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The Subtle Developer Exodus From the Mac App Store
An anonymous reader writes: Milen Dzhumerov, a software developer for OS X and iOS, has posted a concise breakdown of the problems with the Mac App Store. He says the lack of support for trial software and upgrades drives developers away by preventing them from making a living. Forced sandboxing kills many applications before they get started, and the review system isn't helpful to anyone. Dzhumerov says all of these factors, and Apple's unwillingness to address them, are leading to the slow but steady erosion of quality software in the Mac App Store.
"The relationship between consumers and developers is symbiotic, one cannot exist without the other. If the Mac App Store is a hostile environment for developers, we are going to end up in a situation where, either software will not be supported anymore or even worse, won't be made at all. And the result is the same the other way around – if there are no consumers, businesses would go bankrupt and no software will be made. The Mac App Store can be work in ways that's beneficial to both developers and consumers alike, it doesn't have to be one or the other. If the MAS is harmful to either developers or consumers, in the long term, it will be inevitably harmful to both."
"The relationship between consumers and developers is symbiotic, one cannot exist without the other. If the Mac App Store is a hostile environment for developers, we are going to end up in a situation where, either software will not be supported anymore or even worse, won't be made at all. And the result is the same the other way around – if there are no consumers, businesses would go bankrupt and no software will be made. The Mac App Store can be work in ways that's beneficial to both developers and consumers alike, it doesn't have to be one or the other. If the MAS is harmful to either developers or consumers, in the long term, it will be inevitably harmful to both."
Subtle...exodus?
Yo dawg, I heard you like the Ackermann function, so OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD
How many apps are in the Mac app store? Over a million? Who needs a million apps? They can't all be doing something different.
And who needs yet another free app to mine your personal data and sell it to someone? We already have Google for that.
Seems to me that the market is a bit saturated...
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
I know a team of developers that worked for nearly a year to create their app. They put it on the app store for a price point of $4.99. A week later they had sold five copies. The following week, three more. After a month, they had less than $100 in revenue for a year of work.
Where was their market research? Where was their marketing? Any traditional non-technology startup that forgets do do these things will fail. If you build it they won't necessarily come. One has to sell the right thing, execute well, price it right, and let people know about it. Why expect to be able to not do these things just because one is on the internet? If they didn't already know of 8 people that would buy it, why did they create that software?
We could watch Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares and come to the conclusion that it's impossible to make money running restaurants. And indeed it's not easy. Yet there are many successful restaurants as well as many failures. The failure is always in the specifics of a particular restaurant, not the concept of restaurants.
Apps that can't be sandboxed shouldn't be allowed in the store: installation from software not signed and not from the Mac app store triggers a bunch of security hoops, which is exactly what the user should have to see to install software that doesn't exist in a sandbox. Apple's doing the right thing.
There was development before the App Store. People still sell software outside it, and in fact most of my useful software is not in the app store; I only buy little productivity utilities from the store. Office and Photoshop are killer apps that will probably never be in the store, and you don't see them suffering much.
So, you've spent $800 just to start developing the app.
Which is an extraordinarily low investment in a new business. If you think this is a significant sum, then you don't have a business idea, you have a hobby.
If it's a hobby it doesn't matter whether you make money. And come to that, $800 is fairly modest for a hobby.
Maybe it's not fair for me to count the price of buying the initial computer for Mac and not count it for Android.
The difference is obviously significant to you. But then you aren't seriously considering it anyway. It's irrelevant to people that would actually be considering writing Mac software because they are already Mac users. And even for iOS they are probably already Mac users.
You don't have to. Build a website. Do marketing. Sell your product however you want to, and when someone's ready to buy you can provide them with a link that opens the App Store and gives them a "Purchase" button - no need for you to mess with handling payments or fulfillment.
The App Store replaces your shopping cart and shipping desk, not your sales and marketing department.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
The minimum you must spend is $600 on a Mac Mini.
What sales goals do you have if you are worried about a $600 instment? Your goal cannot be to write software and use the money to feed a family. For that goal, $50,000 profit a year is low (it won't make your family happy). If you worry about $600, then you are trying to make some beer money at best.
1. Just because you work on something for a year, doesn't mean it's good (in fact, most successful startups will tell you to ship early and see if you are on the right track).
2. 4.99 is a lot of money for an app, it might be the second coming of Jesus - but most people will look for a 99 cent alternative.
We could watch Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares and come to the conclusion that it's impossible to make money running restaurants. And indeed it's not easy. Yet there are many successful restaurants as well as many failures. The failure is always in the specifics of a particular restaurant, not the concept of restaurants.
This analogy would ALMOST work except for there aren't 42 italian restaurants lined up, side by side, doing the same thing, all for $.99 with the only visible difference being olive garden vs olive g4rden. There is so much garbage in the app store, the market research is almost impossible...and if you even DO the research, someone is going to essentially cold-spike your app, and charge less for it 10 seconds after it's released. Try that with a burger king...
One issue I recall was around 2011, when IAP came along, the fundamental change of apps. Before that, one would buy an app for 99 cents, and it would be playable, people would tell their friends, friends would buy it, and so on.
IAP came along and fundamentally changed the landscape from having a good game that was well engineered from start to finish to games whose sole goal is to get the player stuck so they would throw money at IAP in order to buy extra currency/lives/etc. so they could move on. Games also put deliberate bottlenecks in place where it might take 2-3 weeks to earn enough currency to get some levels, or one could pay $20 and skip that. The fact that the most popular (as in app clones) games changed from tower defense to casino slots also echos this.
People are tired of games that are "free"... but in reality may take $30 to complete. So, user apathy is causing sales to sag in app stores. Candy Crush was the first big game along these lines, but consumers are bored with stuff like that and there won't be another game in that genre which will gross even near that.
Maybe it is time for developers to actually not go for the low and easy road with IAP, but go for something playable that can get a lot of people buying it.
Same problem in the console industry and the PC game industry. DLC used to be for expansions and added levels, not must have content to play the game, or items which make the game not a grueling grind. It is no wonder why game sales are sagging across the board, regardless of platform.
... like that was the "good old days" of software development?
The exclusivity of the walled garden, the novelty of the device and platform, the deep pockets and enthusiasm of the userbase, this all created a gold rush environment for a number of years. (Remember that "I am rich" app that sold for $1000 a pop and did nothing but display a picture?)
Back In My Day, you only joined a small studio or became an independent developer if you had a REALLY INSANELY GOOD idea, were willing to work like hell for it (perhaps because you were tired of working for The Man), and were willing to evangelize it like hell, and even then, you were not guaranteed success, you were almost guaranteed to fail, but you did it anyway because you were deeply compelled. If you had to go slouching back to The Man in a few years, so be it.
The gold rush is over - and it's not a tragedy.
Programmers are as in-demand as they've ever been, and are paid fantastic money for labor that doesn't even involve, say, standing around in the hot sun, carrying a firearm, or constant exposure to hazardous waste. (Unless you count the exhaust from all those commute buses.)
Lolwut? Most "apps" I use daily at work start at tens of dollars and go up to $50k or so per seat. Some of the lower prices ones are actually quite popular - for example SmartGit/Hg and CadSoft Eagle. A $4.99 application can't be very good unless it's hugely popular, otherwise it won't support the development work needed to make it good. I'd argue that the cheap apps should be in fact in a separate "slum" section of the store where you have to explicitly navigate. It's rather sad, actually, that the Mac App Store doesn't have anything serious in the $50-$500 range. Never mind that the search is so broken that unless I knew the name of the app I looked for, I wouldn't find it anyway.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
It is amazing, given they are a big enterprise, but they really don't get what enterprises need, and just don't care. They want enterprises to use their iToys but don't want to spend any time on it. They just want to treat them like consumer devices and what you to spend your money and fuck off. It is really annoying.
They aren't much better to their people internally, either. Last time the campus Apple engineer came by, several years ago (our college doesn't use many Macs) it was shortly after Apple had suddenly discontinued their Xserve like. I asked him what they were going to do for their own web hosting, since they'd been using those. He said "I don't know, they didn't warn us about this or give us any guidance. We'll probably go back to using IBM systems like before."
The sad thing is Mac fanboys decide they want to use them for enterprise work, even though they are manifestly unsuited to it.