Slashdot Mirror
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.
Stop redefining words. Indie means not working for a large company nothing more nothing less. Indie does not imply any position at all on distribution channels.
My wife is big into those little games.. and a couple of the in app purchase ones she actually had the patience to play and succeed at without making any in-app purchases. On two separate games, there was some 'mysterious corruption' and all her progress was erased months after playing. In one of those games she wanted to get it back so desperately she started poking around in data files, and she actually saw the words 'user refuses to pay' in one of them.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Never has there been a time when Indies could compete against a company of ANY size.
You're just ignorant. An indie app can't pay half a million dollars or even $10K, in marketing in order to pay bots to download and rank their apps or even run a single TV ad, they can barely afford google ad-words.
Neither Apple, Google, and now M$, want you to realize just how badly gamed their app ranking system is. Just look at "Flappy Birds" -- It was a shitty ripoff that paid a marketing bot to write reviews with markov chains (invloving thousands of instances of similar terms as "the devil", "insane", "addictive", "life destroying", etc). The success of the other apps by the same dev increased at the same time but there was no marketing force or cross-app influence (he paid for them all to get up-ranked by the bot army, and one got noticed). That's why as soon as Flappy Birds got to the top of the app store it was pulled by the dev -- because otherwise the shady marketing would be discovered.
Funny thing is? A bunch of indie devs thought, "Holy shit that could be me! If only I tap into a catchy addictive mechanic!", and many wasted time making some cool fun games that were way better than Flappy Birds (and didn't even ripoff Mario graphics).... shitty mobile indie devs tried to replicate "flappy birds" success.but they never saw the light of day because they didn't have a marketing budget like the big players have.
You have been deceived. The app rankings are gamed. When there are 10k apps that all do the same shit, each produced by app-dev slaves for a mega corp, then the "inde" can't compete because they can't get visibility. Sure the app dev slaves will quit the megacorps, but there is always some fresh fool to mine for lines, and it only takes a few hours to swap assets of one app and re-sign it as the megacorp's production. Apple, Google, and M$ don't care because if you pay the botnet to buy your apps then you're just forking over money for free (you get some back, but the Walled Garden gets to take its cut, and that's all they care about). Telling everyone how shit of a chance you have because of how gamed their market places are is bad PR for the walled gardeners.
I wish I could be like you again. I miss having that sort of naive optimism. Sadly reality isn't idealistic, and your "MUST do marketing" fails to consider dollars, so it doesn't make cents.