The Great App Store Debate

Some local news

It has finally happened. The iPhone has arrived in Luxembourg!

I didn’t get up a 3am to queue, but got mine in a leisurely fashion on saturday afternoon, which explains why I went home with a “white” model rather than a more “manly” black one.

Having read all the rants about AT&T’s rubbish network, I thought at least here in Luxembourg, one of the most highly GSM-ed countries in the world, I would avoid those kind of problems.

Like everybody else I had to change providers from LuxGSM, one of the “major” providers to VOX Mobile, a tiny-little network whose main attraction is.. you guessed it.. an exclusive iPhone contract..

I was quite shocked to find that the VOX Mobile network where I live is so weak that I keep losing any type of service altogether when I move around my own house.. hmm.. I guess Apple’s choice of network had more to do with profit sharing than with customer service..

Anyway, Vox Mobile is building not one but three new 3G antennas in my “population 3000″ village on the outskirts of Luxembourg City, so I won’t be able to complain for much longer.. the network closer to the “city” is already very good (HSPDA).

Over the past few weeks, both my iPod Touch and my iPhone have slowly filled up with third-party apps, which got me thinking about why I’m not writing any apps for the iPhone myself..

The Great App Store Debate

I am in fact one of those developers who when the AppStore was announced, weren’t overly impressed with the deal as far as developers are concerned. I had two concerns: viability for large-ish projects (meaning several months development time for a one-man operation) and the fact that Apple is playing sole gatekeeper.

In the end, I had more than enough work on my hands with A Better Finder Rename 8 and decided to “wait and see”.

The current App Store is a long way from what I would have hoped for, both as a consumer and as a developer. There’s good bits, like the no-hassle installation process and the “2-click” buying process. Very, very good.

Fundamentally, I don’t like the idea of an App Store as the sole outlet for downloading software. I’d much rather follow the Mac (or indeed Windows) model: research on the net, download the trial, evaluate for a while, buy if satisfied, get support via email.

Of course, that boat has sailed a long time ago, so now it’s a matter of “is what we have good enough?”.

As a consumer, I find the App Store to be okay. Not brilliant, but it works, even though it is more than a little clunky. Over time no doubt it will get better and better and Apple is going to re-invest some of the their 30% profit share on doing exactly that. The first signs of improvement are already there.

As a consumer too, however, I bemoan the absence of full-blown applications from the App Store. There are lots and lots of gimmicky applications (anybody for a beer? need a flashlight? a shopping list?) that no doubt can be developed with fairly minimal effort (a few weeks? months?) and there are some genuinely quite polished applications, such as MooCow Music’s offerings and BeatMaker, but those really are the exception right now.

My main reason for wanting an iPhone in the first place was to have a synchronized to-do list between my Mac and some type of mobile device. I use OmniFocus on the Mac and they have an iPhone version. It’s okay, but fails to be brilliant and it is mostly let down by very poor performance with large-ish lists. This is steadily improving, however, so I’m hopeful that those problems will eventually get sorted and then I’ll have just what I wanted.

On the humble Palm Pilot of course (some years back), there was a lot of software of some complexity worth buying. Agendus Professional being my favorite one. It’s quite expensive at $39.95 compared to current iPhone offerings, but of course is much more full-featured than anything Apple would allow anybody to develop on their platform.

This is of course one of the reasons why such software does not exist for the iPhone and likely will never exist. Apple won’t have their own software go up against any kind of competition, unless they don’t care about the software. That’s why there are lots of timer and calculator applications in the App Store and no email or calendar applications. Whether or not this is good for consumers (protecting the platform) is a matter of some debate, but it’s the way things are.

Another reason for the absence of “serious” software on the App Store is the fact that the average price point is prohibitively low. A developer cannot possibly spend a year developing a program and then sell it at $1 (of which s/he can keep $.70). A half-way competent developer (aka code monkey) earns somewhere in the region of $50,000/year before tax. That’s 72,000 $1 app sales a year..

That’s why most professional developers (the ones that have a family to feed) at the moment try to release as many tiny little apps as possible. The idea is to invest a minimum of time and get a maximum of low-value sales out as quickly as possible. This is working well, but is giving us a plethora of flashlights, metronomes, guitar tuners, shopping lists, beer & popcorn simulations, etc.

Eventually of course there will be somebody offering such tiny-apps for free (ShopShop!) and nobody in their right mind will pay for such apps unless they can demonstrate real superiority in the text and screenshot sections of the App Store.

In other words, becoming a long-term professional metronome or shopping list developer for the iPhone is not something that’s likely to happen. This is an arena that will be dominated by part-timers looking for a quick buck, and community-minded hobbyists.

Pro developers then, if they want to develop for the iPhone long-term, need to find another niche. Traditionally they do things that people are happy to pay for and that aren’t likely to be taken over by “free” software anytime soon. In other words: larger, less fun, less glamorous projects. Things like TextMate, Transmit, MarsEdit, OmniFocus, or indeed high-powered file renamers

The problem is that the App Store isn’t right for such products. They have to be more expensive than a couple of dollars because they represent a substantial investment in development time and engender much larger support costs. The absence of trial downloads in the App Store makes it very hard for anybody to shell out $30 for a product they have never had the opportunity to test. Apple’s 30/70 split is very generous when it comes to $1 apps, but works out quite high for a $30 item ($9 instead of $.30 for the same “service”) and that means that the break even price needs to be even higher.

And then of course there is what John Gruber calls “the fear“: will the app actually get accepted? Not a huge risk if you’ve spent a few weeks on the project, but a major headache if you’ve committed an entire year and/or quit your day job to write it.

What about the real possibility of Apple pulling the application at a later date and wiping out your revenue stream? Imagine building your entire working life around a product, making a nice living off it (developers buy homes and cars and other stuff too) and then getting “fired” by Apple without having any recourse? Granted, it’s not a likely scenario, but it’s also not something that helps you sleep well at night.

Apple can, if it wants to have full-fledged apps on the App Store, do a lot to make this become a reality: It can follow John Gruber’s ideas on minimizing “the fear” (such as posting guidelines and keeping to them once they are published) or go further down Wiley Shipley’s “Let the market decide” route.

Developers (myself included) would certainly prefer a more open market place and I can’t help thinking that playing gate keeper in the way that Apple currently are, is one of Steve’s less wonderful ideas: like the AppleTV (sigh!), the CD-ROM only/ no hard disk Next Cube and the black and white-only (no color!) 9″ Mac Plus display.

Whether or not developers will take the risk and commit to larger apps will depend a lot on how commercially viable smaller apps really are. Apple isn’t the only power that decides on this. In the end the market (that’s you) decides.

My guess is that if full-fledged apps appear in the near future and prove to be commercially viable, Apple won’t change a thing. If they don’t and if (and this is a big “if”) Apple decides that the platform needs such apps, we will see (yet) another market prompted U-turn.. this needn’t cost Apple much. The majority of users would still buy from the App Store even if there was an alternative way of downloading and paying for software for the iPhone. At the end of the day, it’s all about control. Apple want to keep it 100% on their most lucrative platform (ipod/ iphone) and developers don’t want to be 100% dependent on Apple’s whims.. the spade of recent well publicized App Store rejections has of course done nothing to dispel such fears.

As for publicspace.net.. right now I have other things to get on with. Developing for the iPhone sounds like fun, but there are a lot of “if”s and I don’t really want to develop yet another flashlight app..

MacBreakZ, my personal ergonomic assistant, would be the obvious candidate for porting. At its core, it’s a fairly simple application and much of the work is invested in the illustrations and stretching instructions which could be ported pretty much as-is. The complicated stuff, the activity monitor that adjust the break times in accordance with your activity level (how much you type & mouse) can’t be ported at all, since the activity will be on your computer and not on your iPod. A simple timer would need to be enough, but it would allow people to carry their ergonomic assistant with them and use it at work next to their PC or Mac rather than on it. I would have liked having such a solution back when I was a part-timer and wasn’t allowed to install anything on my work machine..

Even here, however, the lack of scheduled execution would make the application impossible to implement. As far as I understand it having written not a line of iPhone code, it isn’t currently possible to tell the iPhone (or iPod Touch) to bring up a screen in 30 minutes unless you remain in the same application. That’s a shame.

For now then, I’ll take the same option as many fellow Mac developers: I’ll shun the iPhone in favor of a free-market, run-your-own show alternative.. no, I’m not talking about Android.. I’m talking about the Mac.