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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!"
Mobile app bubble
Professional stubble
For who will browse jack
Amid the economic rubble?
Burma Shave
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Programmers should be able to take on a wide variety of tasks. Fortunately, smart phones are not alien space technology with nothing in common with computers. From the point you're at now, you should be able to branch out to things like desktop graphics-based apps and perhaps GPU computing without too much trouble. You should prepare yourself for this *now* so that you don't find yourself scrambling if the smartphone app business doesn't go where you want it to. Remember, what your prof teaches you in college is maybe 10% of what you need to know. (Not kidding, that really is the deal, you should be doing A LOT of coding on your own time in order to learn how to operate without that safety net & get enough patterns stored in your head that you can tackle harder problems in the future.) Good luck!
The App bubble has already popped. The only people that make money writing apps are contractors building them for companies that insist they need an app (even though they probably don't...), employees at companies like that drawing a salary, and the 1 in a million that comes up with the ugly meter. Eventually the marketing departments will realize that "Billy Bob's horse feed insurance" doesn't need a mobile app and all of that will dry up pretty quickly.
If you want to have a long career in development, learn databases. You don't necessarily want to be a DBA since they tend to get tied to a platform and their fortunes rise and fall with it (Foxpro anyone?). But, learn how to manipulate information. There will always be someone willing to pay you to manage their data. Maybe through an application, maybe through an app, maybe through a web interface.
At the end of the day, most of the decent paying technology gigs come from managing information for someone.
I got into this business in the early 90's and was told that by a friend of my father's who had been programming since the 60's. It's the best business advice anyone has ever given me.
You listed exactly the reasons everyone thinks it's a bubble... you can't usually see such things coming, and it seems impossible that the well could dry up instantly... and yet it often does. (e.g. rewind your reasons to year 2000... ``Every brand wants or has [a web] app''...)
"If anything can go wrong, it will." - Murphy
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)".
Careful with names containing L slashdot.org/~AiphaWolf_HK slashdot.org/~AlphaWoif_HK slashdot.org/~AiphaWoif_HK
Think back to that dot-com bubble. What actually dried up? Wasn't it the get-rich-quick VC money thrown at startups? The demand for the product (web sites) didn't go away. Just the retarded pie-in-the-sky, brain-dead ideas and money-grubbing schemers. Those with a working business model (Amazon? Google?) are still around and are stronger than ever.
Fast forward to the latest bubble (mobile apps), and you'll soon find the same story. There's a bubble: everybody and their dog jumped on the mobile app bandwagon back in 2008. That bubble was short-lived, but it started a larger bubble. Now, think back to pre-dot-com days. There was a small bubble in the mid/late 90's, then there was the huge bubble in 1999 and 2000. We're riding that huge bubble right now. This too shall pop.
It only takes a quick glance at the Play Store to realize that there are a shit-ton of shitty apps made by sketchy companies that probably won't exist in a year. Most of them have manuals (and text resources) in Engrish.
Note to foreign developers: if you want me to load your app onto my phone (presumably for your profit), learn proper grammar and spelling for my language or hire someone who already knows it. My mom plays a Bejeweled clone that tells her "no more move" when she's run out of moves.
Thus, a bubble. And these developers will be looking for other work soon. (And before you label me a xenophobe, I don't even claim to speak anything other than en-US. Note that. I don't claim to, much less represent that as a professional skill.)