4 ms·

The HTML5 vs. iPhone payment argument is nonsense

20 points by mbrubeck 17y ago

mseebach 17y ago
Heh. It feels like the same sentiment there was around shareware back in the day. Suddenly, there was this idea that if you could hack three buttons together in Delphi, you not only could, but you ware entitled to make money from your software. I've lost count of how much shareware I've used, where I had the distinct feeling that more effort went into "protecting" the copy against piracy then making the software itself.
- bad_user 17y ago
  Shareware is also alive today in the App Store ... many apps have a limited free version. Because of the similarity I also think Apple's App Store isn't sustainable, because there will be so much crap that users will only go for established brands (it's already happening, even with Apple's strict control ... which serves more to ban competitors of Apple's own offerings).
  - gte910h 17y ago
    The reason many apps start as crap is due to the arbitrary nature of the "standards" set by apple. They literally reject your app for any reason (or no reason), even after "suggesting" several changes that cost quite a bit of money. It is professional malpractice to council your clients to build anything other than the bare minimum before publishing (if you're a third party app developer as I am). So basically, Apple gets crap apps because good apps are too risky to build as Apple can reject it ex post facto. There isn't a way to even say, pay them 20k dollars to do a preapproval study. So no one is willing to drop the big bucks required to put out complex full featured apps until the app has been in the store and selling for awhile. Apple's approval process makes only iterative development worthwhile, and biases what people SHOULD be doing towards low cost work.
drewcrawford 17y ago
iPhone developer here. > The first and most obvious way is just getting paid by a client for creating the app. Now that’s a payment model I can believe in... At least 75% of the contract offers on my desk are people who want to sell an app direct to consumer (not an online ordering system or advertising; a game or a utility or calculator, etc.) So developers (albeit 1 step removed) are still very subject to the app store market pressures. If clients can't make money then there will be no contract work. Unlike other markets where there are other sales channels, in the iPhone world, Apple is the only sales channel. As for the motivations of developers, I think the author's got it wrong, or at least he's got it wrong for me. I might write an app to scratch my own itch, but I wouldn't polish it, document it, pay an artist, or promote it without the nominal income that a niche app provides. I'm not in it for the big million-dollar gambles. But if an app can pull in $5k year-on-year for about a week's worth of actual work, that's a very attractive investment for me. You don't have to be EA to get rich on the app store, you just need to work hard and be patient and consistently churn out high-quality products.
- halostatue 17y ago
  The estimation is wrong, too. 1. Many apps can be written in 2 - 4 weeks time. 2. Many developers aren't paid $125/hour. I wrote an app for a client that's now on the app store. The development time was six weeks part time, and my rate was substantially lower than $125 per hour (in part because I have ownership of the source and the client has a royalty-free perpetual licence). The client was responsible for the graphics work (custom button designs, icons, etc.) and the content. Counting his own time, he probably spent around $5k total. I'm not sure if the app has made its investment back, but I suspect that a large number of the 150,000 apps are $5k-or-less investments and a few of them are $10k-or-more. A rarefied few will be even more expensive.
johnrob 17y ago
I'm not sure I buy the argument of '1.5 billion spent developing iPhone apps' vs '500 million in developer revenue'. Even if every hour of iPhone development only gets 30% payment in the macro sense, then I'd wager it's still wildly more lucrative then the startup world at large. Many startups never earn a cent before dying.

20 points by mbrubeck 17y ago

Heh. It feels like the same sentiment there was around shareware back in the day. Suddenly, there was this idea that if you could hack three buttons together in Delphi, you not only could, but you ware entitled to make money from your software. I've lost count of how much shareware I've used, where I had the distinct feeling that more effort went into "protecting" the copy against piracy then making the software itself.

bad_user 17y ago
Shareware is also alive today in the App Store ... many apps have a limited free version. Because of the similarity I also think Apple's App Store isn't sustainable, because there will be so much crap that users will only go for established brands (it's already happening, even with Apple's strict control ... which serves more to ban competitors of Apple's own offerings).
- gte910h 17y ago
  The reason many apps start as crap is due to the arbitrary nature of the "standards" set by apple. They literally reject your app for any reason (or no reason), even after "suggesting" several changes that cost quite a bit of money. It is professional malpractice to council your clients to build anything other than the bare minimum before publishing (if you're a third party app developer as I am). So basically, Apple gets crap apps because good apps are too risky to build as Apple can reject it ex post facto. There isn't a way to even say, pay them 20k dollars to do a preapproval study. So no one is willing to drop the big bucks required to put out complex full featured apps until the app has been in the store and selling for awhile. Apple's approval process makes only iterative development worthwhile, and biases what people SHOULD be doing towards low cost work.

drewcrawford 17y ago

iPhone developer here. > The first and most obvious way is just getting paid by a client for creating the app. Now that’s a payment model I can believe in... At least 75% of the contract offers on my desk are people who want to sell an app direct to consumer (not an online ordering system or advertising; a game or a utility or calculator, etc.) So developers (albeit 1 step removed) are still very subject to the app store market pressures. If clients can't make money then there will be no contract work. Unlike other markets where there are other sales channels, in the iPhone world, Apple is the only sales channel. As for the motivations of developers, I think the author's got it wrong, or at least he's got it wrong for me. I might write an app to scratch my own itch, but I wouldn't polish it, document it, pay an artist, or promote it without the nominal income that a niche app provides. I'm not in it for the big million-dollar gambles. But if an app can pull in $5k year-on-year for about a week's worth of actual work, that's a very attractive investment for me. You don't have to be EA to get rich on the app store, you just need to work hard and be patient and consistently churn out high-quality products.

halostatue 17y ago
The estimation is wrong, too. 1. Many apps can be written in 2 - 4 weeks time. 2. Many developers aren't paid $125/hour. I wrote an app for a client that's now on the app store. The development time was six weeks part time, and my rate was substantially lower than $125 per hour (in part because I have ownership of the source and the client has a royalty-free perpetual licence). The client was responsible for the graphics work (custom button designs, icons, etc.) and the content. Counting his own time, he probably spent around $5k total. I'm not sure if the app has made its investment back, but I suspect that a large number of the 150,000 apps are $5k-or-less investments and a few of them are $10k-or-more. A rarefied few will be even more expensive.

johnrob 17y ago

I'm not sure I buy the argument of '1.5 billion spent developing iPhone apps' vs '500 million in developer revenue'. Even if every hour of iPhone development only gets 30% payment in the macro sense, then I'd wager it's still wildly more lucrative then the startup world at large. Many startups never earn a cent before dying.