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My take on this is that there are two factors contributing to this, and they neatly fall upon the boundaries of the two major app ecosystems. I think these issu

by rusk 9y ago

My take on this is that there are two factors contributing to this, and they neatly fall upon the boundaries of the two major app ecosystems. I think these issues are fixable, and I think big inroads have been made in the second. Firstly, the Apple ecosystem, or the iOS ecosystem really - putting aside the Mac Appstore for now - is fraught with overhead and bureaucracy. Bootstrapping as a developer is relatively expensive given you need to have a modern mac of some sort and you have to pay a subscription which I think cuts off some of the hobbyists. Then once you're rolling, the amount of red tape involved in testing, releasing, updating etc really is shocking. I'm involved in a project where we support an App for both Android and iOS and really, 90% of the work on the Apple end is managing all this bureaucracy. This is massively expensive, and when asked for recommendations on another project I said "develop for Android first and then hire an agency to port it to iOS". The amount of messing involved really makes this a specialist competency like Solicitors' conveyancing or something and it really doesn't make sense having your innovation team waste their effort on it. Secondly then is the lack of quality control in the Android ecosystem. Aside from a few established titles, the Play-store really is a crap-shoot in terms of whether you'll get a good app in a specialist area or somebody just chancing their arm. Like I say this has come along a good bit, but in my Android devices I often just skip on Apps entirely because I really can't be sure whether I'm installing something dodgy or not. I do appreciate the irony that each ecosystem's strengths derive from the what I pose as its weaknesses i.e. bureaucracy => better quality app store; open submission process => lack of quality control. As both a producer and a consumer however, I am just highlighting what I see as the key issues that are limiting growth. It must be said I see ongoing improvements in the second area though, but increasing impediments in the first.

ryanwaggoner 9y ago
Then once you're rolling, the amount of red tape involved in testing, releasing, updating etc really is shocking. I've been doing iOS dev for seven years, and have launched dozens of apps for organizations large and small, many of which had Android versions too. I have no idea what you're talking about here. Yes, you have to submit updates for approval, but it's quick and easy, and I can count on one hand the number of rejections I've ever gotten, all of which were easily fixed. 95% of my updates are approved in 1-2 days. On the testing side, TestFlight and other tools make testing pretty quick and easy. So what is the "bureaucracy" you're talking about? The biggest issues with iOS are the 30% cut Apple takes, and discoverability on the store. The dev experience is actually pretty good, and the user experience is much better than Android. Apple's balance here is FAR superior to Android's.
- rusk 9y ago
  Well, like you say, you've been doing iOS dev for seven years, which kind of puts you into what I'd describe as the "Specialist" category. I wouldn't go trying to develop an iOS application without somebody of your calibre on board - but then you're either an expensive developer with cross-disciplinary skills or somebody we have "on retainer" to deal with this kind of stuff. Specifically what I recommended my colleague hire once she has her prototyping done, purely to deal with the machinations of the Apple ecosystem. Then just take it inhouse for support and maintenance. It's interesting you mention test-flight specifically as this is something we've had a huge amount of trouble transitioning to. For an Apple specialist this is probably a no-brainer but for a product development org this is yet another headache where we used to just be able to issue our own development testing certificates.
  - ryanwaggoner 9y ago
    Maybe you're right and I don't realize how complex it is, but I'm skeptical. Android seems worse in many ways, and I had no trouble starting iOS dev back in 2010. And it's gotten faster and easier since then, so I don't think it's just my amazing skills (though I'd like to take more credit). What specifically is so onerous? Are you sure these aren't just organizational issues on your end?
    - rusk 9y ago
      Yes it is largely organisational in that I typically work in specialist technical fields where our manpower is directed elsewhere than dealing with specific platform issues. Point is though, that where you're talking about growth these are precisely the areas that native is losing out.
  - charlesdm 9y ago
    It's specialised, but nothing ground breaking. The major issue that I had when starting 6 years ago was having issues with code signing, but those have largely been fixed in the latest versions of Xcode. I never had any of the issues you described. Getting an app in the App Store isn't much harder than integrating with a third party API. Frankly, I don't see how they could make it much simpler. You make a build, upload it, it gets reviewed and you push it to the store. Adhering to the rules of the ecosystem is the price you pay for getting access to >100 million accounts that can drop pretty much any amount on your software with the touch of a button. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me. I've managed to make plenty of money through the App Store.
ethbro 9y ago
The biggest thing Android's Play Store is terrible at (and I've heard the same charges leveled at the Apple's app store) is discovery. In Android, here's my use case: (1) Identify a need I want fulfilled by an app, (2) Search in the Play Store for some terms, (3) Receive a results page that gives me no information to discriminate (dodgy reviews, some basic screenshots, people saying it's unstable under the newest Android, etc), (4) Go do a web search +"Android app", (5) Browse through hundreds of shill sites that doubtfully even downloaded any of the "5 Best Android Paint Apps!", (6) Give up and do it on my laptop. Imho, the key is leveraging the social graph. Which is something parts of Google seem to be clueless about (and parts seem to understand). How about you review weight based on how closely connected I am to the reviewer?
- digi_owl 9y ago
  Pretty much, though I find reviews to be too easy to be gamed to carry any value what so ever. What I would love is for an expert mode that allowed me to filter/sort Play store results by permissions, last update time and release time. I have seen way too many results put apps from the early days of Android up top alongside stuff released the last month, with no way to tell them apart except by opening each entry in turn, and look for data hidden behind the description foldout.
  - ethbro 9y ago
    Agreed. The existing search options are also terrible. In the same way that I sometimes have trouble telling Amazon what I want displayed, and fall back on the Top 10 sold list for that category. Or even a "Has this app been updated since the release date of the version of Android I'm currently running?" option.
Silhouette 9y ago
I think you're right about both the two problems and the irony of the two of them being almost opposites extremes. With a web site, you can mostly avoid both though, as web apps have evolved a variety of models where someone can try it out before they make any kind of commitment. Don't like it? Close browser, done. Like it enough to look again later or ask friends? Bookmark and/or share. Like it enough to commit right now? Hit the sign up button and create your account, or follow some other process that the site offers for saving what you were doing more permanently. There are no red tape or royalties to worry about in publishing your site, and because of the lower commitment there's less of a worry about quality for users visiting for the first time. One fundamental difficulty with the app store model is that while its uniformity may make it easy to use, it also offers little influence or control to app developers before someone hits that button to install. And as anyone who's worked on the web equivalent can testify, that's probably where the majority of the customer acquisition process takes place. You're pretty far into the funnel by the time someone is actually downloading your app to their device.
- rusk 9y ago
  Yes. I think this is the phenomena that's eating both appstores' lunches of late.
  - Silhouette 9y ago
    I'm not sure either emperor ever had much in the way of clothes. They sucked a lot of, dare I say, naive developers in because for the few apps that really did hit it out of the park the rewards could be astronomical. However, expecting to publish the next Angry Birds as an app is a bit like getting into web development and expecting to be the next Facebook. Sooner or later, someone will be, but many thousands more will have tried and failed in the meantime.
    - rusk 9y ago
      Ah I think going on 10 years ago native apps were a good bit ahead of web apps in terms of what you could do. Even currently native apps can have the edge in a number of areas, but the gap has closed. I think, for instance developing angry birds for web would be a little better off still in the native space. But the thing is, when you're talking about growth you're concerned not with these specialist areas, but the fringe areas where many are simply deciding web is more straightforward than native and is "good enough".
scarface74 9y ago
How is bootstrapping expensive? If you're just starting off, you can get away with a $499 Mac Mini and a $99 a year developer license. If you don't want to invest that much in your app, I probably don't want it. On the other hand, I'm a Windows developer and I also would pay about $500 for a decent PC. I also pay $14 a month for a JetBrains Resharper subscription and $30 a month for Pluralsight. -- $528 a year. Well worth the money considering what developers salaries are. The chance of being a successful solely mobile developer are infinitesimal. I was making more doing Windows Mobile development in 2008 working for a company than most independent mobile developers are making today.
- rusk 9y ago
  Good point. In my jurisdication Mac Mini starts at €569. That's pretty neat actually didn't realise they were still around! Might pick one up. Point is though, that this is specialist capital expenditure that I don't need to make for other platforms. Also, as the platform evolves there is a requirement to keep it current. Even if this doesn't mean I have to upgrade my hardware, it may mean upgrading to a newer version of Mac OS, which may be awful. Windows development is an area I'm not so familiar with, but so I can't comment. I tend work in specialist niche areas with established domain experts who don't really have the time or interest in learning the minutiae of particular platforms - particularly where these are a moving target. We typically get agency guys to do that kind of heavy lifting.
  - scarface74 9y ago
    "Specialist capital expenditure"? All development stacks require a learning curve and money. Money to buy hardware is relatively cheap - $500. The last time I did mobile development where my company was billing by the hour was 2008. They were billing $125-$150/hour. You could buy a Mac with less than 4 hours worth of billable time. If you're doing it for a personal project, you could recoup your investment easily with one side gig or by getting a better paying job.
    - rusk 9y ago
      > They were billing $125-$150/hour. The hobbyists and have-a-go developers aren't billing anything. Look, personally I could afford 10 of these at short notice if I wanted to. But that's not the point. Growth in the Apps market is slowing. There's a whole market for developers going underserved because the cost of entry in other areas is pretty much '0'.
coldtea 9y ago
>Then once you're rolling, the amount of red tape involved in testing, releasing, updating etc really is shocking. So shocking that only ~ 1 million devs managed to put a mere 1.5 million apps to the store... Ever tried writing for consoles?
- rusk 9y ago
  The context for this discussion is the decline of that trend.
  - coldtea 9y ago
    Not because of the reason I rejected above. That is, not because it's too difficult, and fewer people bother to write apps because of that. If anything the article gives the inverse reason: because TOO many people have written apps, and the market is too saturated.
    - rusk 9y ago
      This is the case I pointed out for Android apps, and the article doesn't make any distinction. The costs for developing Apple apps are too high to make it worth the risk.
      - coldtea 9y ago
        And yet, unsubstianted article aside: "Since it launched nearly 9 years ago, the iOS App Store has delivered more than $70 billion to developers, while downloads have surged 70 percent in the last year alone"

by rusk 9y ago

ryanwaggoner 9y ago

Then once you're rolling, the amount of red tape involved in testing, releasing, updating etc really is shocking. I've been doing iOS dev for seven years, and have launched dozens of apps for organizations large and small, many of which had Android versions too. I have no idea what you're talking about here. Yes, you have to submit updates for approval, but it's quick and easy, and I can count on one hand the number of rejections I've ever gotten, all of which were easily fixed. 95% of my updates are approved in 1-2 days. On the testing side, TestFlight and other tools make testing pretty quick and easy. So what is the "bureaucracy" you're talking about? The biggest issues with iOS are the 30% cut Apple takes, and discoverability on the store. The dev experience is actually pretty good, and the user experience is much better than Android. Apple's balance here is FAR superior to Android's.

rusk 9y ago
Well, like you say, you've been doing iOS dev for seven years, which kind of puts you into what I'd describe as the "Specialist" category. I wouldn't go trying to develop an iOS application without somebody of your calibre on board - but then you're either an expensive developer with cross-disciplinary skills or somebody we have "on retainer" to deal with this kind of stuff. Specifically what I recommended my colleague hire once she has her prototyping done, purely to deal with the machinations of the Apple ecosystem. Then just take it inhouse for support and maintenance. It's interesting you mention test-flight specifically as this is something we've had a huge amount of trouble transitioning to. For an Apple specialist this is probably a no-brainer but for a product development org this is yet another headache where we used to just be able to issue our own development testing certificates.
- ryanwaggoner 9y ago
  Maybe you're right and I don't realize how complex it is, but I'm skeptical. Android seems worse in many ways, and I had no trouble starting iOS dev back in 2010. And it's gotten faster and easier since then, so I don't think it's just my amazing skills (though I'd like to take more credit). What specifically is so onerous? Are you sure these aren't just organizational issues on your end?
  - rusk 9y ago
    Yes it is largely organisational in that I typically work in specialist technical fields where our manpower is directed elsewhere than dealing with specific platform issues. Point is though, that where you're talking about growth these are precisely the areas that native is losing out.
- charlesdm 9y ago
  It's specialised, but nothing ground breaking. The major issue that I had when starting 6 years ago was having issues with code signing, but those have largely been fixed in the latest versions of Xcode. I never had any of the issues you described. Getting an app in the App Store isn't much harder than integrating with a third party API. Frankly, I don't see how they could make it much simpler. You make a build, upload it, it gets reviewed and you push it to the store. Adhering to the rules of the ecosystem is the price you pay for getting access to >100 million accounts that can drop pretty much any amount on your software with the touch of a button. Sounds like a pretty good deal to me. I've managed to make plenty of money through the App Store.

ethbro 9y ago

The biggest thing Android's Play Store is terrible at (and I've heard the same charges leveled at the Apple's app store) is discovery. In Android, here's my use case: (1) Identify a need I want fulfilled by an app, (2) Search in the Play Store for some terms, (3) Receive a results page that gives me no information to discriminate (dodgy reviews, some basic screenshots, people saying it's unstable under the newest Android, etc), (4) Go do a web search +"Android app", (5) Browse through hundreds of shill sites that doubtfully even downloaded any of the "5 Best Android Paint Apps!", (6) Give up and do it on my laptop. Imho, the key is leveraging the social graph. Which is something parts of Google seem to be clueless about (and parts seem to understand). How about you review weight based on how closely connected I am to the reviewer?

digi_owl 9y ago
Pretty much, though I find reviews to be too easy to be gamed to carry any value what so ever. What I would love is for an expert mode that allowed me to filter/sort Play store results by permissions, last update time and release time. I have seen way too many results put apps from the early days of Android up top alongside stuff released the last month, with no way to tell them apart except by opening each entry in turn, and look for data hidden behind the description foldout.
- ethbro 9y ago
  Agreed. The existing search options are also terrible. In the same way that I sometimes have trouble telling Amazon what I want displayed, and fall back on the Top 10 sold list for that category. Or even a "Has this app been updated since the release date of the version of Android I'm currently running?" option.

Silhouette 9y ago

I think you're right about both the two problems and the irony of the two of them being almost opposites extremes. With a web site, you can mostly avoid both though, as web apps have evolved a variety of models where someone can try it out before they make any kind of commitment. Don't like it? Close browser, done. Like it enough to look again later or ask friends? Bookmark and/or share. Like it enough to commit right now? Hit the sign up button and create your account, or follow some other process that the site offers for saving what you were doing more permanently. There are no red tape or royalties to worry about in publishing your site, and because of the lower commitment there's less of a worry about quality for users visiting for the first time. One fundamental difficulty with the app store model is that while its uniformity may make it easy to use, it also offers little influence or control to app developers before someone hits that button to install. And as anyone who's worked on the web equivalent can testify, that's probably where the majority of the customer acquisition process takes place. You're pretty far into the funnel by the time someone is actually downloading your app to their device.

rusk 9y ago
Yes. I think this is the phenomena that's eating both appstores' lunches of late.
- Silhouette 9y ago
  I'm not sure either emperor ever had much in the way of clothes. They sucked a lot of, dare I say, naive developers in because for the few apps that really did hit it out of the park the rewards could be astronomical. However, expecting to publish the next Angry Birds as an app is a bit like getting into web development and expecting to be the next Facebook. Sooner or later, someone will be, but many thousands more will have tried and failed in the meantime.
  - rusk 9y ago
    Ah I think going on 10 years ago native apps were a good bit ahead of web apps in terms of what you could do. Even currently native apps can have the edge in a number of areas, but the gap has closed. I think, for instance developing angry birds for web would be a little better off still in the native space. But the thing is, when you're talking about growth you're concerned not with these specialist areas, but the fringe areas where many are simply deciding web is more straightforward than native and is "good enough".

scarface74 9y ago

How is bootstrapping expensive? If you're just starting off, you can get away with a $499 Mac Mini and a $99 a year developer license. If you don't want to invest that much in your app, I probably don't want it. On the other hand, I'm a Windows developer and I also would pay about $500 for a decent PC. I also pay $14 a month for a JetBrains Resharper subscription and $30 a month for Pluralsight. -- $528 a year. Well worth the money considering what developers salaries are. The chance of being a successful solely mobile developer are infinitesimal. I was making more doing Windows Mobile development in 2008 working for a company than most independent mobile developers are making today.

rusk 9y ago
Good point. In my jurisdication Mac Mini starts at €569. That's pretty neat actually didn't realise they were still around! Might pick one up. Point is though, that this is specialist capital expenditure that I don't need to make for other platforms. Also, as the platform evolves there is a requirement to keep it current. Even if this doesn't mean I have to upgrade my hardware, it may mean upgrading to a newer version of Mac OS, which may be awful. Windows development is an area I'm not so familiar with, but so I can't comment. I tend work in specialist niche areas with established domain experts who don't really have the time or interest in learning the minutiae of particular platforms - particularly where these are a moving target. We typically get agency guys to do that kind of heavy lifting.
- scarface74 9y ago
  "Specialist capital expenditure"? All development stacks require a learning curve and money. Money to buy hardware is relatively cheap - $500. The last time I did mobile development where my company was billing by the hour was 2008. They were billing $125-$150/hour. You could buy a Mac with less than 4 hours worth of billable time. If you're doing it for a personal project, you could recoup your investment easily with one side gig or by getting a better paying job.
  - rusk 9y ago
    > They were billing $125-$150/hour. The hobbyists and have-a-go developers aren't billing anything. Look, personally I could afford 10 of these at short notice if I wanted to. But that's not the point. Growth in the Apps market is slowing. There's a whole market for developers going underserved because the cost of entry in other areas is pretty much '0'.

coldtea 9y ago

>Then once you're rolling, the amount of red tape involved in testing, releasing, updating etc really is shocking. So shocking that only ~ 1 million devs managed to put a mere 1.5 million apps to the store... Ever tried writing for consoles?

rusk 9y ago
The context for this discussion is the decline of that trend.
- coldtea 9y ago
  Not because of the reason I rejected above. That is, not because it's too difficult, and fewer people bother to write apps because of that. If anything the article gives the inverse reason: because TOO many people have written apps, and the market is too saturated.
  - rusk 9y ago
    This is the case I pointed out for Android apps, and the article doesn't make any distinction. The costs for developing Apple apps are too high to make it worth the risk.
    - coldtea 9y ago
      And yet, unsubstianted article aside: "Since it launched nearly 9 years ago, the iOS App Store has delivered more than $70 billion to developers, while downloads have surged 70 percent in the last year alone"