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The Artificial Life of the App Store

Posted by timothy on from the how-about-global-thermonuclear-war? dept.

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!"

8 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. Perhaps they can... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

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

    1. Re:Perhaps they can... by Sarten-X · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
    2. Re:Perhaps they can... by plover · · Score: 4, Funny

      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.

      --
      John
  2. Useful Fitness-Function? by allo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Useful Fitness-Function? by Zerth · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

    2. Re:Useful Fitness-Function? by plover · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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.

      --
      John
    3. Re:Useful Fitness-Function? by Kergan · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

  3. Interesting by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

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