Critical Sharks IV: Fear of Apple

[Jeremy Garchow]

Great article. It raises very salient points.

[Walter Soyka] “It’s part of my point that customers aren’t willing to pay what it costs to deliver innovation and value, because the value of software has become distorted.
“

Distorted is one way to put it. It is true that Apple has built a store, and the value of “apps” and therefore the value of developers is seen in that light. We do have to remember that Apple doesn’t set the prices.

And it is true that Apple suggests a lot of people to become a “Developer” and Apple is writing their own programming language to make it more accessible, and that situation, if you skew towards the cynical, does nothing but self serve Apple since all of the new developers will have to buy new apple products to test their new code and apps.

On the other hand, there’s a lot of work that Apple has done there, and does represent opportunity for a developer.

I think that developers, perhaps, rely on Apple putting them in the “top 25” a little too much, according to this article. If you look at Apple as retailer, and the developers as a wholesaler or producer (and granted, this analogy isn’t perfect), you don’t get mad at the big box retailer for not advertising your product on the coupons list all of the time. You, as a product maker, have to raise awareness (advertise) the product, so that ideally, the customer knows your product before they enter the store. The App Store, and front facing content or retailer devices like it, carry an absolutely dizzying amount of material. Browsing the aisles and looking at products isn’t as easy as it is irl (meaning it’s hard to sometimes get a bird’s eye view), and you can’t try a product and return it. So as a developer, are you relying on the AppStore to do your marketing as well? Is that “fair”? Apple already handles the transactions, provides the marketplace (and takes the retail cut), so how much responsibility do they have to be the marketer? Although, fixing the search engine should certainly be top of list (using the Twitterific example).

We have also spoken about user interface of online “stores” (or channels) in other threads. The iTunes store, App Store, Google Play store, Netflix, YouTube, I think all suffer from interface foibles of some sort. I don’t think the right interface has been invented yet, either. It’s going to take some time to figure it out.

Now, the ability to monetizing your current customer base, yes. That seems to be a shortfall of the current app store model.

Ironically, the App Store does have subscription payment as an option. I have no idea if you can apply the subscription model to a software service, perhaps it’s impossible as feature updates would have to be ‘subscribable’ and bug fixes free, however there isn’t a clear yes or no here:

https://developer.apple.com/in-app-purchase/In-App-Purchase-Guidelines.pdf

Then there’s the side that people simply don’t download mobile apps that much. I don’t think that has much to do with price (article)

Jeremy

[Aindreas Gallagher]

Not that I know what I’m talking about really – but it’s an interesting conversation so what the hoo… but isn’t this all so utterly unrecognisable from the situation pre the iphone?

The first thing I remember buying was ram doubler for OS7 – and I may have bootlegged a bit in my time too – but the idea that around a billion people would be perusing software additions for wireless download as a hobby on a daily basis would have sounded like total madness even ten years ago. One way or another software looks like shiny little smarties for 95% of the people who encounter the idea of commercial software today.
What’s not clear to me is if this has despoiled the previous dark ages natural market of people like us generally accustomed to the notion of a fairly serious software purchase?

As in I get that people trying to sell software for something more than 99 cents are having issues in the mac app store – but in a parallel universe without the iOS store that begat the playstore and the windows store and the mac appstore, in the absence of those, would the vast majority of the people currently at it be still somehow attempting to enter software authorship in the first place? Isn’t this the same old stuff of the removal of scarcity that’s going on in print voice music media in general?

I thought marco arment’s breakdown of the profit cycle on overcast was really interesting and brilliant of him to have done – ditto for the guy who showed how it played out for him advertising his blogging tool on daring fireball – they both made good cash – but given the barrier for entry is now close to zero, the chance of being totally ignored has shot up like a sky rocket at the same time?

https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics

[Gary Huff]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “The first thing I remember buying was ram doubler for OS7 – and I may have bootlegged a bit in my time too”

I would have bootlegged too if my first software purchase was a RAM doubler! 😀

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Aindreas Gallagher] “but given the barrier for entry is now close to zero, the chance of being totally ignored has shot up like a sky rocket at the same time?”

Sure. The other side is that a no name could sky rocket in popularity, thus defining technology of today.