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Black Pixel, which acquired popular Mac RSS reader app NetNewsWire in 2011, announced this week that the brand name is returning to the founder Brent Simmons. From the announcement: Since acquiring NetNewsWire from Newsgator in 2011, we've invested a great deal in the continued development and support of the product suite including the addition of a free sync service. Unfortunately, the ongoing cost of support and feature development for these products require more dedicated resources than we are able to provide. With that in mind, today we are removing all versions of the app from sale. We'll continue to run the sync service for another 60 days, then take it offline at the end of October. Brent Simmons, who founded the app, shared what he plans to do with the brand name: [...] I want to thank them [Black Pixel] for a second thing: their incredible generosity in bringing it back to me. When I asked them about it, they told me they'd already been discussing it. There was never a need to convince them: they thought it was the right thing to do before I even said a word.

[...] You probably know that I've been working on a free and open source reader named Evergreen. Evergreen 1.0 will be renamed NetNewsWire 5.0 -- in other words, I've been working on NetNewsWire 5.0 all this time without knowing it! It will remain free and open source, and it will remain my side project. (By day I'm a Marketing Human at The Omni Group, and I love my job.) Black Pixel will stop selling their versions of the app, and will turn off the syncing system and end customer support -- all of which is detailed in their announcement. (Important note: I will not get any customer data from them, nor will I be doing support for Black Pixel's NetNewsWire.)

I want one thing: to make the very best versions of NetNewsWire ever made. And, along the way, I'd love to have your help. Nothing to Download Yet I don't actually have an app bearing the name NetNewsWire ready to download yet. I will have test versions ready soon, though. It's still going to be a while before the final version of 5.0 ships. The Mac community has been thrilled about the announcement. Daniel Jalkut, founder of blogging tool MarsEdit, said, "I appreciate Black Pixel's decision to return NetNewsWire to Brent Simmons. It was the right move strategically, but also very humanistic." Federico Viticci, a prolific blogger on Apple ecosystem, said, "Congrats Brent Simmons on bringing NetNewsWire home. The Mac can use a modern RSS reader that can stand the test of time." John Gruber, a columnist on Apple ecosystem, said, "Black Pixel did a great job taking over NetNewsWire, but times change, and companies change. Handing the NetNewsWire name back to Brent was a classy move, but completely unsurprising to me, knowing George and the other folks at Black Pixel."

An anonymous reader points us to an opinion piece by Apple blogger Rene Ritchie on the dim prospects for indie app developers, in the face of mass-market, big-name competition. From his piece: Big apps get all the attention these days, just like big movie, music, or book releases and indies get what little is left, when there's even a little left. The App Store is big business, and that's how big business works. [...] Apple could use its considerable power and influence to help shape the App Store economy into one more hospitable to indie developers. After all, those are the apps I love and the ones that dominate my home screens. But the truth is, even if Apple gave indie developers everything they wanted, it wouldn't matter much over the long term. It may help a few for a while, and a very few for a while longer, but the app economy and apps themselves are evolving. Brent Simmons has offered his opinion on the matter. He writes, The Mac has for a long time been overlooked -- first because Windows was so huge, and then web apps, and now iOS. For my entire career people have said that the Mac is a bad bet, that it's dumb to write Mac apps. [...] There was never a golden age for indie iOS developers. It was easier earlier on, but it was never golden. (Yes, some people made money, and some are today. I don't mean that there were zero successes.) And there's a good chance that many of the people you currently think of as thriving iOS indie developers are making money in other ways: contracting, podcast ads, Mac apps, etc.

A recent post by Instapaper's Marco Arment suggests that design flaws in Apple's App Store are harming the app ecosystem, and users are suffering because of it. "The dominance and prominence of 'top lists' stratifies the top 0.02% so far above everyone else that the entire ecosystem is encouraged to design for a theoretical top-list placement that, by definition, won’t happen to 99.98% of them." Arment notes that many good app developers are finding continued development to be unsustainable, while scammy apps are encouraged to flood the market.

"As the economics get tighter, it becomes much harder to support the lavish treatment that developers have given apps in the past, such as full-time staffs, offices, pixel-perfect custom designs of every screen, frequent free updates, and completely different iPhone and iPad interfaces. Many will give up and leave for stable, better-paying jobs. (Many already have.)" Brent Simmons points out the indie developers have largely given up the dream of being able to support themselves through iOS development. Yoni Heisler argues that their plight is simply a consequence of ever-increasing competition within the industry, though he acknowledges that more app curation would be a good thing. What strategies could Apple (and the operators of other mobile application stories) do to keep app quality high?

An anonymous reader writes "Brent Simmons has posted about a troubling email he received from Network Solutions. He registered two domains with them in the 1990s, and the domains remain registered today. Simmons just received an email informing him that he'd been opted into some kind of security service called Weblock, and that he would be billed $1,850 for the first year. Further, he would be billed $1,350 for every year after the first. Believing it to be a scam, he contacted the official Network Solutions account on Twitter. They said it was real. The email even said he couldn't opt out except by making a phone call."