6 ms·

IPhone =/= Debian app

154 points by telemachos 16y ago

mortenjorck 16y ago
Yes, just like the dot com boom, this growth is unsustainable. But again, just like the dot com boom, once the market has matured to blow away the chaff, what remains will have proven pretty game-changing.
- mikecane 16y ago
  I keep wondering why Jobs keeps pushing HTML5. He too must realize the unsustainability of it all. A collapse has to happen -- and then how many "real" apps will remain for sale? And how many devs will migrate to the web where they don't have to have the approval of Apple or Google or any other hardware maker in order to create and publicize/sell something?
  - cookiecaper 16y ago
    I don't see what this has to do with HTML5. Could you elaborate?
    - michaelneale 16y ago
      I think he means that HTML5 is a hedge against the coming collapse in the number and quality of native iOS apps from 3rd parties.
      - borism 16y ago
        "Number and quality" What are you talking about? There can possibly be few millions more of useless apps?
  - derefr 16y ago
    Jobs never liked the idea of Apps in the first place (probably because he knew it was unsustainable); he was fully prepared to go with a pure-webapp strategy until developers revolted. He's probably trying to get back out of that market as quickly as possible.
    - jrockway 16y ago
      Unsustainable, but 30% of every sale probably makes it worthwhile.
      - ptomato 16y ago
        Doubtful. That's not really making Apple any (significant) profit when you look at their overhead for that.
    - carussell 16y ago
      Is that the case? I thought it was more of an issue of the SDK and the APIs not being ready at the time that they wanted to launch. I can't imagine that Jobs hates the notion of apps. On the other hand, I don't understand why anyone involved with the Mac platform, where uniform interfaces are a big deal and microcriticism of widgets is so common, would ever champion the Web as a platform.
- handelaar 16y ago
  The step in that process you left out was "years-long massive earthquake-level crash leading to complete economic collapse of the micro-economy under discussion", the kind where most of the casualties are all the smart non-founders in the industry. Been there, done that. The primary reason I'm involved in this community is that I was in London before the first crash. Us internet people had been there for a decade or more, but all the investment money was going to some twat in a suit who had no cocking idea what was going on, or why. Outside the little Nirvana that pg and company (among others) have created, the same rules apply. [All of the following may be completely Euro-specific.] Talentless schmucks get all the money available because they're the {sons|nephews|mistresses|cabana boys} of other people with money, and then try to hire us to fill in the yawning chasms (they call them 'gaps') in their plans. The only winning move is not to play. Do your own thing, but ferchrissakes don't start working for some family-moneyed fool because "appz R h0tt and we're all gonna get rich". If you're gonna take a risk, at least ensure that the risk beneficiary is you. The one major thing I've noticed in this little playground of ours is this: it's not that you are going to have trouble raising money - it's that you're going to have trouble raising money because you're going to get lost in the deafening noise of trustafarian morons with connections, and they're going to win that funding battle. That is why we need to play out of revenues and/or do our thing on ramen money: it's because the other method is massively stacked against us, and massively stacked in favour of idiots.
  - dman 16y ago
    Very well put.
  - mkramlich 16y ago
    You speak much truth. And yet, you should not give in to hate. That way leads to the Dark Side. -- posting for my friend Yoda who cannot reach the keyboard
einarvollset 16y ago
Ehum.. What? Yeah there were a lot of shit webpages back in the day, but there was also what became came ebay, facebook, google, etc, etc. I don't see a lot of debian apps doing better than facebook..
- jonursenbach 16y ago
  You completely missed the point of the article.
  - einarvollset 16y ago
    Maybe I did, but you still missed mine and added zero additional value to the conversation. So let me spoonfeed you my point: The OP claims that 99.99% of all websites back in the day were shit, just like 99.99% of all iphone apps today are shit. He then makes a remark that suggests that Debian is a superior platform because the number of debian apps is small/manageable. Now, I pointed out that out of the vast majority of shit of the early web came a bunch of valuable companies, and I conjecture that it was in part due to vast number of websites were built that it became _more_ likely that the web as a platform would be successful and that some websites would become hugely valuable. From that I consider it a risky bet to say that the vast number of iPhone apps in itself makes the platform inferior. I then finished off by pointing out that no debian _apps_ that I was aware of had in any way become as successful as a bunch of websites I could care to mention. Maybe it was that which confused you - they are separate but related points.
    - zaphar 16y ago
      I don't think he missed your point at all. Would you say that GCC as one of the debian apps others here have mentioned was less successful? It arguably helps power Facebook, Ebay, Google, Amazon,... and any number of other of those sites you mentioned. Or perhaps Python? is it less successful? Or perhaps you defined successful in terms of revenue only? In which case that's a very narrowly defined term and the case could be made that such a narrowly defined definition of success adds "zero additional value" to the conversation.
mralbie 16y ago
These worthless apps are also a cost to Apple. It is getting harder and harder to find quality apps on the App Store. The Store itself is now (a) the 'Featured' page, (b) the 'Top Ten' lists, and (c) Apple's 'Collections'. The more difficult it is to find quality apps the more difficult it will be for the ecosystem as a whole to improve. Are there other examples of online stores with vast selections which genuinely help users find quality products? Netflix is the only one I can think of. (And don't get me started on Apple's 'Genius Recommendations'.)
- talklittle 16y ago
  It is a cost to Apple, but it is a problem they are actively addressing in R&D. I'm basing this statement largely on discussion from yesterday's HN post (the guy claiming to be "snubbed" on potential Apple business deal): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1440303 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1440303
- rakslice 16y ago
  Why does everyone discount the idea of people finding apps through the search box? Are the users assumed to be unimaginative and unresourceful? Is the long tail too flat for anyone to make a living off of?
  - Splines 16y ago
    Maybe it's just me, but the process I use to determine what software I choose is not done in the store. Research via reading reviews and recommendations from others is usually the way I go about it. The problem I have in the App Store (wrt. finding apps that are "free floating") is that I don't know what's out there, and it's difficult to predict what will show up when I type in a specific query. I'm a gamer, so let's look at games. Typically, for my 360 and PC, I'm well aware of new games that are on the horizon. Big name publishers and even the smaller ones typically receive publicity well in advance of release, and on release day/week there is usually something I can find on metacritic that someone else has written about that game. OTOH, in the App Store, I have very little idea on the quality of gameplay for new games released that day. Finding reviews outside of the App Store for games developed by one-man-shops is incredibly difficult. Take the game "Red Conquest" as an example. I heard about it in an online web forum. I never saw it in any App Store category list, and a search for the term "RTS" is bound to contain so much fluff that I still wouldn't have found it. It's a game that I think exemplifies the lost-in-the-shuffle problem in the App Store. (FWIW, I love this game. It's brutally hard, but you can tone down the difficulty to make it manageable. Small things, like the fact that it boots in less than 5 seconds, or that it has bluetooth/wifi multiplayer, make a big difference). To summarize, it's difficult to search using the search box because you don't know what you're looking for.
codeflo 16y ago
That's true, iPhone apps aren't like Debian packages at all. iPhone apps are self-contained, sandboxed, can only access data that I allow them to, and if I delete them, every trace of them is gone. A Debian package on the other hand first of all has to pull 57 other packages in order to even work, each of which splatters hundreds of files of all kinds all over my filesystem, and if I uninstall a package, I can rest assured that at least two dozen configuration files remain abandoned somewhere in /etc. I'm not sure how someone could confuse the two.
- telemachos 16y ago
  FUD: # remove package, its dependents _and_ purge config files aptitude purge <package-name> # purge config files from items that were removed but not purged aptitude purge ~c And, to play Devil's advocate the other way around, because Debian's tools are not sandboxed, they can inter-operate sanely. You can, you know, share things, print them, move them around. It's as if - shocking - you own your own data. Imagine that. I work pretty regularly with both Debian and OSX. They both have areas where they excel. I think you're being pretty simplistic.
  - codeflo 16y ago
    Well, I want to make a few things clear here. First of all, I was being a bit snarky obviously. I didn't know about "aptitude purge", but it's a bit ironic that when googling for that, the first result is a forum post about someone with orphaned config files that aptitude purge wouldn't remove... sounds reliable. I think it's time for desktop OS makers (and that includes Apple, because OS X isn't any different from Linux or Windows in this regard at all) rethink the way software is installed and organized. In my opinion, the way you can install and try applications without consequences on iOS devices has a lot going for it. Users actually install stuff on their iPads, which they don't on their Windows computers because they're scared of unintended consequences.
    - telemachos 16y ago
      Edited to remove unhelpful rage It sounds like you don't know Debian very well. That's fine. No reason you should. I know Debian reasonably well. I can tell you that in four years of using aptitude, I have found a very small number of edge cases where it does not work sanely, efficiently and helpfully. (To clarify it's really APT + aptitude. aptitude is one possible tool to use APT.) It's not perfect; no software is. But it's quite remarkable. I believe it to be a far better packaging system than anything available for OSX, including Homebrew - which I like a lot and which gets better all the time. To respond to your follow-up, I deeply disagree about iOS representing a good future for software. The kernel already implements one filesystem - and that's a big job. Why would we want every application to have to reinvent that wheel? Worse yet, how we will we allow and help users to share data between all our little sandboxes if we go that route? I think the iOS sandboxing is a disaster and huge step backwards for software. A final question: in your original post you say if you remove an iPhone app, no trace of it is left. How would you know? My point being that the system is so locked down, there's really no basis for us to know that. For all we know, iApps leave the drive cluttered with their configuration files and preferences. Maybe you develop for Apple and can show me I'm wrong (or someone else can), but as a user there's no real way for me to know this, is there?
mclin 16y ago
What about the barrier to entry: $100 + a Mac + an iPhone. As compared to a computer, which pretty much everyone had by 1998. Also iPhone programming is way harder than HTML. I had a mandatory high school class that taught HTML. Maybe I'm underestimating how many people are jumping on this, but my intuition is it can't be as many as were jumping on web. Twitter/social media marketing however... :P
- dman 16y ago
  Please also include - a) ~30 dollars to buy an objective c book b) N hours to learn a new language when youre perfectly productive in another language.
  - faboo 16y ago
    This attitude is perplexing to me. a) If you have internet access, why would you need to buy a book? b) Unless you're a strict Prolog or ML enthusiast, Objective C is similar enough to what you already know that you could probably be productive inside a weekend or two. Also, learning a new language or library that's different enough from what you know that it takes more than a few hours to be comfortable (generally) makes you a better programmer. Sorry, I do realize you were mostly trying to pile onto the IPhone cost tally, but I'm always surprised to see other programmers imply that learning new things is inherently hard and undesirable.
    - dman 16y ago
      a) Because I stare at a computer screen ~10 hours a day at work. When I am reading in the evening I prefer to have a book, which I can underline and scribble in. b) Every programmer over time develops tiny helpful apps that make life bearable, having to rewrite all those apps / utilities in a fresh new language is a burden that I would like to avoid. c) Admittedly I am a bit more aggrieved than most people because my languages of choice are lisp, scheme and python.
      - docgnome 16y ago
bcl 16y ago
I don't totally disagree. But I don't agree either. Maybe that's because I'm making enough off my ad supported app to pay my monthly iPhone bill. Not much more than that, but enough. http://brianlane.com/software/nascar-iphone/ http://brianlane.com/software/nascar-iphone/ and it isn't even pretty.
Hoff 16y ago
Whether you agree with a market or a business, it's your money and your choice and your investments. Whether you believe the market is the next great thing or unsustainable, if it's trending up, that's money to be made. Whether you think a widget is pretty or pretty ugly, it's money. Whether you think the CEO is a genius or an idiot, if a company is going up, it's money. (And if you're positioned for and inclined for a put or with a CDS, a market or a business that's headed down can be money, too.) Sure, the folks might eventually realize they're getting minimum wage, and that those fancy tulip bulks are all worthless. The key is stepping off before the bubble bursts. Or you might wake up one morning, and realize that the business cycle has shifted, and iOS is everywhere. Welcome to capitalism. Place your investments.
thought_alarm 16y ago
As Apple's products get more and more popular with developers and users, the anti-Apple criticism get more and more bizarre and inane.
- dman 16y ago
  Kind of like what happened to Microsoft.
- telemachos 16y ago
  I'm not sure what you think is inane - I wouldn't mind hearing. And I read the post as anti-Appstore more than anti-Apple. (I think it's an important distinction in context.) The poster is responding to this in the thread above him: How many useful applications are in Debian's repositories? <snip> 10 thousand? 20 thousand? How long has Debian been around? 17 years? Now compare this to iPhone: 3 years and ~140,000 applications. The post isn't criticizing Apple so much as saying to that argument, "You're not counting parallel things here. The Appstore is filled with trivially small apps - apps that amount to no more than a simple webpage. That inflates those numbers." What is it you find inane there?
  - thought_alarm 16y ago
    Funny you should mention the original post, because he makes a very good yet obvious point: > If 'Free Software' is to succeed as 'Free software' it needs to produce superior product and out compete It was wrong of him to trot out total app count, because it's a meaningless number, but there's no question that the iPhone has attracted a huge amount of developer interest. This has resulted in a large library of very well-designed and compelling software across all categories, and has allowed independent developers to reach more users than they ever could have dreamed. Much of this developer traction can be attributed to Apple's management of the App Store, but this kind of exciting software development was happening before the App Store, when developers did it just for fun and had to reverse-engineer the APIs. If you weren't there in 2007, you have no idea how exciting it was. It says a lot about what can happen when you deliver a compelling piece of hardware running a sophisticated platform. Of course, the reply addressed none of it, and succeeds only in demonstrating a complete lack of understanding about consumer software development in 2010.
frankus 16y ago
I would point out that there is as much difference between your basic piece of ShovelWare and a real iPhone app as there is between a "Home Page" and a Web app. In both cases having a deep understanding of the platform and the skills to build non-trivial stuff on top if it will be valuable after gold rush phase has passed.
korch 16y ago
While I agree with this point completely, I also think bitching about Apple's iPhone and Ipad "apps" is a moot point. 5 years from now it's all going to be html5, and all of these apps will run on any mobile device web browser. Apple now has such a head start on their app platform that pretty much the only reasonable strategy their competitors can do is collude and standardize on html5 for all apps. Then Apple has a very big problem—they will be in direct opposition to Google and the rest of the organic, growing web. Never, ever bet against the web, nor face the web upstream. If you discount 3d games, image manipulation programs, and some other specialized software that really can't "just be a web page", then what is even left for "apps" to do that the web can't? Apps should have been the web the entire time.
- aboodman 16y ago
  Ah, 3d games and image manipulation. The last resort of all native arguments. This is going to change pretty rapidly with native client I think.
  - yonilevy 16y ago
    Native client, as the name implies, runs native code.
  - pyre 16y ago
    That went over my head. By 'native client,' are you making a reference to the fact that the push to make all of our apps run on a server is a swing of the pendulum back to the 'mainframe' days and that some day people will be expounding the virtues of writing software to run on the client as the 'new thing?' Or is 'native client' a reference to some new browser technology that I'm unaware of (which is possible)?
    - Raphael 16y ago
      new tech: http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/ http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
rakslice 16y ago
What's more volatile than a discussion with a group of enthusiasts with chips on their shoulders made of pure sodium? A discussion that pits two such groups against each other. When it comes to binary compatibility, Debian's answer is basically the same as the App Store's: Use only our official packages and you won't have to worry about compatibility. With all the flamey comparisons about the contents of the iPhone App Store and Official Debian Repositories, who develops for each, and what their motivations are, what's getting lost is that in each case what connects the developers with officialdom is some kind of approval process. By investigating the App Store's approval process, the Debian project can get a lot of ideas about what they might want to add to their own approval process (and what they might want to remove from it).
ddelony 16y ago
I think that the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad platform has taken off because the mobile Web is just painful to use right now in those tiny browsers. Apple's fulfilling a niche that AOL did in the '90s. Where AOL provided training wheels for the Internet, Apple does the same thing for mobile computing. Unfortunately, AOL didn't figure out that users would eventually outgrow the training wheels and discover the open Internet. I guess the same thing will happen with the mobile Web once browsers improve and people start to learn to design mobile Web sites for mobile devices. I think Apple realizes this, since they're putting effort into HTML 5.

154 points by telemachos 16y ago

Yes, just like the dot com boom, this growth is unsustainable. But again, just like the dot com boom, once the market has matured to blow away the chaff, what remains will have proven pretty game-changing.

mikecane 16y ago
I keep wondering why Jobs keeps pushing HTML5. He too must realize the unsustainability of it all. A collapse has to happen -- and then how many "real" apps will remain for sale? And how many devs will migrate to the web where they don't have to have the approval of Apple or Google or any other hardware maker in order to create and publicize/sell something?
- cookiecaper 16y ago
  I don't see what this has to do with HTML5. Could you elaborate?
  - michaelneale 16y ago
    I think he means that HTML5 is a hedge against the coming collapse in the number and quality of native iOS apps from 3rd parties.
    - borism 16y ago
      "Number and quality" What are you talking about? There can possibly be few millions more of useless apps?
- derefr 16y ago
  Jobs never liked the idea of Apps in the first place (probably because he knew it was unsustainable); he was fully prepared to go with a pure-webapp strategy until developers revolted. He's probably trying to get back out of that market as quickly as possible.
  - jrockway 16y ago
    Unsustainable, but 30% of every sale probably makes it worthwhile.
    - ptomato 16y ago
      Doubtful. That's not really making Apple any (significant) profit when you look at their overhead for that.
  - carussell 16y ago
    Is that the case? I thought it was more of an issue of the SDK and the APIs not being ready at the time that they wanted to launch. I can't imagine that Jobs hates the notion of apps. On the other hand, I don't understand why anyone involved with the Mac platform, where uniform interfaces are a big deal and microcriticism of widgets is so common, would ever champion the Web as a platform.
handelaar 16y ago
The step in that process you left out was "years-long massive earthquake-level crash leading to complete economic collapse of the micro-economy under discussion", the kind where most of the casualties are all the smart non-founders in the industry. Been there, done that. The primary reason I'm involved in this community is that I was in London before the first crash. Us internet people had been there for a decade or more, but all the investment money was going to some twat in a suit who had no cocking idea what was going on, or why. Outside the little Nirvana that pg and company (among others) have created, the same rules apply. [All of the following may be completely Euro-specific.] Talentless schmucks get all the money available because they're the {sons|nephews|mistresses|cabana boys} of other people with money, and then try to hire us to fill in the yawning chasms (they call them 'gaps') in their plans. The only winning move is not to play. Do your own thing, but ferchrissakes don't start working for some family-moneyed fool because "appz R h0tt and we're all gonna get rich". If you're gonna take a risk, at least ensure that the risk beneficiary is you. The one major thing I've noticed in this little playground of ours is this: it's not that you are going to have trouble raising money - it's that you're going to have trouble raising money because you're going to get lost in the deafening noise of trustafarian morons with connections, and they're going to win that funding battle. That is why we need to play out of revenues and/or do our thing on ramen money: it's because the other method is massively stacked against us, and massively stacked in favour of idiots.
- dman 16y ago
  Very well put.
- mkramlich 16y ago
  You speak much truth. And yet, you should not give in to hate. That way leads to the Dark Side. -- posting for my friend Yoda who cannot reach the keyboard

einarvollset 16y ago

Ehum.. What? Yeah there were a lot of shit webpages back in the day, but there was also what became came ebay, facebook, google, etc, etc. I don't see a lot of debian apps doing better than facebook..

jonursenbach 16y ago
You completely missed the point of the article.
- einarvollset 16y ago
  Maybe I did, but you still missed mine and added zero additional value to the conversation. So let me spoonfeed you my point: The OP claims that 99.99% of all websites back in the day were shit, just like 99.99% of all iphone apps today are shit. He then makes a remark that suggests that Debian is a superior platform because the number of debian apps is small/manageable. Now, I pointed out that out of the vast majority of shit of the early web came a bunch of valuable companies, and I conjecture that it was in part due to vast number of websites were built that it became _more_ likely that the web as a platform would be successful and that some websites would become hugely valuable. From that I consider it a risky bet to say that the vast number of iPhone apps in itself makes the platform inferior. I then finished off by pointing out that no debian _apps_ that I was aware of had in any way become as successful as a bunch of websites I could care to mention. Maybe it was that which confused you - they are separate but related points.
  - zaphar 16y ago
    I don't think he missed your point at all. Would you say that GCC as one of the debian apps others here have mentioned was less successful? It arguably helps power Facebook, Ebay, Google, Amazon,... and any number of other of those sites you mentioned. Or perhaps Python? is it less successful? Or perhaps you defined successful in terms of revenue only? In which case that's a very narrowly defined term and the case could be made that such a narrowly defined definition of success adds "zero additional value" to the conversation.

mralbie 16y ago

These worthless apps are also a cost to Apple. It is getting harder and harder to find quality apps on the App Store. The Store itself is now (a) the 'Featured' page, (b) the 'Top Ten' lists, and (c) Apple's 'Collections'. The more difficult it is to find quality apps the more difficult it will be for the ecosystem as a whole to improve. Are there other examples of online stores with vast selections which genuinely help users find quality products? Netflix is the only one I can think of. (And don't get me started on Apple's 'Genius Recommendations'.)

talklittle 16y ago
It is a cost to Apple, but it is a problem they are actively addressing in R&D. I'm basing this statement largely on discussion from yesterday's HN post (the guy claiming to be "snubbed" on potential Apple business deal): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1440303 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1440303
rakslice 16y ago
Why does everyone discount the idea of people finding apps through the search box? Are the users assumed to be unimaginative and unresourceful? Is the long tail too flat for anyone to make a living off of?
- Splines 16y ago
  Maybe it's just me, but the process I use to determine what software I choose is not done in the store. Research via reading reviews and recommendations from others is usually the way I go about it. The problem I have in the App Store (wrt. finding apps that are "free floating") is that I don't know what's out there, and it's difficult to predict what will show up when I type in a specific query. I'm a gamer, so let's look at games. Typically, for my 360 and PC, I'm well aware of new games that are on the horizon. Big name publishers and even the smaller ones typically receive publicity well in advance of release, and on release day/week there is usually something I can find on metacritic that someone else has written about that game. OTOH, in the App Store, I have very little idea on the quality of gameplay for new games released that day. Finding reviews outside of the App Store for games developed by one-man-shops is incredibly difficult. Take the game "Red Conquest" as an example. I heard about it in an online web forum. I never saw it in any App Store category list, and a search for the term "RTS" is bound to contain so much fluff that I still wouldn't have found it. It's a game that I think exemplifies the lost-in-the-shuffle problem in the App Store. (FWIW, I love this game. It's brutally hard, but you can tone down the difficulty to make it manageable. Small things, like the fact that it boots in less than 5 seconds, or that it has bluetooth/wifi multiplayer, make a big difference). To summarize, it's difficult to search using the search box because you don't know what you're looking for.

codeflo 16y ago

That's true, iPhone apps aren't like Debian packages at all. iPhone apps are self-contained, sandboxed, can only access data that I allow them to, and if I delete them, every trace of them is gone. A Debian package on the other hand first of all has to pull 57 other packages in order to even work, each of which splatters hundreds of files of all kinds all over my filesystem, and if I uninstall a package, I can rest assured that at least two dozen configuration files remain abandoned somewhere in /etc. I'm not sure how someone could confuse the two.

telemachos 16y ago
FUD: # remove package, its dependents _and_ purge config files aptitude purge <package-name> # purge config files from items that were removed but not purged aptitude purge ~c And, to play Devil's advocate the other way around, because Debian's tools are not sandboxed, they can inter-operate sanely. You can, you know, share things, print them, move them around. It's as if - shocking - you own your own data. Imagine that. I work pretty regularly with both Debian and OSX. They both have areas where they excel. I think you're being pretty simplistic.
- codeflo 16y ago
  Well, I want to make a few things clear here. First of all, I was being a bit snarky obviously. I didn't know about "aptitude purge", but it's a bit ironic that when googling for that, the first result is a forum post about someone with orphaned config files that aptitude purge wouldn't remove... sounds reliable. I think it's time for desktop OS makers (and that includes Apple, because OS X isn't any different from Linux or Windows in this regard at all) rethink the way software is installed and organized. In my opinion, the way you can install and try applications without consequences on iOS devices has a lot going for it. Users actually install stuff on their iPads, which they don't on their Windows computers because they're scared of unintended consequences.
  - telemachos 16y ago
    Edited to remove unhelpful rage It sounds like you don't know Debian very well. That's fine. No reason you should. I know Debian reasonably well. I can tell you that in four years of using aptitude, I have found a very small number of edge cases where it does not work sanely, efficiently and helpfully. (To clarify it's really APT + aptitude. aptitude is one possible tool to use APT.) It's not perfect; no software is. But it's quite remarkable. I believe it to be a far better packaging system than anything available for OSX, including Homebrew - which I like a lot and which gets better all the time. To respond to your follow-up, I deeply disagree about iOS representing a good future for software. The kernel already implements one filesystem - and that's a big job. Why would we want every application to have to reinvent that wheel? Worse yet, how we will we allow and help users to share data between all our little sandboxes if we go that route? I think the iOS sandboxing is a disaster and huge step backwards for software. A final question: in your original post you say if you remove an iPhone app, no trace of it is left. How would you know? My point being that the system is so locked down, there's really no basis for us to know that. For all we know, iApps leave the drive cluttered with their configuration files and preferences. Maybe you develop for Apple and can show me I'm wrong (or someone else can), but as a user there's no real way for me to know this, is there?

mclin 16y ago

What about the barrier to entry: $100 + a Mac + an iPhone. As compared to a computer, which pretty much everyone had by 1998. Also iPhone programming is way harder than HTML. I had a mandatory high school class that taught HTML. Maybe I'm underestimating how many people are jumping on this, but my intuition is it can't be as many as were jumping on web. Twitter/social media marketing however... :P

dman 16y ago
Please also include - a) ~30 dollars to buy an objective c book b) N hours to learn a new language when youre perfectly productive in another language.
- faboo 16y ago
  This attitude is perplexing to me. a) If you have internet access, why would you need to buy a book? b) Unless you're a strict Prolog or ML enthusiast, Objective C is similar enough to what you already know that you could probably be productive inside a weekend or two. Also, learning a new language or library that's different enough from what you know that it takes more than a few hours to be comfortable (generally) makes you a better programmer. Sorry, I do realize you were mostly trying to pile onto the IPhone cost tally, but I'm always surprised to see other programmers imply that learning new things is inherently hard and undesirable.
  - dman 16y ago
    a) Because I stare at a computer screen ~10 hours a day at work. When I am reading in the evening I prefer to have a book, which I can underline and scribble in. b) Every programmer over time develops tiny helpful apps that make life bearable, having to rewrite all those apps / utilities in a fresh new language is a burden that I would like to avoid. c) Admittedly I am a bit more aggrieved than most people because my languages of choice are lisp, scheme and python.
    - docgnome 16y ago

bcl 16y ago

I don't totally disagree. But I don't agree either. Maybe that's because I'm making enough off my ad supported app to pay my monthly iPhone bill. Not much more than that, but enough. http://brianlane.com/software/nascar-iphone/ http://brianlane.com/software/nascar-iphone/ and it isn't even pretty.

Hoff 16y ago

Whether you agree with a market or a business, it's your money and your choice and your investments. Whether you believe the market is the next great thing or unsustainable, if it's trending up, that's money to be made. Whether you think a widget is pretty or pretty ugly, it's money. Whether you think the CEO is a genius or an idiot, if a company is going up, it's money. (And if you're positioned for and inclined for a put or with a CDS, a market or a business that's headed down can be money, too.) Sure, the folks might eventually realize they're getting minimum wage, and that those fancy tulip bulks are all worthless. The key is stepping off before the bubble bursts. Or you might wake up one morning, and realize that the business cycle has shifted, and iOS is everywhere. Welcome to capitalism. Place your investments.

thought_alarm 16y ago

As Apple's products get more and more popular with developers and users, the anti-Apple criticism get more and more bizarre and inane.

dman 16y ago
Kind of like what happened to Microsoft.
telemachos 16y ago
I'm not sure what you think is inane - I wouldn't mind hearing. And I read the post as anti-Appstore more than anti-Apple. (I think it's an important distinction in context.) The poster is responding to this in the thread above him: How many useful applications are in Debian's repositories? <snip> 10 thousand? 20 thousand? How long has Debian been around? 17 years? Now compare this to iPhone: 3 years and ~140,000 applications. The post isn't criticizing Apple so much as saying to that argument, "You're not counting parallel things here. The Appstore is filled with trivially small apps - apps that amount to no more than a simple webpage. That inflates those numbers." What is it you find inane there?
- thought_alarm 16y ago
  Funny you should mention the original post, because he makes a very good yet obvious point: > If 'Free Software' is to succeed as 'Free software' it needs to produce superior product and out compete It was wrong of him to trot out total app count, because it's a meaningless number, but there's no question that the iPhone has attracted a huge amount of developer interest. This has resulted in a large library of very well-designed and compelling software across all categories, and has allowed independent developers to reach more users than they ever could have dreamed. Much of this developer traction can be attributed to Apple's management of the App Store, but this kind of exciting software development was happening before the App Store, when developers did it just for fun and had to reverse-engineer the APIs. If you weren't there in 2007, you have no idea how exciting it was. It says a lot about what can happen when you deliver a compelling piece of hardware running a sophisticated platform. Of course, the reply addressed none of it, and succeeds only in demonstrating a complete lack of understanding about consumer software development in 2010.

frankus 16y ago

I would point out that there is as much difference between your basic piece of ShovelWare and a real iPhone app as there is between a "Home Page" and a Web app. In both cases having a deep understanding of the platform and the skills to build non-trivial stuff on top if it will be valuable after gold rush phase has passed.

korch 16y ago

While I agree with this point completely, I also think bitching about Apple's iPhone and Ipad "apps" is a moot point. 5 years from now it's all going to be html5, and all of these apps will run on any mobile device web browser. Apple now has such a head start on their app platform that pretty much the only reasonable strategy their competitors can do is collude and standardize on html5 for all apps. Then Apple has a very big problem—they will be in direct opposition to Google and the rest of the organic, growing web. Never, ever bet against the web, nor face the web upstream. If you discount 3d games, image manipulation programs, and some other specialized software that really can't "just be a web page", then what is even left for "apps" to do that the web can't? Apps should have been the web the entire time.

aboodman 16y ago
Ah, 3d games and image manipulation. The last resort of all native arguments. This is going to change pretty rapidly with native client I think.
- yonilevy 16y ago
  Native client, as the name implies, runs native code.
- pyre 16y ago
  That went over my head. By 'native client,' are you making a reference to the fact that the push to make all of our apps run on a server is a swing of the pendulum back to the 'mainframe' days and that some day people will be expounding the virtues of writing software to run on the client as the 'new thing?' Or is 'native client' a reference to some new browser technology that I'm unaware of (which is possible)?
  - Raphael 16y ago
    new tech: http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/ http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/
  - deleted 16y ago
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rakslice 16y ago

What's more volatile than a discussion with a group of enthusiasts with chips on their shoulders made of pure sodium? A discussion that pits two such groups against each other. When it comes to binary compatibility, Debian's answer is basically the same as the App Store's: Use only our official packages and you won't have to worry about compatibility. With all the flamey comparisons about the contents of the iPhone App Store and Official Debian Repositories, who develops for each, and what their motivations are, what's getting lost is that in each case what connects the developers with officialdom is some kind of approval process. By investigating the App Store's approval process, the Debian project can get a lot of ideas about what they might want to add to their own approval process (and what they might want to remove from it).

ddelony 16y ago

I think that the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad platform has taken off because the mobile Web is just painful to use right now in those tiny browsers. Apple's fulfilling a niche that AOL did in the '90s. Where AOL provided training wheels for the Internet, Apple does the same thing for mobile computing. Unfortunately, AOL didn't figure out that users would eventually outgrow the training wheels and discover the open Internet. I guess the same thing will happen with the mobile Web once browsers improve and people start to learn to design mobile Web sites for mobile devices. I think Apple realizes this, since they're putting effort into HTML 5.