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!"

Comments

Perhaps they can...

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps they can simulate how to make slashdot summaries make sense next?

Re:Perhaps they can...

[Sarten-X]

This one makes a decent amount of sense to me, though I did do previous work in artificial life simulators...

Effectively, they built a simulation of the app store, and filled it with developers following several different strategies, and presumably a feedback function that models expected consumer behavior. The simulation was left to run, and interesting results were gathered. TFA is actually a rather well-written explanation that's worth reading.

Re:Perhaps they can...

[plover]

Perhaps they can simulate how to make slashdot summaries make sense next?

Seriously, if you can't understand this one, go play on facebook or whatever the kids are doing these days. Your life is wasted here, as is a fraction of ours for reading your inane drivel.

Useful Fitness-Function?

[allo]

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.

Re:Useful Fitness-Function?

[Zerth]

I wonder if they included the idea that frequently it is the copycat that takes off, while the originator languishes in obscurity.

Re:Useful Fitness-Function?

[gstrickler]

That is why I refuse to use any Zynga owned game. Even if they purchased the original rather than copy it, they'll use the profits to copy others.

Re:Useful Fitness-Function?

[plover]

There's more than one utility function. For example, if wrote an app I would not expect to profit, it would be for fun. Thus I'd give it away for free or a dollar. Someone else might be hoping to make a living at it. too bad.

This simulation was built to identify profit models, not to maximize developer happiness. But the two are related, and profit will be an element everyone can measure.

Consider if the app you created turned out to be really fun and truly innovative, and it went viral and sold five hundred thousand copies at $0.99.

If nothing else, you'd learn that half a million users can be awfully demanding. You might find yourself mired in support requests, and have to decide whether or not you can support it yourself or if you want to sell it to a game company so they can manage it. If nothing else, you might be surprised when you discover you have to pay taxes on a whole lot more income than you thought. The point is that at some financial threshold, you will probably have to take it seriously. My threshold might be higher or lower than yours, but in this simulation, it doesn't really matter. It would change your personal view of profiting from your work.

Re:Useful Fitness-Function?

[gstrickler]

Are you just trolling or do you not know about Zynga's practices? Google them, they copy most of their game ideas, while filing suit against anyone who copies one of their game ideas. They're completely amoral, or worse.

Re:Useful Fitness-Function?

[Kergan]

There's more than one utility function. For example, if wrote an app I would not expect to profit, it would be for fun. Thus I'd give it away for free or a dollar. Someone else might be hoping to make a living at it. too bad.

Too bad? If you're not meaning for the customer/end-user, I'd wager you never wrote any such app; or any OSS app, for that matter. And that those who tagged you as insightful haven't either.

In the real world, app development is just the beginning. Unless you decide to accept no feedback whatsoever, which is a losing proposition, you're in for a lot more feedback, emails and/or forum posts than you ever wish you'll ever read in your entire lifetime if you're even remotely successful. It's absolutely insane. Your success will destroy you unless you've an adequate means to scale -- whether monetization or extra funding.

So here you are, quacking that you'd happily share an app. For free. You'll keep your day job as you do. Someone out there actually wants to make a living off of a similar app. But he or she will get less or no business because you released that -- soon to be unsupported -- app at in an inadequately low price point.

Look... It's one thing to be competing with a Chinese team who can field $500/month coders to support their app, or with crap hobbyists who only have a slight clue of what they're doing. Those are mostly manageable in practice. It's an entirely different thing to compete with hobbyists who distribute good products without any interest in having a sustainable business.

Think of it this way: for every $100/month "cool, I got some pocket money I barely couldn't care about" app out there, an actual person who does care might be losing his job. So please do yourself a favor, do that guy a favor, and -- most importantly, in the long term -- do the customer a favor, and don't release it unless you work out your business model first. Else you're just building a mine field for those who do care.

Interesting

[Anonymous Coward]

In my simulation the best strategy was to take 30% of everyone's revenues.

Re:Interesting

[gstrickler]

That's no different than any other development model, or most other businesses. Starting a business is a risk, welcome to reality.

Re:Interesting

[RobbieThe1st]

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.

Re:Parasitic infestation...

[whoever57]

"The 1%" includes most *households* in the US with an income somewhere between $200-250k, which is easily achieved these days by a 2-professional household with a few years of industry experience in their respective fields.

Try again. To be in the 1%, you must have an adjusted gross income of $343,927 which would probably equate to an unadjusted family income of over $400,000. Not easily achievable.

Re:Not for profit defined

[LDAPMAN]

That's not what it generally means in the US. A "not for profit" here is literally an organization that does some function, usually charitable or community service, that is not intended to make a profit. In fact, I believe they are legally prohibited from making a profit if they wish to maintain their special tax status.