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The iOS Economy, Updated
- debt 9y agoGreat time to get into apps as everyone is so focused on Blockchain. By the time that bubble implodes, investors will want a brand new, fresh, ready-to-be-invested in app to throw their money at.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- stevenwoo 9y agoThs article and it's predecessor note the relative puny Android market and rewards (though not nearly as thorough comparison of the recent trajectories of the two ecosystems) - what is it going to take for Android to turn around?
- untog 9y agoI think Google is addressing this with Progressive Web Apps. There's a lot of work yet to be done, but web sites that implement native features such as home screen presence, notifications and (key to making money) integration with Android Pay have a lot of potential. The problem is that it doesn't compare exactly with the iOS model, so everyone assumes it is worse. But completely removing app download friction from the process could be huge.
- untog 9y agoOr you could just focus on making money, rather than endlessly chasing rounds of investor money. Investment shouldn't be an end goal.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- padobson 9y agoA giant market with a single gatekeeper. Does anyone have thoughts on alternative app stores like Google Play or Amazon? The markets are obviously much smaller, but there's also much less competition.
- paulcole 9y agoDoesn't Android have like 85% of the global market? Doesn't that make a Google Play MUCH larger potential market?
- valuearb 9y agoNo, because most of that volume is driven by super cheap phones, and their owners spend far less on apps. iOS phones are all high end devices.
- melling 9y agoI'm not sure a lot of developers make money on iOS. I think it's now larger companies. There are still millions of apps so discoverability is impossible. You can't spend much to advertise a free app, and you can't really charge money. I wrote a simple Word Search app a couple months ago, localized it, and have had zero downloads outside the US and Canada. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h4labs-word-search/id1311744075?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h4labs-word-search/id1311744... In 2010, I whipped up a quick little language app on Android and saw several thousand global downloads within a month( there were about 10,000 apps at the time).
- cableshaft 9y agoMy understanding was that while there's more money being made in Apps, it's getting more and more concentrated into less and less apps and larger and larger companies, so that the overwhelming majority of apps released nowadays make very little money. Especially for independent developers I've heard there are much better opportunities on other platforms, for the most part. For others here that are still in iOS app development or know people still in it, is that the case? I've been out of it for a few years, so I'm not really sure.
- nnd 9y agoWhat other platoforms have better opportunities for indie developers?
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- cableshaft 9y agoFor applications, I've heard more devs are going back to web first, but I'm mainly familiar with the game scene, and indie game developers have had a lot better luck with Steam, the Vita, and most recently the Nintendo Switch than on mobile for the past several years.
- wlesieutre 9y agoThat used to be the case for Steam if you could get your game in, but the impression I’ve heard more recently is that it’s become more of a dumpster fire of unfinished shovelware. Throw something together from unity asset store pieces, call it early access, and see how many suckers you can get. There are occasional breakout hits, but discoverability for indie titles is minimal. Plus their revenue cut is (maybe not confirmed, but widely speculated to be) the same as Apple’s 30%.
- adamqureshi 9y agoWhy not try PWA. I built a marketplace app and used gravity forms and you get camera in the browser. Unless you need device hardware, you can get away with PWA. The web is much larger then app islands with 30% fees. Then the bi-weekly updates. Then you get a message " this developer needs to update their app for iOS (latest version) jesus.
- AndrewKemendo 9y agocamera in the browser How so? Do you mean through UIImagePickerController or AVCaptureDevice? Even with the latest iOS 11 release I haven't seen AVCaptureDevice available to WebKit anywhere. getusermedia isn't supported and I've yet to see a successful implementation of WebRTC on WebKit [1]. Maybe I missed something. Would be great to be able to do that finally. [1]https://webkit.org/blog/7763/a-closer-look-into-webrtc/ https://webkit.org/blog/7763/a-closer-look-into-webrtc/
- adamqureshi 9y agowe used gravity forms for one gig. On mobile a mobile browser say an iphone, you can take snap a pic with a camera and upload / attach it and send it via the form. That was our basic need / feature for this particular MVP. i found this article in stakoverflow: In 2015 Google introduced a new approach for developing web apps for Android: progressive web apps. One can create an application that will look like a native application, will be able to use device's hardware like camera and accelerometers, receive push notifications, have a launcher icon, work in offline, store local data, etc.
- AndrewKemendo 9y agoYea Android supports all of that including camera through getusermedia, iOS doesn't.
- adamqureshi 9y agoSo i tested the form. OnClick attach a pic / or take a pic in iOS i took a pic and attached and on submit it sent the form with image to the email the form was going too. Is that not it?
- ksec 9y agoLarge majority of that are games. I wonder what % is that. 80? Or 90?
- digleto 9y agoThe market might be larger but it is becoming more and more difficult to be an indie developer in the ever-increasingly saturated IOS App Store.