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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.
All it would take to get my (completely unknown, not worth linking) indie apps onto their stuff is to open it up so that I don't have to have permission from their dictator just to have access to the tools. Permit access, allow open toolchains, and then if your dictator likes my app you could at least be granted leave to consider it.
An open toolchain would mean that a lot of indies would switch to portable frameworks. But right now there is no benefit; I could write the code that way, but I still can't turn it into an app and load it into a simulator for testing. Why use a portable framework when I can only even compile and test for one platform? Even if I had a friend with an iPhone, I can't just install and test.
I assume that Apple doesn't want me to write apps for their platform, and I naturally agree with people who don't want to do business with me. That is a big part of the point of being an independent; there isn't all that rat race. It is OK if only a few people use something. The goldrush is in silly-apps, it is a mini-bubble like paid ringtones. Over time, there will be many fewer fad apps, from big or small developers, paid or not.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
she actually saw the words 'user refuses to pay' in one of them.
Was there also evidence of why the Illuminati caused 9/11 and keept cold fusion under wraps?
Mysterious corruption is certainly possible, but there is zero reason for them to explicitly admit that they are doing something bad on client side.
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
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.
You know the anecdote is fiction from the point where he states his wife was poking around in data files.
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!
I wish I had taken a screenshot or something.. but at the time she was just trying to get the game to work again. Sorry, I have no proof.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
You've heard of string resource files for localization right? Looks like you (or your wife) came across one of those, and if you have ever worked on a project which does use localization you will know that a lot of crap gets left behind in the resource files and not used (anymore). It would be "dead code" but it's more like a "dead resource", happens all the time.
There are three kinds of falsehood: the first is a 'fib,' the second is a downright lie, and the third is statistics.
That occurred to me as well, except in that case I would expect there to be a whole bunch of other readable data in the same vicinity. This was just a single small file with the text inside.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.