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The Artificial Life of the App Store
mikejuk writes "How does the Apple App Store actually work? What is the best strategy to employ if you want to get some users and make some money? There are some pointers on how it all works from an unusual source — artificial life. A pair of researchers Soo Ling Lim and Peter Bentley from University College London, set up an artificial life simulation of the app store's ecosystem. They created app developers with strategies such as — innovate, copy other apps, create useless variations on a basic app or try and optimize the app you have. What they found, among other things, was that the CopyCat strategy was on average the best. When they allow the strategies to compete and developer agents to swap then the use of the CopyCat fell to only 10%. The reason — more than 10% CopyCats resulted in nothing new to copy!"
Of course a copycat can be minimum efford maximum profit in a simplified model, but this strongly depends on the calculation of the fitness-function. I think it can be hard to match the real world fitness-function, because some of the factors that are relevant to an actual user are hard to calculate.
Your study is flawed. For many App Store developers, Apple gets much more than a mere 30% of the developer's revenue.
To develop and market a $0.99 or $1.99 app, the developer needs to drop many thousands of dollars on various pieces of Apple hardware, and then there's the annual fee that needs to be paid, too. And that's all in addition to the 30% you mention.
For every developer who does turn an actual profit, there are likely many thousands who suffer very significant losses, even if they try to deny it. Yes, it is considered a net loss when you have to spend $3000 or more for an Apple computer, an iPhone, an iPad, and the annual fee, in addition to many hours of work, just to bring in $50 to $100 in revenue.
It died out because not even hippies like to camp out in the winter. The current reboot of it is calling itself "The American Spring" or "the 99% spring" and they're back to protesting now that the weather is warm again.
Occasionally living proof of the Ballmer peak.
That's no different than any other development model, or most other businesses. Starting a business is a risk, welcome to reality.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
There is no major performance difference between a Sandy Bridge macbook pro and a mac mini esp. at 13". The 15" can get a quad core, but so can mac mini server. For a 'high end' non-mac pro desktop you are looking at $1000 for mac mini server with a i7 in it. Add in another $400 for a decent SSD (DIY, apple reacts too slow to market prices) and you are good to go. So $1000(Comp) + $120 (RAM) + SSD ($400) = $1520 one time fee for a screaming fast dev environment. What is the problem here?
By the way the refurb prices i quoted are direct from Apple, sold by Apple, on the Apple website with full warranty and confidence, not some 3rd party bullshit. The rest of your argument runs off into ROI fantasy land.
Good-bye
I must point out that you are missing one crucial factor - Just because your app doesn't sell(or does, for that matter), the hardware is still usable. You can always install Windows on your Mac and have a fully functional PC and develop for Windows(same with Linux, for that matter). You can also use that same machine as a gaming/internet box. So the real "apple tax" is more like $99/year + (cost of Mac - cost of equavlent Dell system) + cost of iDevice(and possibly +$100 for a copy of windows). Not quite as high as it might seem.
Disclaimer: I do not own any Apple products, and consider iDevices useless junk. But that doesn't mean I can't give credit where it is due.