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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.
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
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.