App Rot
marco.org
marco.org
For example: Imagine spending 6-12 months on your own dime developing a really neat bitcoin wallet app that you'd like to offer for perhaps $20-30. It'd be completely crazy. Who knows if "virtual curriences" are banned or allowed in the app store review process in 12 months?
On PCs, it is still possible for developers to sell from their own website, without paying a 30% fee to a platform app store.
PCs may be a numerically smaller (hundreds of millions vs. billions of devices) market, but customer perceptions of software value are reflected in an order of magnitude difference in price expectations.
Plenty don't develop for any particular platform. You write your code in Unity3D, and then build for all the platforms it can (Android, IOS, etc) then you build your app for Steam where you make it run on all platforms (ie Windows, Mac and Linux) which is easy because it is almost just a button in Unity.
Then you hope that enough people buy your game to earn the development cost back. You don't develop just for one platform because it is unlikely that you will make enough money to get it back.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_(software) mentioned Steam Greenlight for estimating demand for new games, but it is apparently being phased out.
Is it limiting when a platform (Apple, Valve, Amazon, etc) owns the customer relationship? Seems like it would be difficult to apply conventional marketing techniques to learn about customers, if the platform provider owns the user's contact info.
Generally, you still have to do your own marketing. There's no great meritocratic system out there for discovering games (and pretty unlikely one can arise IMO - it's impossible to objectively class a game as good or bad).
"I think Gabe has mentioned this before many times, he'd like to get rid of Greenlight to leave developers open to place their game on steam.
Then, users would curate the titles through their own customized storefront. This would drive word of mouth and generate free adverting for the companies that really on the steam digital store.
So think of it as following your favorite youtube channel/ store front because it has niche titles that are in line with what you like. You wouldn't have to dig for titles if that's not your thing.
This way, the devs of said niche title appears directly to its audience and yet still leaves the choice to the end user if they want to dig into the onslaught of new releases.
I really hope Gabe follows through on this idea because it keeps options open and doesn't give you a force fed walled garden that Sony, EA or MS is so dead set on controlling and manipulating end-users/devs with."
It's not like competing on the web, to be the next Facebook or even Basecamp is any better. If anything, it's worse.
>For example: Imagine spending 6-12 months on your own dime developing a really neat bitcoin wallet app that you'd like to offer for perhaps $20-30. It'd be completely crazy.
Then don't? Who said a "bitcoin wallet" is anything popular enough to justify a $20 app?
App Store revenue not being Apple's bread and butter is a double edged sword. My point here is not that the above idea would "save" the app business, but to notice that the app store today is effectively the same as it was 6 years ago. Experimentation in that space doesn't seem to be in their DNA.
8. FartApp
10. Flashlight
8. FartApp
9. Flashlight
In the second, Flashlight has been promoted from number 10 to number 9, falsely inflating its ranking.
You could solve this by leaving a gap or indicator where 9. Angry Birds should have been but then the user's wondering "what isn't it showing me in that gap?".
So maybe you should just call the Top 10, "Your Personalized Top 10". But then it's not personalized really, all they've done is remove apps you already own. The user thinks, "Why are Apple showing me fart apps? Don't they think I have taste? Can't they see I only download Twitter clients and podcast apps?".
For the marginal benefit of not showing apps you already own, which are indicated as such, you are opening a whole can of UI worms.
I'd also like if the store didn't keep showing things it's shown me a dozen times before. If I haven't downloaded them after seeing them advertised this many times, I'm never going to download them.
This is a concern that goes away in a user-centered design process. The "ranking" does not matter to anyone but app developers or journalists keeping score. The only reason a user looks at those lists is to find new apps to download.
Consider Google SERPs, which are now highly customized. Who obsesses over whether an item is at #7 or #9? No one but the people who own those links. Everyone else just wants an answer to their question.
Top Charts is a popularity-based browse mechanism. Search is an answer to "what can i play podcasts on?".
You could argue Top Charts should be removed from the store or demoted. But you need some kind of browse functionality because people are often not aware that a certain type of app exists to search for.
If you conducted a survey of App Store users and asked them to give you the numerical rank of a given app ("was it 8 or 9?"), I would surprised if many could remember, and shocked if any cared.
Why do users view those lists? As you point out, to browse for new apps. The precise numerical ranking does not help them very much to do that; therefore a user-centered design process should not care very much about how precisely accurate the displayed rankings are.
Edit to add: Users have no way to independently verify rankings anyway, so the concept of a "false" shift from 9 to 8 has no meaning to them. They don't know what's false, only what's useful.
Anecdotally, I'm seeing people starting to abandon their iPads and go back to laptops (generally macbooks/ultrabooks) in meetings and the like. I think the keyboard is just too useful for most people. Smartphone usage is definitely not following a similar trend, though.
Windows can be fully operated with just a keyboard and ~90% of OS X is operable via keyboard, but I don't see that being the case with iOS or Android.
The YouTube app seems to be under heavy development, and while they often break little things, they also fix and add stuff quickly. I really enjoy YouTube on the iPad and I spend a lot of time there.
Likewise, the Google Maps app is great on the iPad. Most of what I said for YouTube applies to Google Maps.
Twitter and Tweetdeck work great. They don't change much, but they don't need to.
Twitch seems to be under active development. It works fairly well, and I use it a fair amount.
Kindle and Amazon Instant Video don't change much, but they just work.
It may seem that indie devs don't matter, but they create new features that are later copied by the ecosystem, e.g. Reading Lists on iOS.
If the economics of iOS apps are closer to that of "content" like music, what does this mean for the users who invest time in learning app workflows and encoding new data? Should users prioritize data export and open-standard formats?
Hopefully iOS8 will make it feasible for apps to reuse existing data formats, instead of reinventing the wheel. This could improve the economics for some productivity categories.
I always felt the original iPad 2 was too big and heavy to use comfortably for very long, too. 5"-7" seems like the sweet spot.
But I really like the small screen, or rather, the small form factor. I don't want anything bigger in my daily carry. I'm not too keen on the (well-established) rumors of a larger iPhone. I wasn't even keen on the larger screen on the iPhone 5, but it made up for it by being much thinner and lighter than the 4.
Actually, that's where the in-app purchases come in. As every free2play game developer will tell you, the key to good monetization is updating your app and engage the community. Produce new content, throw seasonal promotions and sales, fix bugs, keep the game alive.
That's exactly because you care about the overall LTV of the user, not the download event — and, as free2play developer, my task is not to lure the user to pay $1 to download it, but to convince the user to pay while he's already in it. There are developers that buy installs for $10 a piece from a certain sources, and they make a great profit out of it — just because once the user gets there, he'll pay more. Not because anyone will force him to; it's impossible to force the user to do anything, we don't a gun to his head — but because he wants to.
May be the app developers, too, will finally go to the same route?
1. Use platform conventions over custom widgets
2. Favour responsive layouts over layouts tailored for each screen
have long been the norm on Android. And since Holo - (1) has been far from a handicap. Apps that stuck to Holo (and now 'Material design') conventions were usually the most attractive.
With regard to (2) - the way this has forced Apple's hand in hardware choices has been fascinating. Having to double resolution via retina rather than grow incrementally and the long delayed and slightly painful transition to a new aspect ratio for the iPhone 5.
I understand this as: people are leaving our craftsman market in city center to stop by the big retailers in suburbia and are happy with it. And the craftsmen can't make their shops attractive enough vs big retailers.
I find Marco is pessimistic here (ad hom: as often).
1/ even matured and commoditized, the App Store is the largest money transfer to software vendors _ever_ , with a favorable cut going to indies/small makers. Even if less affluent, the small city center is still getting tons of attention.
2/ still on the craftsman metaphor: city centers are actually thriving again _along_ big suburbia retail thanks to a very intimate, qualitative experience. There's an exploding market fed by a better information flow. So yes, x% buyers are currently buying from an App Store "top list" - what about all other sources of traffic towards an app? Pretty sure you've lost if you bet on a top list from the start (just like buying a sign off an highway for an artisan). There are other leverages as well.
And 3/ from a consumer perspective, software is so different than devs imagine. In my mind, real people see 3 very different types of app: - give me fun (news, games, many social apps) - improve me and help me (smart home, smart features, assistants, productivity, work etc) - talk to people (many social apps)
The "fun" and "talk" apps are totally commoditized. Freemium at best. Yes, that's were the attention is, so what?
The "improve" market is just starting. It's harder to crack because people want a perfect experience with it- it's intimate. That's why I see it as a perfect opportunity for indie app makers.
Actually that's why I hope to launch an app studio next year to make it easier for EU devs to build and integrate their apps.
Side note, hopefully Apple also removes soon enough the thousands of apps left unattended for >3y. I don't thing Apple needs to hold that much to the total app figures by now, can remove 50% of the old crust.
Those stories reinforce the message: develop for the app store and be a millionaire, attracting both more developers and more customers to the platform.
Apple has little incentive to change.
Everyone wants to be a "founder" or "start-up ceo" but besides writing code, there's a whole ton of good old business stuff that contributes to a successful, profitable business.
It's not Apple's job to promote your app, they simply run the marketplace.
On the OP though, I think it is unfair to bash apple so much. Most of the apps I find are from curated groups like "Best New Apps", "Hot Puzzle Games", etc.
That said, if you redesign each time Apple updates iOS you will probably have a good chance of getting featured in their store. Like I said, anecdotally, most of my purchase come from features and recommendations from friends and blogs, not top lists.
Not necessarily. Lots of very celebrated and nice selling apps are abandoned just as well. This, for example, was a top seller in its day, and was all but left to rot:
http://blog.chasejarvis.com/blog/2009/09/the-best-camera-iph...
I have lots more example of similar abandonment. Some developers went in for cashing out, and couldn't bother afterwards.
That's just the world we live in. Init? There is no standing still in the IT industry.
The technology is pretty good, and the single code base for iPhone, iPad, Android and Web makes it as tempting as it ever has.
More importantly, now it lets you diversify your sources of revenue. That wasn't important when it was easy to make money in the AppStore, but - maybe - now it is?
For anything that needs to tap to the full power of the CPU / sensors, etc, that's a non starter.
>The technology is pretty good, and the single code base for iPhone, iPad, Android and Web makes it as tempting as it ever has.
Unless if we're talking about an established service, like Facebook etc, it's not like anybody made much (or any) money on the web version of their apps. If you're a startup you might even hurt yourself from offering a subpar (non native) Android and iOS experience.
That means that if the chances of getting a hit product are at all assisted by going native it is probably the right move. Having said that for puzzle games and things the HTML route may be the best and if your experience is JS that may be a reason to go that way too.
[0] Suspect truth is lower.
You can certainly do that but be prepared to write special code on each platform to handle some things. Like IOS < 8 doesn't do WebGl and without WebGL you are not going to get very much smooth graphics.
Also forget supporting the earlier models, forget retina graphics (at least pre webGL).
If you are just making games go with Unity and develop for all the platforms.
For instance - I have never seen a set of rich HTML components that does keyboard acceleration well. With desktop tech, I get full control over the keyboard and it's important because people who do tons of data entry (call centers, etc) need to be able navigate things like tree views, tab views and grids with a keyboard.
1) In a store with close to 1 million apps, a lot of them aren't actively developed anymore or updated to the latest iOS. (DUH!)
2) Hard work and effort are not automagically rewarded with large sales. (DUH!)
3) Not all hundrends of thousands or millions of app programmers competing with each other can live by their app income alone. In fact, few can. (DUH!)
This doesn't deserve your "DUH!". It reflects the fact that making these apps is easy. If it were so difficult or time-consuming that hobbyists starved trying to get an app done, everyone in the app store would be living on their app income.
The model you are proposing is the J2ME that Nokia had, and the result was an utter flop.
It just reflects the fact that there are too many of them.
How hard something is is not a predictor of there being any market for it. Deep scholarly knowledge in dead languages literatures is hard too, but hardly a career. Same with Brainfuck the other guy mentioned.
Or, to give an even more specific example: there are apps in the app store that are very difficult to make, and took extreme expertise, and still they make far less money that some fart apps or dize-a-dozen platformer games (some doesn't even break even).
Bonus: