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An App Store For iPhone Software
Steve Jobs demonstrated a new "App Store" that will be pushed out to all iPhones in June. It's available now in beta. This will be the exclusive avenue developers will use to get their iPhone apps, written to the newly released SDK, to customers. Developers will get 70% of the proceeds from sales of their goods on the App store, with no further charges for hosting, credit-card processing, etc. Jobs called this "the best deal going to distribute applications in the mobile space."
apparently it's free to use for iphone users, but ipod touch users will have to pay a fee.
"And there's no charge for developers to distribute free applications"
Well... now I'm excited
Meh. My submission was better.
Apple revealed details of the iPhone SDK today. Apps will be developed using XCode and the new Cocoa Touch framework, and will be distributed by Apple either via an application on the phone or through iTunes. Developers set the cost of their applications and keep 70%, although "free" is also an option. (Not all applications will be distributed: "Porn, malicious apps, ones that invade privacy.") When asked about VOIP, Jobs replied: "We will only stop VOIP over cell networks, but not WiFi." Corporations can also privately distribute applications to their employees. AOL demoed an AIM client, and an iPhone version of the upcoming game Spore was also demoed. The iPhone is also gaining enhanced enterprise capabilities, including Exchange and Cisco VPN support, remote wiping, as well as certificates and identities.
Yep, free apps are allowed and even encouraged. You have to pay a $99 developer fee to get assigned a cert, so you have to sign your apps - but you can set any price, including free.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yes, but Apple still takes 30% of the sales price.
The main question I have, is if John Carmack has anything to add to the discussion.
With his latest interest in portable gaming, I hope he could see some value in the iPhone/touch platform.
The screen on the phone is phenomenal (in terms of pixels/inch), touch gestures and accelerometers should add quite a few new exciting additions to the gaming world.
I hope he has an intel Mac and time to download the beta of the SDK and try it out.
With Doom, or even Quake on my iPod touch, I don't think I'd ever leave the bathroom at work. (80% serious, 20% joking)
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
When you get an app from the app store, you'll automatically be advised when new versions can be had and also what new features are offered.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Comparison pricing:
I used to develop & sell software for PalmOS.
The IDE was $500, plus $150/year to upgrade.
The major reseller I used wanted 40%, for a lower percentage they'd shove you in the back of the bus. I had my own web store set up separately, but literally got zero (nil, nada) sales from it. Mobile users tend to shop at specific sites. Without their own reputation, the little guys have to lean on the reputation of resellers (i.e. it's credible b/c it's being sold by them).
30% off the top isn't great, but it also doesn't require hosting, fulfillment, or anything else. Just ship them a binary and they send you a check in the mail each month until people stop buying (or an ABI change breaks your binary). I don't know how refunds are handled (or allowed at all), or documentation or support either, really.
Still, any info on what we can put on our own devices? I'm not interested in going back into mobile space anytime soon, just looking for a phone I can hack on personally. The SDK here is nice, but I'm still leaning towards the new openmoko when it comes out.
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The SDK is going to be HUGE for the jailbreaking community. They now have an official documented API and development environment. So there will be apps out there way earlier than 4 months.
IT sounds like the limitations on the SDK are not as drastic as I feared, but I strongly suspect that apple will limit ichat type clients though. Those would kill the golden goose that is SMS.
The more limiting the SDK is, the more vibrant the jailbroken app community will be.
I'm waiting for the Apple servers to recover from the melt-down and I'll be downloading the SDK. Looks like a geeky evening for me.
Apps the iPhone needs:
MMS: WTF apple? This was obvious...
A Calculator that doesn't suck: RPN and trig functions etc. No more Dollar store Calc.
Chat client that uses wifi AND wireless data.
Sheldon
The app store is news, as it the 70/30 split, but what about these submissions:
SDK features:
OpenGL Games:
MS Exchange:
Or mine:
It would appear the slashdot editor simply went with the submission with the most "Apple is teh EEEEVILL" slant.
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Just because there is a simulator, does not mean you cannot also load the app onto the phone directly - they showed a demo of an app being pushed to the phone and then also being debugged (from the Mac side) while it ran, including gathering profiling data.
It's basically the best scenario you could have hoped for as a developer.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Actually this could be a very sweet deal for developers.
... but it seems to me that even with Apple taking a 30% cut, the exposure that the App store gives could provide the developers with WAY more sales than they could manage to get going solo.
Now, I didn't read the details so maybe apple will prevent developers from selling their apps direct AND going through the App store
It's kind of like the Record Labels and Recording Artists. The only difference being that recording artists don't get to keep 70% of their sales and they usually take huge cash advances to record their albums that they have to pay back with absolutely no guarantee that they'll sell enough records to pay it back plus they're in a contract that promises the label X number of further records.
No I don't have a problem with Apple's App store as long as they're providing a valuable service for the developers and on the surface it appears that they are. When they take the majority of the sales and lock the developers into contracts promising exclusive deals with the App store for years to come THEN I'll say the developers are better going solo. To me this seems like the high-exposure radio station of indie software marketing.
Direct sales don't come anywhere close to 100% in the real world. You have to pay for the distribution medium. If that is a box on a shelf, you generally pay for shelf space at the major retailers up front, and then make your money back after they take their cut.
If you sell via the web, you have hosting costs, bandwidth isn't free, web site development costs money and time, managing updates requires atleast half a clue. You also have to do marketing if you expect it to get popular, just putting up a page doesn't mean people will buy your stuff, reguardless of how great it is, they have to find it first. So that means some form of advertising, sometimes all you need is to have Google index your site, if people are looking for something that only you offer. But its unlikely you are the first, and certainly not the most popular with your brand new software, so you aren't going to be near the top of the list without some Google bombing, which isn't free since it requires work at the very least.
In this case, your 30% taken by Apple puts you on the definative list of iPhone software, and it makes you somewhat trusted, since Apple hasn't banned you yet. So if you think web distribution is closer to 100% then I say that you get 100% free marketing with the AppStore.
Pick any other form of distribution and you'll find that its never anywhere close to 100%.
30% is high. The company I work for distributes portable applications for U3 devices, on the U3 website, they charge 25% at the lost volume of sales. Of course, the also aren't Apple so its not suprising.
If you want to bitch that Apple is charging too much, fine that argument I'll listen to. Claiming that direct sales is going to be close to 100%, thats just silly once you consider all the real costs that go into doing it.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
IT sounds like the limitations on the SDK are not as drastic as I feared, but I strongly suspect that apple will limit ichat type clients though. Those would kill the golden goose that is SMS.
They demoed AIM on stage for goodness sakes! They are even allowing VOIP apps (though admittedly only over WiFi, not EDGE).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I suspect that it will be a monitor the app after the fact type of thing. Apple and AT&T know who you are as the app author. So if your app does something funky, then they pull the plug on it. There's no way the apple folks are going to scour source for all the apps that will flow in. I suspect they have a profiling tool that checks port usage etc and off it goes. Then if it's doing something sneaky, AT&T will catch it eventually if it's popular, and pull the plug. If it's not popular (IE you and your aunt berha are exchanging chat messages over the data network not SMS) then it's really not an issue.
The cost of putting actual eyeballs on code is so high that they would never do it. But some profiling tools would be cheap to use.
Sheldon
Yea. Apple takes care of notifying users of updates. Apple takes care of bandwidth and server costs. Apple takes care of anti-piracy. Sounds rather nice to me. I'd be willing to give up only 30% of my possible profit to avoid all those different headaches. If your application becomes popular, those things can get complex and expensive.
It will be interesting to see what some of the Mac Developer Bloggers think about this (Daniel Jalkut, John Gruber, and Wil Shipley for example).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
My understanding (and IANAA) is that because Apple realizes the revenue from iPhone purchases over the course of two years, they can make changes to the product and it's no big deal. With the touch, they've already accounted for your purchase, so there's some arcane rule that says they can't give you additional functionality without charging you for it. I'm betting the "nominal" fee really will be nominal--like $2 or something.
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And presumably you could get someone in a generous position to offer free distribution of open source applications under a single "publisher". Ie, twenty free apps published by "FreeSoftwareInc", and suddenly its $5 per developer, not $100.
Thats a price thats easy to make back up with ads, etc, on the "application" website.
You should actually go read the web page that tells you what the details are.
You have to pay and go through apple to distribute your applications. The SDK is a free download (registration required).
http://developer.apple.com/iphone/program/
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Apple, I am a fan, and most importantly, a paying customer. However, give up the MS-like control. Charging developers $100 for a cert then telling them that you are going to take 30% of the sales? Lame, freaking Lame.
Do you think so? I don't. For that 30% you get a distribution network, a way to notify your users of updates, and free advertising via the integrated download client. Seems pretty fair to me. And the IDE and SDK itself are free. IIRC Palm charges charges similarly, and you have to buy the IDE. (I don't know about RIM.)
Also covers credit card charges so you don't need to worry about those either.
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You must be new, welcome to the Internet. Here on the Internet you are required to view any publicly held company as evil and any effort on their part to charge for a service as pure, unadulterated greed preferably attributed to their CEO or other high-ranking executive. Corporations should provide as many possible services for free, regardless of the time, capital, and human resources required to develop and run those services or products. Any efforts of corporations to charge money in voluntary exchange for their services or products is to be likened to highway robbery, extortion, or in the case of particularly large corporations, rape. I hope these guidelines have helped. May your future be full of forum discussions loathing corporations and their evil/greedy ways.
Steve's keynote slides explicitly show that Xcode can publish the code to your personal iPhone for testing purposes. This image from Engadget's coverage (see the 10:30am post for context) shows an iMac remote debugging on the phone using an iPod dock. Whether that means an end user can load an app without going through the store is hard to say.
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In X-Windows the client serves YOU!
a) The hardware - some pretty sweet margins b) A nice cut (~15 to 25%) on the montly fees 3) A 30% cut on all software sold (except of course the free apps)
Contrast this to a Windows mobile phone. Microsoft gets paid a fixed license amount on each device sold and makes nothing on the hardware, the monthly fee, and any software sold to run on their OS. This helps companies compete on hardware, apps etc. I think Apple is gonna miss out on small companies(where the most innovation lies) which cannot afford the 30% overhead for their software sales. Also Apple being the gatekeeper of the software will hurt apps(even free ones) that try to fundamentally interact with the hardware in a non-approved Apple way. The iPhone is aimed at the casual consumers, most of whom don't read long forum threads dedicated to jailbreaking it.
As of now, this looks like a rerun of the 80s microcomputer war and we all know how that turned out to be. It's all about 'Developers, Developers and Developers'. Microsoft gets that and ships excellent development tools with no restrictions at all. Right now, Windows Mobile phones may suck, but heavy competition between handset manufacturers is going to make them better and Windows Mobile OS(look at 6.1 and upcoming 7.0) is heading towards being 'good enough'(like DOS and Windows 3.11). Already we see devices like the Sony Xperia (video ad) coming out which will give Apple a run for their money. Remember what IBM, Dell, Gateway, HP, Compaq did to Apple back in the 80s? Will Sony, Samsung, Nokia be their equivalent in this round?
I think Apple is missing the bandwagon again in their spirit to make money immediately and are killing the gold egg laying goose for their short term benefit.This space for rent.
Even on Atari 800XL my excited developer friends knocked my door with a cassette tape, diskette to show their programs.
That's because the 800XL was too bulky to carry. I can knock on the door of my friends, iPhone in hand, and show them my cool application.
I'm perfectly OK with the 70/30 thing because the Palm model sucked. It was easy to write apps but very hard to get anyone to look at them. Now you have an AppStore - right on the phone itself! Is it worth 30% of your gross profits to have 1000% greater sales, along with someone else managing ALL of the infrastructure related to hosting and delivery? Hell yes!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley