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Slashdot Asks: Is the App Boom Over?
Quartz did a story in 2014 in which, citing comScore's data, it noted that most smartphones users download zero apps per month. Two years later, the data from Nomura reveals that the top 15 app publishers saw downloads drop an average of 20% in the United States. While there are exceptions -- Uber and Snapchat continue to attract new users worldwide -- it appears that developers are finding it increasingly difficult to get new people to download and try their apps. Recode reports: But now even the very biggest app publishers are seeing their growth slow down or stop altogether. Most people have all the apps they want and/or need. They're not looking for new ones.What's your take on this?
There is too much junk in the app world. I personally don't want to sort through all of it. I have the apps I know I need/want and never search for new apps without a recommendation from a friend.
My most recent app download was Microsoft office lens, I had no idea I needed it until I took a picture of a whiteboard and my coworker told me to use office lens instead.
Basically I don't know I need any new apps so you have to advertise it well or it has to be recommended by a friend.
" Most people have all the apps they want and/or need. They're not looking for new ones."
Not much more to say. Galaxy Note 2, only 2GB of ram and 2012 tech, runs totally fine, quite happy with it, considering I paid $100 a year ago for it used... but I don't see the need to get a heap of pointless apps. I probably regularly use no more than 10, including the ones that come on the phone.
They are fixing this. Older apps have monolithic permissions, but in the latest OSs, you can tune them. Android is copying apple in that you can now ask for a permission at runtime and the user can disable it later.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
I know everybody just LOVES it and I am alone on this. But micro payments / in app purchases killed the games for me. I don't mind paying for the games and I used to buy new ones every month. But I haven't spent money in any "app store" in over 2 years now.
I can deliver a wonderful interactive user experience with HTML5, especially because of the Web Audio/Video interface which makes the microphone and camera available to a Javascript program, the HTML5 2D canvas (I've not done anything with HTML5 3D canvas yet) and Websockets for a session-based connection. The Javascript language and the web APIs are kludges built on top of kludges, but they are well-optimized and they work across three widely-available browsers.
That is, except on iOS because Apple insists that web browsers use their handicapped rendering engine instead of the browser's native one. Apple needs to catch up. Right now, I just don't support them. You need to run Chrome, Firefox, or Opera with their full rendering engine, not Apple's handicapped one. This even works on Mac, just not iOS.
Bruce Perens.
You've not heard of the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite Camera API. Adobe can't let HTML5 do things that Adobe Digital Publishing can't do. It seems to me that HTML5 makes all of the Adobe stuff obsolete, especially since the canvas can render SVG. You can do a machine translation of PDF to HTML5. But Adobe doesn't want you to know that.
Bruce Perens.
"Most" smartphone users run Android. Mostly because "most" smartphones out there are Android. Been that way for a long time - Android's outsold iOS 4:1 or so for a few years now. So I wouldn't be surprised that "most" smartphone users download zero apps - they got a smartphone because that's pretty much what is available.
So I'd guess most smartphone users don't bother with apps not because they are scared of permissions or whatever, but because they don't care - their smartphone already came laden with the apps they care about - Facebook, Pandora, Spotify, etc. They don't know, nor care about anything else. They got a smartphone, and damned if they were going to pay more than $0 for it.
Of course, that excludes a certain other mobile OS where developers do make money. Granted,t he gold rush is over, and there's tons of crap, but whose users do keep getting apps and all that. Of course, since they are a tiny minority of smartphone users (under 20%), well, they don't count.
Then of course, Android app users generally don't pay for apps as a whole so if a developer wants to eat, ads are pretty much the only way.
What is still missing is just "faking" permissions, i.e. you have permission to open my contacts, but I have none... or my camera is just filming in the dark. Cyanogenmod had that, but I'm not sure why Google hasn't decided to use it.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
Serverauditor is a decent SSH client for Android. Free works, but does occasionally nag you to pay for the subscription. I would happily pay a one-time fee, but app subscriptions are silly.
> One reason I stopped buying apps for iOS is the stream of broken apps Apple leaves behind by constantly breaking the damned operating system.
As a hobbyist programmer with a bunch of apps - every time Apple updates their OS I have to slog through whatever they broke this time and update all my apps. For someone with no time and who doesn't make much money off the apps this is a pain in the ass.