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Sorry, Indie Devs -- Pop Apps Are the Future of App Store (imore.com)
An anonymous reader points us to an opinion piece by Apple blogger Rene Ritchie on the dim prospects for indie app developers, in the face of mass-market, big-name competition. From his piece: Big apps get all the attention these days, just like big movie, music, or book releases and indies get what little is left, when there's even a little left. The App Store is big business, and that's how big business works. [...] Apple could use its considerable power and influence to help shape the App Store economy into one more hospitable to indie developers. After all, those are the apps I love and the ones that dominate my home screens. But the truth is, even if Apple gave indie developers everything they wanted, it wouldn't matter much over the long term. It may help a few for a while, and a very few for a while longer, but the app economy and apps themselves are evolving. Brent Simmons has offered his opinion on the matter. He writes, The Mac has for a long time been overlooked -- first because Windows was so huge, and then web apps, and now iOS. For my entire career people have said that the Mac is a bad bet, that it's dumb to write Mac apps. [...] There was never a golden age for indie iOS developers. It was easier earlier on, but it was never golden. (Yes, some people made money, and some are today. I don't mean that there were zero successes.) And there's a good chance that many of the people you currently think of as thriving iOS indie developers are making money in other ways: contracting, podcast ads, Mac apps, etc.
It wasn't a "golden age", it was just a gold rush. And did people seriously think the "gold rush" would last forever? It's like any other gold rush, literal or figurative - a few in the first wave get lucky and strike it rich. Most of the people who actually made a profit were selling equipment or services to the prospectors. And after the individual prospectors skimming off the surface were gone, it took a large-scale mining effort to exploit the resources at a deeper level.
The strength of indie developers are that they're able to move quickly with new ideas and on new platforms, but the new platforms don't come along all that often, and marketable new ideas are surprisingly hard to come by.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Everyone thought it was a positively grand idea to give a single entity, Apple in this case, control over not just what software users are permitted to run, but what software may be even be sold for their platform, and how. You wanted a dictatorship? Fine. You got one!
Sorry, I have no sympathy for anyone complaining about the result of locking themselves into such an ecosystem, or whether the dictator is acting to "shaping things to help indie app developers".
(Before you go assuming anything I haven't said, I have in no way said anything about Android here. Take your straw-man elsewhere, thank you).
Another big trend in apps is to give away a game, but then charge for in-app purchases that make the game much more playable. For example, Sims Freeplay can be played without paying for what are essentially tokens. However, the game then takes a ridiculously long time to advance through. EA is betting that you'll get impatient and pay for some of the in-app purchases. They periodically insert challenges that you have a week or two to complete, hoping that you'll desire the reward enough to pay money. Furthermore, with some other EA games on Android, EA has added "new versions" of apps that are suddenly not compatible with devices that used to run them without a problem. This includes apps like Monopoly, Bejeweled 2, FIFA 10, and FIFA 12. The devices are almost certainly capable of running those games without a problem, but EA wants to force you to use their new apps with in-app purchases. And while they might not have the freedom to do quite those things on iOS, trends in Android apps are not fundamentally different from those on iOS. I expect people will eventually get tired of the way these companies treat them, and maybe there'll be a market for games that don't effectively require lots of money on in-app purchases. One can hope that the greed of big developers eventually catches up with them.
Lost in all of this commotion is the technical reality, that most popular apps these days are not really that complex. That is to say, there's no reason a small indie of even just one developer could not make and maintain a pretty compelling application.
This has gotten more and more true with easier to configure and maintain server components, such that you hardly even need to be aware of how to properly write and scale server code anymore. Vast numbers of frameworks to accomplish just about anything you can thinks of help on the client side.
Never has there been a time when Indies could compete against a company of ANY size.
So why have indies been fading away a bit? Well to start with, I'm not sure they really have - I think there are still a lot of indie devs plugging away and making a living.
I think all of the recent publicity about this is because it specifically indies living in California that are having a hard time competing against companies - and that is because California and Silicon Valley has become a vast echo chamber, seemingly incapable of thinking up really original ideas - or at least thought processes are so in lock-step that one guy coming up with an idea there means 20 others will at the same time, some with easier access to funding.
The one thing aspect that has become important for apps now is they MUST do marketing, you just can't build an app and call it a day. To be a successful app writing business, you must act like a business and not just expect customers to come to you because.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
It wouldn't behoove Apple - or anyone else - to reinstate the conditions that made the iPhone a good place for the indie developers. Before Apple had an App Store, there was Installer.app and Cydia. This was back in the 1.x firmware days, when the innovations that Apple brought to the table were "kinetic scrolling", "threaded SMS", and "the marriage of the iPod and the cell phone". Labyrinth, Tap Tap Revolution (later Tap Tap Revenge), and a few others got their start there. Before Apple supported MMS, someone wrote SwirlyMMS that allowed picture messages to be sent and received on the iPhone. Summerboard (later Winterboard) allowed for theming and icon customizations. For those who prefer the shadier side of the internet and to use the phrase 'because I can' to justify their patience, cTorrent allowed for torrent downloads using a command line.
The reason why there was all this innovation before the App Store formalized was because it required jailbreaking to install *any* app. There were no formally documented APIs or anything; all programs were reverse engineered. While Apple never (to my knowledge) sent a lawyer-drawn nastygram to anyone who developed for the jailbroken iPhone platform, if King started making the hand-over-fist money they're getting from Candy Crush as a result of a release in Cydia, I think it definitely would have drawn the eye of Apple to intervene in some form.
Once the App Store was 'legitimized' and regulated by Apple, sea level started rising. Now, everyone is competing with ten million other apps for the same few-dozen spots on everyone's phone, and trying to come up with an original, marketable idea that somehow manages to rise to the top of the congested top-50 charts against apps that have TV commercials starring Arnold Schwarzenegger is the kind of thing that requires nothing short of a miracle.
tl;dr: When "getting too big" in Cydia had the implicit concern that Apple would come and rain on your parade, indie development was relatively possible. Apple making an App Store that they controlled and thus enabling "sky is the limit" development, marketing budgets, and 'too many choices' made it nearly impossible to an indie to compete with traditional means.
The entire store is full of garbage and people trying to sell you shovels and picks. Even if a customer has a legitimate need and does a search, its difficult to find the app for that specific need. Add to that something obscure but you would think millions of app choices would help? No.
So, no visibility for legit app developers and customers who are frustrated finding apps. And customers are increasingly dependant on Apple cherry picking a promoting only a tiny fraction of the apps.
Freemium games? Just eats up time and they move on to the next game. More garbage accumulates.
And if you had a good idea, you would not get visibility and one of the big boys would take the idea. ( or an Apple project manager would take the idea ... they have to review it all anyways )
Things are grim on the app store at the moment. And it all started when they allowed flash apps and purchased the company Chomp.
Even students are publishing apps. So, it all seems more like resume candy now than a legitimate business opportunity or market.
Open source alternative? I love it and hate it. If I need a fast solution its great. If I don't want to be a service and sell software it sucks. And if businesses are going to open source, its like a big short on that idea -- I short to shut you out while they are probably outsourcing h1b at the same time.
But I can always expect Apple to create a new device with another screen size or feature to get me to buy hardware. Not anymore guys....
I know, right?! Let's work together to solve this problem. Round up the Christians and put them into concentration camps. Promise to let them free if they accept that praying to Jesus does nothing except waste their time. Those who embrace the reality that Christianity is BS are free to rejoin the real world. Those who don't will starve to death or die from disease. The world will be a better place. Nobody will be praying to Jesus to make it rain or anything else their fictional god might do. Atheism is the only way! Death to Christianity!
Apple, Google, MS, Amazon, all want to control app stores but these big app makers will just turn into publishers/stores themselves. Time for policy changes right fellas? Probably too late
Twinstiq, game news
Every time this complaint comes up I say the same thing. Stop writing horizontal apps. Indie developers can (and should continue) to focus on narrowly targeted vertical applications. You aren't going to write a better driving app than Google maps, Apple maps, Waze, Open... But you can write a better application for skiers that consolidate deals and account for reports of conditions. You can write a better app for hotel front desk applications to tie to the mobile phones of hotel maids in navigating which rooms have checked out vs. which have left vs. which still have people in them. You can write a better application for appliance installers which gives them information on which warehouses to pick up which parts in...
There is still a wide open market for vertical applications. Horizontal is too competitive but so what? Vertical pays way better.
Round up the Anonymous Cowards and put them into concentration camps. Promise to let them free if they accept that meaningless comments on Slashdot does nothing except waste everyone's time.
FTFY - P.S., Jesus still loves you. :P
Apple is the future.
It is the only company capable of making secure, reliable, privacy-focused computing systems that are easy to use and for which customers are willing to pay money.
You can't say that about Windows.
You can't say that about Linux or any other FOSS software.
You can't say that about Android.
Apple is the future of all non-shitty computing.
Indies are mendacious posing Hipster Fascists with filthy beards, blue hair, jack boots, their grandparents clothes, half skinheads, contempt for classic geekery, espresso egos and entitlement, and no ability to do useful, productive or creative work whatsoever.
From what I read elsewhere, the Stanford School of Business are putting out graduate students who Big Idea(TM) for business is... another app.
These people talk like spammers and SEO scum lamenting obstacles to their business, or hobos leaving codes for each other about how hospitable is the town ahead. How did such worthless work become the center of imagined economic eliteness?
When I was a kid, cheek-pinching aunts and uncles used to say, "oh you're into computers?" Into, yuck. Already I feel a tiny hostility toward people having interests at all. "Are you going to be the next Bill Gates?"
"Ew, no. He strangled the evolution of a field I care about with overbearing, condescending technical mediocrity."
"He's the richest man in the world. You have to respect that."
I guess apps are the new Bill Gates. Why don't we give up and admire people who buy lottery tickets instead?
When ebooks took off in 2010, I published my short stories as $0.99 and made more money selling ebooks than I did in selling first serial rights. Six years later, my ebook income is now a tickle. The market has changed as readers demanded longer ebooks from a series with a free starter ebook, a glut of ebooks have flooded the market, and Amazon is still behaving like a monopoly. Rather than bitching, moaning and groaning, I'm rebuilding the business and exploring new opportunities.
Almost all mobile apps are near complete crap. It's a completely immature market and open to anyone to develop. The top apps from brand names are junk and they may get minor review boosts because ppl trust them and download them, but that doesn't turn them into market leaders.
A quick look at the app store entirely confirms that big name app makers are NOT the top downloaded apps and yes they can get downloads and installs, but that doesn't mean ppl keep the programs anyway, it doesn't really mean anything because the mobile market is a consumption market, not a production market.
They want you to be confused with options because that means you will wind up making more purchases and that's all the android and iOS markets are really about. 90% of what you phone can do really has little to do with user demands and everything to do with what can make money. Facebook is there to make money, not to connect people. Android is not there to help people get connected, it's there to create a alternative marketplace to Microsoft.
If people weren't wasting money on dumbed down mobile apps, they would be buying more desktop apps. Their attention is easier to get with a mobile device so the platform makes money, but the apps don't really do much and they are often missing obvious features than anyone coding with a real purpose would not have left out. It's a rapid development disposable app market and in general it should not be taken seriously.
What you see today in the mobile market is not the future of anything. It's a transition and a trend. People will start to demand more useful features from smartphones now that the hype is wearing off. Phones can't just keep getting bigger, so the profit and technological curve will flatten. There is just only soo much you can do with a 4-5 inch screen.
and are they related to Pop Tarts in some way?
You know the old saying: Dreamers open the new paths, companies draw the maps and banks charge the toll.
Indies are the pioneers, the dreamers who open new paths. But they are no good roads, they are paths. Companies make what Indies did but much better because they have more resources and they are committed to do that, while Indies want to enjoy with new path. If they enjoy more earning money, they become companies, like google, yahoo etc.
There was a golden age of Indies, but never was a golden economic age, it was a golden media visibility age. Now that most terrain is explored, there no much room for Indies.
A small developer really doesn't have the resources to devote many hours to developing an app that will then get approved or not by a single gatekeeper with no recourse.
The rules are generally clear enough for most apps that that's not even a concern - there are lots and lots of indie developers making money today doing just exactly what you suggest they cannot.
But even for the fringe cases your basic premise is wrong. There is recourse; first of all you can appeal a rejection, or you can simply comply with whatever Apple wanted you to change about your app. I have seen appeals work, and apps that were previously rejected get through.
Failing those mechanisms of recourse, you can always sell through Cydia.
There are so many iPhones now that the even the Cydia route can be popular, or you can simply build and sell a Cydia app with an eye towards Apple buying you (as they did with the Notification Center for iOS).
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
An indie app can't pay half a million dollars or even $10K, in marketing in order to pay bots to download and rank their apps or even run a single TV ad,
The moment you said "TV ad" I simply stopped reading, as there are so many other channels of advertising that so much more effective and cheap... you simply have no idea what the hell you are talking about.
Just a few thousand can get you very effective marketing in most channels.
The one area I should have qualified was games; that is an area where I can see life being much harder for an indie, though even there are constant sorries of success by small players because the mainstream game industry is so ossified and lacks creativity.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Sorry, but I forgot to mention in the last message the other reason I know you are utterly ignorant of modern app sales is because you think app store rankings are the only means to success. Read what I wrote again, and think. App store rankings are the laziest possible way to gain some market share but even they may not do as much for you as you think. They are a short-term boost, not a long-term strategy for success.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The article is generalising to sensationalise and gain attention. It's about "indies" coming up with new features that the phone lacks but should be built in.
This isn't about "indies" so much as about the recent pulling of FlexBright by Apple as iOS9.3 will provide that same functionality under the name "Night Shift mode"
No point griping about Apple playing catch up with built in features. That's what their customers demand, indies don't matter.
Indies (and I am one who lives off the proceeds of my iOS apps) can thrive in the app store eco-system if they stand back from the technology and look at what people want or might like.
A better article on being an Indie would be one about how to monetise an app and how that has changed and evolved.
There's an opportunity out there with Ads in apps to satisfy a lot of, rich, frustrated advertisers as ad blockers can't block ads in-app.
As an indie you can't compete with the big fellows and their massive marketing budgets that are paying Schwarzenegger salaries.
You can capitalise on emptying those deep pockets though.
I released an app myself like a week or two ago and have not gotten even one person to use it... I have even given out promo codes to get the app free and still nothing.. The app is called 'Drop Distance'. It is on Google play and amazon app store. Contact me for pomo codes! Jeromestonebridge at gmail.com
The issue we have now is that apps are really cheap. It's pretty much impossible to have a sustainable living as an Indy developer on a $1.99 app. The smarter route to take is utilize apps as another marketing channel for a larger service. All of the big corporations have lots of more resources and don't need to make a profit with the apps they release. It will be nearly impossible to win this kind of battle.
The problem that index devs face - a glut of apps, and lots of money pouring in from large companies - would be made WORSE by the App Store being more open, not better.
If the app store were totally open with no barriers there would for a start be about 10x more apps. That increase in numbers would make people MORE likely, not less, to only download apps from large companies because apps from smaller companies would mostly be scam or spyware of some kind (see: Android Market).
Indie devs still have a chance in the iOS ecosystem because of, not despite, the more closed nature of the App Store. There's a reason why Google ratchets ever closer to that model for their own App Store, but because it's so easy to side load it doesn't really matter. An indie dev would have to be insane I think to develop for Android these days, but they could still do quite well on iOS.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Are you jew? Or muslim?
open it up so that I don't have to have permission from their dictator just to have access to the tools. [...] Even if I had a friend with an iPhone, I can't just install and test.
When did you come to that conclusion? Apple's rules have changed, and it may have been since then. As of Xcode 7, you no longer have to pay $99 per year to install iOS apps from source code on your own device. Nowadays, so long as you own a Mac and an iOS device on the same Apple ID, you can just build and deploy the app for testing without any recurring fee. Apple charges the fee only when you submit the app to the App Store for review for the first time.
Yeah, there's risks. Life is about risks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMFYs3gfgis
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
Modern app appers only use APP apps, not LUDDITE "pop" apps!
Apps!
The fundamental issue is that more efficient distribution in a growing market benefits companies with strong brands and more resources, who can drive people to their products. I'd suggest that the App Store's handling infrastructure (sales, distribution, in-store marketing) makes it easier for indie companies to focus on writing apps, so they'd be worse off if they could only sell via their web sites.
The "missing functionality" in the App Store - upgrade pricing and free trials - can both be effectively achieved using other mechanisms. That is, companies can (and do) release new versions of their apps as separate apps when they think that the differences are significant enough that people will pay for the app upgrade. And companies often release "free" apps that have an in-app purchase for the "real" game, which gives you a free trial that you pay to continue to play. Of course, the "freemium" model is an extension of a free trial, breaking the purchase into ongoing small purchases.
Enable 3D printed prosthetics!
It's like Christians figuring out that praying to Jesus won't make it rain. On the one hand you want to celebrate the conclusion, on the other hand you know they didn't arrive at it using logic, as they still believe praying to Jesus will do something.
Funny how your post is like a Muslim figuring out that praying to Allah won't work, but making fun of the infidels will. And if that won't work, killing them will.