Developing for the iPhone AppStore is betting your money on horses | Hacker News Reader

Developing for the iPhone AppStore is betting your money on horses

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22 pointsnader18 comments

Hopefully Cydia will gain traction. I've bought a couple apps on it already and its been a positive experience.

It has the potential to be huge, however no VC firm will touch it since it also has the potential to be sued out of existence. I doubt it will have the resources to build things up enough where it can scale up and get a mainstream marketshare.

Android seems to be the only real alternative to Apple's appstore madness. I'll definitely be supporting that platform in the future. Getting an iPhone 3g last year was a really boneheaded move.

I'm positive about Cydia as well as there will be more and more frustrated users and developers turning to the store. Additionally big publications like CNN, Wired and lots of blogs are writing about it.

The question is really how long the store will last, or, how long jailbreakers can win against iPhone software updates. Unlikely but maybe Apple finds a way to keep them of doing so.

Yes, I think the Android market is interesting as more and more companies are distributing their phones with pre-installed Android, especially in China.

It doesn't really have the potential to be huge - yes there are a lot of iPhones out there, but they are not all potential Cydia users. You need people who are technical enough to jailbreak, interested enough to jailbreak, willing to do some care and maintenance and maybe re-jailbreak every time an upgrade is released and who are unhappy with the AppStore.

Given that the marketing for the iPhone is about how easy to use it is and how comprehensive the AppStore is, the iPhone target market is pretty much entirely excluding the Cydia market. The crossover is a chance happening that geeky people like the iPhone too, and the iPhone is actually a nice gadget dressed up as a phone.

I think you're oversimplifying the divide between geeky and non-geeky people. Or, to be more specific, you'd be surprised at the lengths "non-geeky" people would go to to get what they want. "You mean I can get more free apps for my iPhone? Show me!!"

"You mean I have to go to this ad-infested site and follow this long list of instructions? All for something I'll use once and forget about?"

I could be, bug if you change that to 'the lengths they will go to to get another way to pay for apps' does it still hold? There would have to be a killer app there...

Technically speaking, jailbreaking an iPhone now consists of clicking a button and rebooting the phone - tasks which I am pretty sure you don't have to be 'technical enough' to do.

Until someone develops a phone thats as easy-to-use, feature rich, and as pretty as the iPhone, the smart money will be to develop for the platform, evil as the approval process is.

The simple fact is that Apple is light-years ahead of the competition with the iPhone and looks to remain in that position for the forseeable future. And I say that as an Android owner with no Macs in my house.

I am not convinced the approval process is 'evil'. Capricious? yes. Opaque? You bet. But not evil. They have made some dumb decisions that are getting a good amount of press coverage in tech circles, but the general iPhone user doesn't care about most of that.

I also don't think the article's author made a good case for iPhone development being as bad as gambling. Writing software for any platform can look like a crap-shoot from the outside. But success depends on a good product and a market to be served. Many of the iPhone apps are neither so that makes it more difficult to determine what the chances of success are.

I think that iPhone development has a higher chance of success than for any other current platform. You have a audience that is willing to spend disposable income, and a place where they can easily find apps to serve their needs.

You misunderstood the comparison with gambling. It's obvious bad software usually isn't gonna be too successful, no matter the platform and its policies. But the way Apple is letting you know only AFTER you are done with development whether you'll be even allowed (!) to sell it, that is definitely NOT the conventional risk you take when you decide to develop an application or not. And there are numerous hints at Apple not approving an application citing a certain policy that is in no way related to the actual reason for not approving the app. A developer is, by definition, unable to make 100% sure that his app will be approved by Apple. _That_ is the actual reference to gambling.

You can say a similar thing when government legislates your business as illegal. Large amount of regulators can be very opaque, and you only find out after the fact a month or two after you've started business.

Android is gonna have to fight the old war of OpenSource platforms that go commercial (a fight that has been won only very seldom in the past). If it succeeds at that, its future is going to be very bright. Cydia will never be as popular and/or successful as the AppStore. But then again, it never was supposed to be. Cydia is supposed to be an open platform welcomming any kind of developer without restrictions and/or fees. The idea itself is meant for an outsider-position. Saurik is doing an awesome job at maintaining the Cydia store, but his much more important work consists in bringing *nix software to the iPhone platform. Cydia is only one of these advantages ;-)

"Android is gonna have to fight the old war of OpenSource platforms that go commercial (a fight that has been won only very seldom in the past). If it succeeds at that, its future is going to be very bright."

Care to explain that? Google does not intend to make money directly out of Android sales and just about all the applications users buy are proprietary. It's more or less the same as someone buying Oracle to run on Linux - the OS is open-source, but the application is not.

Here's an interesting blogpost from an android developer: http://tseng-blog.nge-web.net/blog/2009/02/28/android-market...

This article was very disappointing - thin, old news, and generalizes to all developers from two very specific and unique examples. Not to mention the jarring its/it's usage. I do not come to HN to get this kind of blogspam. Sorry to be so negative, but something is broken here. I suspect people are upvoting simply for the easy-to-agree-with headline. Please don't do that, without actually looking at the article first. I want those two minutes back, and I wish HN had a way to prevent this kind of thing in the future.

ObTopic: It still comes down to writing a good app, and not tempting fate by straying close to Apple's sensitive spots.

I thought that all this bad publicity wouldn't hurt Apple and the App Store model, but in the last few days I've heard many people how aren't geeks and who don't even own an iPhone talking about Cydia.

Developing _anything_ for _anything_ is a big gamble, akin to betting on horses. Talent, enthusiasm, and perserverance all play a role, but luck also stands behind success.

"Its" not "it's." This is not rocket surgery, people.

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