Ask Slashdot: Preparing For the 'App Bubble' To Pop?

Niris writes "I am currently a senior in computer science, and am expecting to graduate in December. I have an internship lined up in Android development with medium sized company that builds apps for much larger corporations, and I have recently begun a foray into iOS development. So far my experience with Android ranges from a small mobile game (basically Asteroids), a Japanese language study aid, and a fairly large mobile app for a local non-profit that uses RSS feeds, Google Cloud Messaging and various APIs. I have also recently started working with some machine learning algorithms and sensors/the ADK to start putting together a prototype for a mobile business application for mobile inspectors. My question: is my background diverse enough that I don't have to worry about finding a job if all the predictions that the 'app bubble' will pop soon come true? Is there another, similar area of programming that I should look into in order to have some contingencies in place if things go south? My general interests and experience have so far been in mobile app development with Java and C++ (using the NDK), and some web development on both the client and server side. Thank you!"

Comments

Re:Is there an app bubble?

[AlphaWolf_HK]

That's the strange thing about economic bubbles. You'll see a crazy trend with crazy demand, and it may even sit that way for a long time, and just when you think it is a genuine shift in trends rather than a bubble, it pops. In 1995 some observers saw what they believed to be a tech bubble. 1998 passed, and it was still there. Some economists believed that the business cycle had come to an end (e.g. no more cycles - just consistent sustained growth) due to how far reaching the tech industry was. And what do you know, in 2000 growth stops, and shortly after it pops because it turns out that most players in the tech industry didn't actually have a viable business model (I remember a lot of them were ad driven - e.g. this company makes money by selling ads to that company, which sells ads to another company...) Clearly Bush's fault.

Same thing with the housing bubble, which some were observing as a bubble in 2003, and it took all the way until 2008 before it finally popped. Only since the housing bubble wasn't as entrenched in nearly as many adjacent industries (the banking industry being a notable exception,) the GDP wasn't artificially propped up so we didn't see the miracle economy with the non-existent business cycle that we had in the late 90's. Gingrich claimed he was a pro at balancing the budget and Clinton claimed to be an economics pro, only neither was true, the revenue stream was just artificially high so it gave them both free bullet points on their resume's.

As for mobile, I think there's a bit of hype, but I don't think there's a true bubble. It may scale back a bit as once developers have their apps, they could shed some employees because they merely need to maintain the apps rather than write new ones. Note the uncertain terms I'm using. For example, you've got companies like instagram who doesn't appear to have a viable business model other than being backed by facebook. But then again, you could continue to go through the regular process of new companies coming up and needing new apps before they fold, only for a new one to repeat.

I think as was mentioned earlier though that the mobile sector as a whole is overhyped. You've got people into these shiny new devices, but excitement for them is dying down. Iphones are becoming less popular because it is mostly just incremental upgrades like we saw at the turn of the millennium to 2002 or so, at which point sales sort of leveled off. I predict the same with the Galaxy S4. We'll probably see the sales numbers sit around until the market saturates, and then people will just get to the point that they like sticking with what they have instead of always upgrading. But you ask, how does this effect apps if everybody has a smartphone? One thing I tend to notice, but I don't know if its true because I don't have any numbers (so I could be talking out my ass here) but it seems to me that people tend to do a lot of app shopping when they get a new device. If the waves of new devices stop coming (or rather, the waves of excitement stop,) that might cause the app sales to level off until "the next big thing(TM)".

Re:App bubble already popped..

[Prof.Phreak]

I second this recommendation! Unfortunately most college folks don't understand this at all...

Google isn't about apps... it's about data... Facebook isn't about apps... it's about data... Financial analysis isn't about..err..money... it's about data... at the end of the day, it's ALL about data, how to search it, manipulate it, transform it, transmit it, learn from it, etc., (in sql, hadoop, hive, map-reduce, perl, java, anything!). And this skill isn't likely to ever become irrelevant; there's more data every day gathered by just about all corporations---and every one of them does something with all that data... and will do something *new* with that data in the future.