My dislike for application stores, the race to the bottom they enabled, and the myth of it being a great way for small developers to make it big is well-documented at OSNews, so yeah, I couldn’t pass up this story (don’t click the link yet!). Developer Sam Soffes released an interesting application on the Mac App Store, and when he looked at how well his application as doing later that day, he was in for a shock.
For launch, the price was $4.99. I may play with that some over time. I was originally thinking $2.99 and a bunch of folks on Twitter said $4.99 was better. Anyway, Redacted was #8 top paid in the US and #1 top paid in Graphics at the end of launch day. It was also at the top of Product Hunt with 538 up votes! Wow!
This sounds amazing, right? Surely, this is a story of an indie developer making it big, becoming a millionaire overnight. Good feels were had all around, right?
Now read the post.
The race to the bottom is great for end users though.
I find everything I need on the app stores, the quality for the top-level apps are great and they cost nearly nothing.
It’s sad that the authors doesn’t make tons of money, but the willingness to pay for software was never really there. Reality kicked in and now we’re “there”.
Moving on.
A race to the bottom?! Have you seen the demo video of that “application”? It’s barely more than the kind program people write as their first project when learning a new GUI toolkit: one text area and three buttons for three simple algorithms, zero design. I find it unbelievable that anybody would pay $5 for that.
That said, the conclusion of the story is priceless. Literally.
No kidding. There’s probably a hundred desktop programs that are free and/or open source that could provide the same function.
Am I the only one that thinks the entire “mobile apps” market is a scam on gullible consumers?
Guy 1, “This app costs $5. I could do this for free with GIMP or Paint.net or Picasa or the software that came with my camera.”
Guy 2, “But it works on your phone!”
Guy 1, “Wow! Why didn’t you say so! What a bargain!”
OSS sucks rocks for the vast majority of the user applications out there! especially the ones that do not have corporate sponsors. There are very few that are truly usable. I cannot tell you how many time I have downloaded an OSS app that should have been just what I needed… except that the developer stopped when it was “done”. ie. when he got bored and so the polish that separates really good usable SW from close but useless, was never done!
There are a few exceptions but these usually have companies backing them up that can afford the man power to do the polishing.
Considering that the company always gets control of how long and if the software is there, and that they always make money, it’s understandable that they push it.
I’d love to see that go away and perhaps they can switch the system to a repository.
The other issue that I have maybe 4 apps at less than 7 dollars each from the store. Only one app that is $90 USD I purchased outside but alas: it gave a code to download from the App Store because the vendor canceled the installer to “prevent piracy”.
Ugh. Insult to injury.
That sort of thing is why I’ve always been wary of any sort of vendor lock-in and ensure that the entire software stack for anything I buy is fully functional in an “airgapped and installed from scratch via DVD+R backups” situation.
(eg. Commodity hardware -> Fully open-source Linux desktop -> DOSBox or Wine (open-source) -> GOG.com game)
Granted, in practice, I tend to run the nVidia binary drivers on my gaming devices, but my AMD onboard works perfectly well with the Mesa drivers as long as I run more demanding 3D games at lower resolutions and, now that I’ve got a GeForce GTX 750, I’m going to wait to see how this whole “signed firmware” mess for 900-series cards turns out.
Edited 2015-05-07 22:40 UTC
Name a single thing this story has to do with the app store. This guy made an simple app. Some people bought it. He made some money but not as much as he would have expected.
This is the fault of the app store model how exactly? The Mac app store is several orders of magnitude smaller than the iOS one. Why would you expect to make $15,000 in half a day, when an insanely popular app like Flappy Bird was making $50,000/day on the iOS store at #1 overall?
Never mind that any reasonable programmer could write this app in a day or two.
Edited 2015-05-08 01:59 UTC
A reasonable programmer could have written that in a day or two as well (ok, maybe a week if your slow…)
I love the whole Flappy Bird story. Good for that guy, really – I like success stories. But seriously, all those sales were based on mindless buzz, accidental exposure, the media effect, and the cup of coffee price tag. None of it had anything to do with the app.
No one bought Flappy Bird because of the quality of the software, or to reward good work, or for any rationale reason at all. I know the guy didn’t intentionally go out and try to scam anyone, it was an accident. But that is my point – accidental success seems to be the most common scenario as far as indie apps go. Its all lightning in a bottle.
If you want to get into indie software, go make really good, non-trivial, serious-amounts-of-effort apps that service real needs. Then sell them. If they are good, some people will buy them and you might earn enough to make a living at it (barely). If you expect anything beyond that, you are naive – simple as that. There is a reason people say you can’t catch lightning in a bottle… Because you can’t. The “app store model” doesn’t change the equation at all.
Edited 2015-05-08 03:08 UTC
A much better path is to find an industry that is not technology based. Find a process that is highly manual (there are still millions of them) and find a good way to automate it with technology. Get a good contact in that industry and sell your software for a high price. Still endless potential for niche software.
Totally agree on that.
Honestly, I’m amazed even 59 people bought it.
Yeah I understand that, but I think in retrospect the guesses were just way off base. If we know that on iOS a top game (again the Flappy Bird example) makes about $50,000/day, then we can estimate from there. There are 800 million iOS devices, and only 80 million macs out there. So right off the bat you should not expect more than $5000/day even if you were #1. Also the Mac App store is relatively new, so I wouldnt be surprised if there’s another factor of 10 less activity on it compared to iOS where the marketing from the beginning has been “There’s an app for that”.
So I would expect about $500-$1000/day for #1 spot on the mac app store. #8 and $452 seems about right.
Edited 2015-05-08 04:41 UTC
That’s the real story here.
The question is: How much money “Redacted” would make without the existence of the App Store?
My bet is 0… and $452 is much much better than 0 ergo the App Store is good.
I understand the story is a different one (top amms in the Mac app store make very little money), but I can’t get over the fact is a worthless app, which even at 0.99$ would be overpriced. It’s so basic, it should be given away for free.
True. I wrote a quite simple app for the Mac for repairing WAV files that had become corrupted. Made it reasonably pretty, wrote the documentation and packaged it up. Probably a similar amount of work to this app. I then released it for free, and have received probably around €50 in donations in a year. But it’s such a simple little app that I would have been embarrassed to even submit it to the Mac app store, let alone ask for money. I guess different people have different perspectives on these things…
If you look closely one of the problems with the store, and one of the reasons it’s such useless BS is that, well, look at his numbers…
The product got upvoted more than it was SOLD. Since it only has one avenue of delivery (via the store) the problem is clear, people can like or vote for products they’ve never used and haven’t bought, giving you a complete BS rating.
It’s one of many fixes I think App stores need, make it so you can’t vote for something you haven’t bought and run at least once; of course they’d NEVER go for that since it would reduce the number of people voting since once you have it, are you REALLY going to be bothered to go back and rate it?
Though again, it would make the voice of the people who do bother have even more legitimacy, particularly when it comes to positive reviews.
Marketing 101 does come into play there sadly; people are ten times more likely to take the time to complain than they are to give praise.
That’s kind of fixable through UI design, though. Imagine if the app store had a panel with “You bought these apps, but haven’t rated them yet”. If they just want bulk ratings, having a star widget there where you could submit a rating with a single click would probably see a lot of use; if they would prefer fewer ratings with more feedback it could pop up text field with stars and cancel/submit underneath.
Something like this: http://imgur.com/mVQhbYO