iOS developer house Pixite decided to give full access to the entire company to Casey Newton.
This past December, Kaneko emailed me out of the blue. He didn’t know it then, but I’m a fan of the company’s apps: Fragment, which applies prismatic effects to photos, is one of my favorite artistic tools. “As an independent bootstrapped app company, we are struggling,” Kaneko wrote. “If things don’t turn around, we’ll need to lay off half of our staff in the next few months.” He invited me to come to San Diego and observe the struggle up close. Kaneko would open up Pixite’s books and share every piece of data that I requested while, over the course of two days, his team locked itself in a room and attempted to chart a path forward. Pixite would either figure it out or die.
For years now, I’ve been skeptical here on OSNews about the sustainability of the application store model. After the initial gold rush, Apple (or Google, for that matter) clearly had absolutely no clue what to do with the application store model to keep it sustainable after the gold rush ran out. Even today, after the languishing application store model utterly gutted the independent developer field and has caused tremendous harm to small developers, the two mobile heavyweights still seem utterly oblivious as to what to do going forward.
And now that both Apple and Google are trying to scale their mobile operating systems up from Facebook and Candy Crush to actual, serious work, everyone is finally starting to realise what a small number of skeptics warned about so many years ago: there’s no more money, incentive, or trust in the application store model for developers to create the kind of applications a scaled-up iOS and Android running on laptops or laptop-like devices would need.
This year is going to be incredibly fascinating. I have no doubt that Apple and Google will be able to scale iOS and Android up for work. The real question, though, is if they’ll be able to convince weary developers to invest in the application store model again.
I think it’s too late. Either there’s going to be deep, sweeping changes to how we distribute and sell applications on these platforms, or they will be forever confined to consumption.
Are the coders, amazingly. Unsurprised about the snail pace of the walk.
Of old age.
And a new, unaware generation sprout from college
To compensate for Corporative hagiographies.
To be printed, on paper.
Committing their working lives to this. Did you know? :/
As someone who *never* spent a cent in any app store, I may agree its model is flawed, but not really *everyone* seems to agree: we see Microsoft pushing it more and more.
And isn’t Steam also a kind of app store? Everyone points at them as a success story.
The App Store model is very good for the owners of the store (e.g. Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc.) BUT it is bad for the app builders.
The experts in mobile technology (like for example Tomi Ahonen) have been saying for years that App Store is basically a Casino industry (where very very few developers win and everybody else loses). Basically, the percentage of “winners” among developers who develop apps for App Store is the same as the percentage of winners at casino.
Only games developers in general are able to make a living by developing games for App Store.
Edited 2016-03-03 07:30 UTC
and is worse than each developer trying to sell the same useless app from his own (obscure) website?
a real problem is the app stores are flooded with useless crappy apps and users learned quickly not to buy them “maybe this one is what i was looking for”
That’s pretty much what I was thinking. The model of a central store from which to buy software isn’t the part that is broken. It’s the fact that simple apps which would only have existed as personal or school projects in the past are now sold as complete products, along with there being no content control on them, and lastly that giving the apps away for free or for very cheap is heavily encouraged to the point where you almost can’t sell an app unless its a game.
see this picture from the article: https://cdn0.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/6129003/_NJT6141…. nowhere on the table is “make apps people really want to use”
Spiron,
This is a biproduct of supply and demand, exacerbated by winner-takes-all economics and the consolidation of the entire market into one app store per platform for the whole world. If the app stores market was healthier (for example, at least one for each country) it would create more opportunities for local developers to get attention and compete in their own local regions.
Think you are on a sensitive point, Alfman.
By design -doesn’t know if accidental or deliberate- ‘Stores’ fragment and isolate what essentially should be a strongly netted ecosystem.
All of the app stores have one store per country. It hasn’t helped, other than to artificially limit what apps people can buy in some cases. On top of that, you can install third party markets on Android. It hasn’t seemed to help much, if at all.
darknexus,
Apple US may be a different division than Apple UK, but that’s a very far cry from what I’m talking about. I’m talking about hundreds of unique stores spread throughout the world under completely separate ownership in direct competition with one another. Apple has no incentive to compete with itself anywhere around the world, and it doesn’t even have to compete with any other IOS software stores because they are blocked at the device level. A software ecosystem under just one profit-driven company is not even remotely healthy.
Yes that’s true, it is not sufficient that competition be allowed, it also has to be viable. Control over technology and mindshare are so asymmetrically balanced that it makes me wonder if it can ever recover. In the game of monopoly, once a single player is in possession of the railroads, pennsylvanian avenues, park places, boardwalks, it’s pretty much game over for everyone else until the game gets reset.
What gave you that idea? There are literally hundreds of millions of Android devices with application stores other than Google Play.
And how has that affected app quality? As far as I can see, it has not, nor has it seemed to change how developers are able (or not able) to monetize their apps which is what this article was about. I didn’t say there were no Android devices without Google. What I said was that it hasn’t changed the situation for developers in the overall scheme of things.
That’s exactly right, because it’s not just the individual store (Play or App Store) that sucks – it’s the model as a whole, regardless of store.
Edited 2016-03-03 20:50 UTC
Thom, we’re in agreement at least to a degree. The model, as executed now, sucks. There are ways it could very easily be done better. That’s one of the reasons I’m disappointed in Microsoft–they had an opportunity to change how the store model would work, and just copied the big two instead of putting a little thought into it.
It is basic economics – Pareto’s Law. It happens in all competitive markets. It is not some flaw inherent in app stores.
Edited 2016-03-04 10:09 UTC
unclefester,
It is not a flaw inherent to app stores, however it is rather unique that these mobile app channels started out as natural monopolies and never really got to benefit from diversity or competition during their course of their evolution.
For all the power MS and apple have in the PC industry, look at all the trouble they have establishing app stores for PCs. When we have viable alternatives (direct sales, gog, steam, amazon, ebay, newegg, tigerdirect, bestbuy, and so on), it turns out that without exclusivity, the terms of vendor app stores are not very attractive or competitive.
Their lead is so great that even if everyone at the bottom were to collectively join hands, it’s a pathetic 1.5%. I’m not optimistic that the future of tech has any diversity.
http://www.macrumors.com/2016/02/18/ios-android-market-share-q4-15-…
Edited 2016-03-04 20:32 UTC
I meant to say “Their lead [on mobile] is so great that…”, referring to android and ios.
I suspect that more stores would lower the earnings of most developers because of increased competition.
High incomes are always created by creating a restricted supply. Roughly 5% of people are capable of becoming physicians. However training places are so heavily regulated that there is a chronic shortage of physicians in most developed countries. This keeps salaries high. If every potential physician was allowed into medical school the oversupply would be so great that most physicians would be living in poverty.
Edited 2016-03-04 23:48 UTC
unclefester,
Clearly, that’s what supply and demand dictates. But I’d like you to consider this on multiple levels; the end-to-end effects of supply and demand can be altered by what’s going on in the middle. If we could decimate the number of hospitals, this in and of itself would significantly reduce the demand for doctors by hospitals, and even create a glut of unemployed doctors. Meanwhile many patents would desperately want to be seen by the remaining facilities, drastically increasing the market rates for health care.
Obviously a healthy market should correct itself with the addition of more medical facilities. But the mobile app market is not healthy, we’re allowing monopolies to take over and stay in control. Consolidating all software channels into one single distributor is catastrophic for the free market. A few do insanely well, at the expense of all the others who inevitably become redundant and have nowhere else to go.
Edited 2016-03-05 06:48 UTC
So, come up with a third-party store for Android that:
1. Is appealing to manufacturers–more appealing than Google’s.
2. Appeals to developers, probably with some really good terms.
3. Appeals to users.
On Android at least, the chances to fix the problem are right there. Not so on Windows or iOS of course, but there is still a chance to do something about it. No one has, however, and the pathetic attempts at third-party markets other than Amazons have utterly failed to appeal to all three categories of people required to make them work. Appealing to one or two out of these three is simply not enough, and you’d best make it so appealing that developers don’t feel the desire to publish somewhere else too.
So I set the challenge before anyone who is concerned: fix it.
Edited 2016-03-07 13:53 UTC
And really, have you looked at their apps? http://pixiteapps.com/ – even if they were totally free of charge and available for my Android devices, I won’t feel any kind of need for any of them – the apps looks gimmicky, each of them can add a different and limited set of filters (why have 10 apps instead of a single one, just to draw more money from your customers?) and the filters may look spectacular when seen for the first time (some of them do), but they get old *very* fast. But the app, use it a couple of times and then not open it again. Then why buy the next app from the same developer?
Their vector app Assembly is great though. It ain’t Adobe Illustrator, but it works well for simple quick “prototyping” in some of my work (logos, posters, etc), with .svg output ready to be exported to the desktop when I’m back at the office. Completely worth the few bucks (can’t remember, definitely less that $5) I paid.
The rest, I’m not sure. Their descriptions do sound gimmicky. I grabbed one of the filter apps when it was free for a day or something. Probably a decent tool if you’re into posting pictures of sunsets or food on Instagram, but I’m not into that hobby, so can’t really offer anything constructive. Didn’t seem to offer anything other apps in that “field” didn’t, though I could be wrong.
Yeah, i saw that app and found it cute, but immediately thought: why would i do that on my phone when i can do the same with Inkscape on my PC?
This could become a form of auction where app store owners reduce their take in order to gain market share.
The problem with this picture is that an app often needs to be there across all the handsets with significant market share.
If all the app stores reduce charges together then they could face legal charges of market manipulation. If they don’t then the current choke strangles many players out of the app field.
The probable outcome is that apps end up being produced by people with ulterior motives. Somewhat akin to the way that many successful online stores are owned by successful offline retail stores.
Edited 2016-03-03 09:09 UTC
From my point of view it’s greed. Looking at the team there are just too many people for this kind of business that they are trying to make a living out of.
People never get “accustomed” to making ‘x’ amount of money from online store.
They want more, they think they discovered a new market and want to milk to it until there’s not much more to do..
It’s the moment when they go to “Investors” and strategy “leads” that start wanting more and more from them and at this point you can either have a very strong basis or just disappear from public attention because other smaller group of people try to do the same thing, but now with more knowledge than you had when you first begun this.
So many drop out of college these days because they want to have success on app stores and just leave with the illusion of living their own dreams (with no bosses to bother them at work or tell them what to do) when they actually become more dependent to the tech giants than they are aware of.
Problem here is that corporations do not care one bit about you and your business if something goes wrong.
Edited 2016-03-03 09:25 UTC
Add to your point that there is *over* supply. The main problem being that too many people are trying to make as an app store developer. This is in part due to the siren’s call of the gold rush.
There is no way (app store or not) that the huge amount of developers publishing their software can make a living. It is even more unlikely given the kind of useless apps many publish.
And yes, maybe it would fare better if the app stores wouldn’t be cluttered with useless applications, but that has a difficult solution other than limiting the quite “free to publish” nature, and then we would be complaining about the barriers to publish software.
So: small investment required to enter the market + change to “hit the gold” + something “cool” to work on it + not something really hard to do -> oversupply and plenty of people unable to make a living. A big surprise (not).
Apple have overcome the opposition in the market by quoting number of apps as their defining metric. The last thing they want to do is change that. For every startup that fails, another will take its place. Apple still get their cut, they don’t care who from.
Osvil could be right. Maybe some additional work required at Market Management.
Without a hint of treasonous attitude. Qualifying panels integrated by totality of iOS registered users, developers and Apple valuators. That would do some heal on ‘cluttering’ problem. And rise expectations of developers to be paid accordingly.
Standardized Qualification Polices could be enforced about developers -as responsibilities- about their Teams’ products, within their declared lifespan. That would make easy for them to go from one project to next.
Developers’ and Products’ Seniority could well be ranked high on this Qualification, to promote experience and continuity.
Declaring what ACTUALLY that thing is, does, and doesn’t.
Delusion is the most important deterrent on creating a loyal clientele.
There’s delusion here, also.
Although on a personal level I have sympathy for these 6 guys, I can’t say I am in any way surprised by the outcome.
If they sold their app as a windows app in the “old” market, where you made a product and put it on a shelf at PCWorld, who would buy it? I think not.
Somehow people have become deluded into thinking that an “App” does not need to be as complete nor as robust as an ‘off the shelf’ product. And it’s this that’s crippling them as a buisness.
Will a photo filter be critical to your day to day buisness like MSWord? No. it won’t.
The majority of apps are cheap curiosities at best and arn’t a sustainable buisness for the same reason no one buys Furbies anymore. Fads come and go.
Though I agree with Thom on the flawed app-store model, I think it opened a lot of opportunities for indie developers that, in other older scenarios, would not have had any chance to win.
That said, with this easy way of publish “apps”, the quality of such products is, by general (of course there are a lot of exceptions), very very poor, and the problem they try to solve is, in many cases, trivial.
So, what we need inside this model is:
* Having better “applications”, not simply “apps” that solve real problems in a real way.
* Having a way to expose those applications to be general public in order to make them known.
* Apple, Google and all the app-store owners should start to take care on the quality (instead of the quantity) of such products.
It’s how Apple and Google have tackled it, and how the consumers have responded. When everyone expects an app to cost a maximum of $0.99, any model is going to be doomed whether it’s centralized or otherwise. The problem is that these stores rate apps on popularity and number of downloads, which directly links to price point. There are some really, really nice apps on iOS that I willingly paid for. Apps like Prompt2, Prismo, and the like. They’re all considerably more than $0.99, but worth every cent in the $9.99 I paid for Prompt2 (can’t remember what Prismo cost). I have no problem paying for value, however it seems I’m in the minority of app store customers. I think the most expensive app I purchased on iOS was $99. It’s a very niche app, however it was worth everything I paid and more. However, that $99 is also the last they’ll see from me, because none of these stores (save for the Mac App Store) have a facility to permit paid upgrade paths. Everyone gets free upgrades to any app they buy, for life.
What they need to do is stop grouping apps by popularity and feature notable apps that really work, even expensive ones. Most of the awesome apps you will never find if you don’t know to look for them and that, I think, is where the real problem is. Plus very few consumers use their devices to actually do anything in comparison to those who just play games and social media.
P.s. While I’m speaking about Apple in this post, this applies equally well to Google and Microsoft. It’s a shame about the latter, because Microsoft have just copied the other two instead of doing something better (their usual strategy of late).
Edited 2016-03-03 14:25 UTC
Microsoft did. In 6.x and 7.0
You used to be able to down load apps directly, or if you chose, download the “Windows Marketplace for Mobile”. The company was berrated for this approch at the time and forced to follow Apple’s lead around the same time Google were with the release of 7.5.
Now, people are again clamouring for what we used to insist was archaic and not user friendly. Installing full-fat desktop apps on a mobile.
I think you misunderstood me. I wasn’t talking about downloading apps directly (though I do think the users should always have that option) but rather Microsoft’s recent strategy. Further, you’re wrong in that Windows Mobile 6.x apps were fat desktop apps. They were fat all right, but didn’t even come close to the functionality of good apps even on iOS let alone their desktop equivalents. Even Microsoft’s default apps were terrible (remember Internet Explorer pocket?). Windows Mobile 6 (even 6.5 which had a store model) was slow, buggy, complicated to program, and riddled with crappy apps from Microsoft on down as well as horrible touch screens and devices. I think they have improved quite a bit from those days in mobile operating system quality. However, they have not improved their store strategy from what Apple and Google have done, and that is what is sad.
Are kind of difficult to match words. I know several from the Desktop Universe, they all distinguish by being strongly founded on standard exchange protocols.
That’s not an app that even 1% of people want, much less need. I think I found the problem with their business model, and the app store is not it…
and the good Pixite people will be dead. 🙂
I just… don’t understand this crazy thought process that leads them to blame the app store. I’m sure they’re very polished easy to use apps. But they have no reason to exist, except as conceptual art pieces. Like a stature of the Virgin Mary made out of old shoes.
People seem to want it both ways.. The want independent developers to have a platform they can peddle their wares on, giving them opportunity they wouldn’t have had otherwise. BUT, those same people don’t want an ocean to form of what they deem to be crap.
I personally don’t want Google, Apple, Microsoft, or `you` to decide for me what’s crap and what isn’t. Thank but no thanks, I can decide what I like without `your` intervention.
A lot of people make the mistake of thinking if they code it and put it in an app store, customers will come. I don’t see a lot of advertising going on be it little indie developers or companies that actually have some kind of machine behind them. Not even cheap & easy stuff. The work doesn’t stop once the code is written, in fact it’s the opposite. The real work only begins when you have an actual product in hand.
Maybe the problem isn’t the ocean of crap but the type of apps the complainers are writing… You know, solving problems that don’t exist, `convenience` apps that aren’t actually that convenient, tools or some sort that offer really nothing over other tools, and so on… I think many developers are miscalculating everything important and that contributes to their lack of success.
A lot of people, independent and otherwise, have the app store game figured out and are raking in cash from it. The store is working fine, people are finding software and paying for it. Instead of crying foul or conspiracy, perhaps people should consider that what they’re making just isn’t what people are looking for, or that they’re not doing enough to promote their software, or that the problem generally has something to do with them rather than someone/something else.
Consumer is the Stake Holder truly going ‘into the dark’ if confidence is not regained. Starting to search at attic for my old typewriter and non-wifi camera.