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Even now, hearing about this app I think "Wow! That's so novel and cool! (magical, even)". I've said it before, but I dearly miss the creativity people had in t

by _bxg1 7y ago

Even now, hearing about this app I think "Wow! That's so novel and cool! (magical, even)". I've said it before, but I dearly miss the creativity people had in the first few years of iOS. We have much better devices now; we should have better apps! I should be so desensitized by how interesting the new apps are that a skeuomorphic guitar tuner sounds banal and obvious! Instead today's apps are boring. They've been reduced to nothing but feeds to scroll through, clients for online services, and crappy games. What in the world happened? Edit: Some people are mentioning the quality productivity apps available, particularly on the iPad Pro. I didn't mean to suggest there aren't quality apps, I meant to suggest there aren't interesting apps that turn these devices into wondrous multi-tools. Apps that use the sensors in novel ways to interface with the real world; that make your phone or tablet more of a device and less of a screen. I also want to say I didn't mean to imply that there are no quality games on mobile; it's just hard for them to survive (Apple Arcade is an interesting workaround for this), and also games in general just usually don't have the kind of novelty I'm talking about here.

xxpor 7y ago
There's no money to be made in the app store, for the most part. OTOH, there's plenty to be made in monthly service revenue (and 30% of it isn't taken by apple in most cases).
- alasdair_ 7y ago
  The money thing is more a power law thing. There is DEFINITELY money to be made in the app store (I worked on an app that made a billion in revenue in seven months from a product with only twelve engineers directly working on it) but it’s almost all going to the winners in a specific category.
  - jklm 7y ago
    Can you share the space your app was in out of curiosity?
    - alasdair_ 7y ago
      Pokemon GO, it’s a game.
  - lifeisstillgood 7y ago
    >>> I worked on an app that made a billion in revenue in seven months from a product with only twelve engineers directly working on it uh? Can you indicate what? How many other apps have similar penetration?
    - sdrothrock 7y ago
      He's mentioned working on Pokemon Go before, so I'd guess that.
  - xxpor 7y ago
    Yeah, that's a much better way of putting it.
sneak 7y ago
It turns out you can make more money repeatedly selling $0.99 token packs for simple dot puzzle game powerups than one-time $1.99 or even $2.99 whole-app purchases. There are also more people who play silly puzzle games in waiting rooms around the world than people who play guitar. There is still tons of innovation in the App Store. It’s just on Skinner Box mechanics now.
- _bxg1 7y ago
  Yes, I think you've hit on the crux of it. Content streams, accessory apps to larger services, and games with micro-transactions all have one thing in common: they make way more money than you can typically hope to make off of a standalone, novel app that costs $1-$3.
  - underwater 7y ago
    This was the argument of why an Apple controlled app store was so important. But they seem to be actively pushing people towards those high profit, user hostile, apps. There is a cohort of games that is 10x worse than anything you'd find on the web. Unskippable 30s blocks of ads every few minutes, that just promote more crappy games.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      Apple introduced Apple Arcade because of the horrible state of games on the App Store.
      - cageface 7y ago
        I'm curious how well devs are doing in AA. The potential market is huge but you're also getting a tiny slice of $5/month. I see some of the same games on consoles for $20 each and up.
        scarface74 7y ago
        Apple is paying what amounts to an advance. Game developers are guaranteed a minimum. https://gameanalytics.com/blog/apple-arcade-mobile-game-developers.html https://gameanalytics.com/blog/apple-arcade-mobile-game-deve... In their latest report, Apple announced that they want to help developers get set up on their service by paying for some of their costs, which should take some pressure off when building your game. How much they’ll contribute is still yet to be revealed, so maybe don’t hold your breath.
freehunter 7y ago
There really is no excuse for the lack of "real" software on the iPad (using "real" as in desktop quality). Only a small amount can be blamed on the system itself, appealing to a very niche audience (like XCode). Arbitrary Javascript code written on the iPad can run, as evidenced by Play.js. Arbitrary Python code written on the iPad can run as evidenced by Pythonista. Arbitrary Swift code can run as evidenced by Swift Playgrounds. There's a Github app, there's a file explorer app, you can connect USB drives and keyboard and as of very recently, a mouse. So where is VS Code for the iPad? Where is desktop-class software for the iPad? Why is this [1] article from 8 years ago still the best-in-class way to write code on an iPad? Is there still some kind of missing support I'm not seeing? [1] https://yieldthought.com/post/12239282034/swapped-my-macbook-for-an-ipad https://yieldthought.com/post/12239282034/swapped-my-macbook...
- saagarjha 7y ago
  > Arbitrary Swift code can run as evidenced by Swift Playgrounds. Arbitrary Swift code which can only run because Apple grants themselves private entitlements that let it work.
- rhinoceraptor 7y ago
  There are a ton of great desktop quality apps on the iPad, I think the thing is that prosumer users don't know about them, and also people have been conditioned to think that any iOS app over $5 is expensive. As one example, the music ecosystem is really good. There's Garageband and several great 3rd party DAWs, and a ton of apps which provide audio units that you can plug into, such as Model D for synths, or Stark for guitar amp modeling. For photo/video, there are a few really great options: Affinity Photo is comparable to Photoshop, and LumaFusion is comparable to Final Cut or Premiere.
  - dharma1 7y ago
    Agreed on the music ecosystem. The only thing that gets to me is the lack of keyboard shortcuts and being able to bind any midi cc to anything. You can't use midi to start and stop recording in Garageband for instance, which is something all desktop DAWs let you configure. LumaFusion is good but I really wish iOS supported more video codecs than two delivery codecs (h264 and h265). I mean, they own ProRes. Cmon just add support for it in iOS.
DevKoala 7y ago
I would guess that there are more great apps published daily than ever before. The issue is probably discovery. Even if you build something great, you are competing for attention, and people who can pay for ads get the most attention.
- freehunter 7y ago
  Honestly, yes. I go through the App Store nearly every single day looking for something interesting and every single day it’s “have you tried Bear yet?” Or Day One, or Calm or Clash of Clans or some cookie cutter “Crossy Road” style nonsense. Judging by what’s promoted on the App Store, there hasn’t been any new software written for iOS in years. They’ve just been republishing the same iOS Essentials article twice a day since 2015.
criddell 7y ago
There are some fantastic iPad apps. Procreate and GoodNotes are two of my favorites. They are also insanely inexpensive. I can't imagine making something as good as Procreate and then only charging $10 for it. If I had an idea for something complex on the iPad I would have serious reservations about developing it. You can't charge reasonable prices for software unless you do it in $0.99 chunks.
- chronogram 7y ago
  Procreate is the killer app of the Apple pencil and maybe even the iPad Pro. The pricing is indeed strange. There are people paying $999 for a tablet, $129 for the pencil, just to run a $10 app.
  - frosted-flakes 7y ago
    When you put it like that, yeah, mobile app pricing is messed up. Compare that to desktop programs like Adobe Creative Cloud, which costs more than $500 a year. Or console games, where the console costs about $300 (Switch Lite) and a single game costs almost $100. (All priced CAD, rounded.)
    - dvdkon 7y ago
      It all depends on perspective. From my point of view, Adobe's pricing is definitely messed up and I know a few people who are still using pre-CC versions because they don't want to pay for a subscription, especially if they only use Photoshop occasionaly. On a similar note, I pay on average 5USD per (PC) game by tracking sales and would only consider paying more than 10USD for new games that I want to play really badly (e.g. DOOM Eternal). Console game pricing always seemed way too high to me, I'd spend what I saved on not building a PC in just a few AAA titles.
      - c22 7y ago
        For an even more extreme perspective, I haven't paid for software of any sort in over 20 years, and I don't pirate either. I don't play games and if I want to edit a photo I figure out how to do it in gimp. I've been busy the last two decades too. I've built websites, used CAD to design and machine dozens of physical objects, designed circuit boards, wrote and compiled software, made music, simulated chemical reactions, created and edited text documents, converted files from all sorts of formats to other formats, deployed databases with millions of rows, run two small businesses, and sent and received thousands of communications over myriad channels. All using free and open source software. If there's something I want to do with a computer and I can't find a free solution that does it I write new code to accomplish my task (but honestly, this almost never happens these days).
rchaud 7y ago
> What in the world happened? Business incentives changed. The early iPhone/iPad app ecosystem focused on showcasing creativity. The UI was new and unique, and apps were created to take advantage of the gyroscope for games, or the audio input for apps like the guitar tuner thing in this article. But that doesn't put food on the table, especially if the land baron is taking a 30% cut for every sale. Why bother creating complex apps that push device capabilities to their limits, when what the majority of the market wants to do with their phones is tap away at a Candy Crush/Clash of Clans clone, or scroll mindlessly through one of 3 social media apps? It simply became more lucrative to create clones of products where market demand had been validated, and stuff it full of ads and in-app purchases.
kick 7y ago
A lack of constraints mixed with a lack of real benefits. Late-stage iPhoneOS was magical because of the constraints people were working with. If you tell a developer, "Hey! Here's hardware with effectively no possible limits," they'll never write anything of value for it. A text editor and a way to do something you're already doing 5% faster. If you tell a developer, "Hey! Here's hardware that's extremely slow and limited by today's standards, make something magical," they'll move the sun and stars to get you something that'll wow you. Early-stage iOS was magical because of the new frontier offered; the constraints had mostly disappeared by then, but the ground was new and it presented what was effectively a new way to interface with the machine.
- hyperpallium 7y ago
  True, constraints promote creativity, the form of a sonnet or the rules of a fictional world or 8 bit graphics. But in this particular case, they used the new strengths of the device that enabled things not possible before (removing constraints), yet thought their idea might be too much for it (hence the prototype), and their later idea was too much for it (needed a bigger screen). So their ideas didn't benefit from the constraints. An upcoming test of your hypothesis is the PS5 100x SSD. Will it promote or stifle creativity? The sense of the "magical" is the newness. Miracles, when commonplace, become commonplace. (Though I am still in awe at billion/sec pocket electro-computers... OTOH no one else is, it's just a cheap phone).
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
sixQuarks 7y ago
You may be looking at things with rose colored glasses. The #1 app in the early days was something called Fart App.
BenGosub 7y ago
Music production software is currently booming in the IOS world, there are professional producers using the iPad to make music e.g. Madlib announced that he made all beats for the album Bandana on his iPad

by _bxg1 7y ago

xxpor 7y ago

There's no money to be made in the app store, for the most part. OTOH, there's plenty to be made in monthly service revenue (and 30% of it isn't taken by apple in most cases).

alasdair_ 7y ago
The money thing is more a power law thing. There is DEFINITELY money to be made in the app store (I worked on an app that made a billion in revenue in seven months from a product with only twelve engineers directly working on it) but it’s almost all going to the winners in a specific category.
- jklm 7y ago
  Can you share the space your app was in out of curiosity?
  - alasdair_ 7y ago
    Pokemon GO, it’s a game.
- lifeisstillgood 7y ago
  >>> I worked on an app that made a billion in revenue in seven months from a product with only twelve engineers directly working on it uh? Can you indicate what? How many other apps have similar penetration?
  - sdrothrock 7y ago
    He's mentioned working on Pokemon Go before, so I'd guess that.
- xxpor 7y ago
  Yeah, that's a much better way of putting it.

sneak 7y ago

It turns out you can make more money repeatedly selling $0.99 token packs for simple dot puzzle game powerups than one-time $1.99 or even $2.99 whole-app purchases. There are also more people who play silly puzzle games in waiting rooms around the world than people who play guitar. There is still tons of innovation in the App Store. It’s just on Skinner Box mechanics now.

_bxg1 7y ago
Yes, I think you've hit on the crux of it. Content streams, accessory apps to larger services, and games with micro-transactions all have one thing in common: they make way more money than you can typically hope to make off of a standalone, novel app that costs $1-$3.
- underwater 7y ago
  This was the argument of why an Apple controlled app store was so important. But they seem to be actively pushing people towards those high profit, user hostile, apps. There is a cohort of games that is 10x worse than anything you'd find on the web. Unskippable 30s blocks of ads every few minutes, that just promote more crappy games.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Apple introduced Apple Arcade because of the horrible state of games on the App Store.
    - cageface 7y ago
      I'm curious how well devs are doing in AA. The potential market is huge but you're also getting a tiny slice of $5/month. I see some of the same games on consoles for $20 each and up.
      - scarface74 7y ago
        Apple is paying what amounts to an advance. Game developers are guaranteed a minimum. https://gameanalytics.com/blog/apple-arcade-mobile-game-developers.html https://gameanalytics.com/blog/apple-arcade-mobile-game-deve... In their latest report, Apple announced that they want to help developers get set up on their service by paying for some of their costs, which should take some pressure off when building your game. How much they’ll contribute is still yet to be revealed, so maybe don’t hold your breath.

freehunter 7y ago

There really is no excuse for the lack of "real" software on the iPad (using "real" as in desktop quality). Only a small amount can be blamed on the system itself, appealing to a very niche audience (like XCode). Arbitrary Javascript code written on the iPad can run, as evidenced by Play.js. Arbitrary Python code written on the iPad can run as evidenced by Pythonista. Arbitrary Swift code can run as evidenced by Swift Playgrounds. There's a Github app, there's a file explorer app, you can connect USB drives and keyboard and as of very recently, a mouse. So where is VS Code for the iPad? Where is desktop-class software for the iPad? Why is this [1] article from 8 years ago still the best-in-class way to write code on an iPad? Is there still some kind of missing support I'm not seeing? [1] https://yieldthought.com/post/12239282034/swapped-my-macbook-for-an-ipad https://yieldthought.com/post/12239282034/swapped-my-macbook...

saagarjha 7y ago
> Arbitrary Swift code can run as evidenced by Swift Playgrounds. Arbitrary Swift code which can only run because Apple grants themselves private entitlements that let it work.
rhinoceraptor 7y ago
There are a ton of great desktop quality apps on the iPad, I think the thing is that prosumer users don't know about them, and also people have been conditioned to think that any iOS app over $5 is expensive. As one example, the music ecosystem is really good. There's Garageband and several great 3rd party DAWs, and a ton of apps which provide audio units that you can plug into, such as Model D for synths, or Stark for guitar amp modeling. For photo/video, there are a few really great options: Affinity Photo is comparable to Photoshop, and LumaFusion is comparable to Final Cut or Premiere.
- dharma1 7y ago
  Agreed on the music ecosystem. The only thing that gets to me is the lack of keyboard shortcuts and being able to bind any midi cc to anything. You can't use midi to start and stop recording in Garageband for instance, which is something all desktop DAWs let you configure. LumaFusion is good but I really wish iOS supported more video codecs than two delivery codecs (h264 and h265). I mean, they own ProRes. Cmon just add support for it in iOS.

DevKoala 7y ago

I would guess that there are more great apps published daily than ever before. The issue is probably discovery. Even if you build something great, you are competing for attention, and people who can pay for ads get the most attention.

freehunter 7y ago
Honestly, yes. I go through the App Store nearly every single day looking for something interesting and every single day it’s “have you tried Bear yet?” Or Day One, or Calm or Clash of Clans or some cookie cutter “Crossy Road” style nonsense. Judging by what’s promoted on the App Store, there hasn’t been any new software written for iOS in years. They’ve just been republishing the same iOS Essentials article twice a day since 2015.

criddell 7y ago

There are some fantastic iPad apps. Procreate and GoodNotes are two of my favorites. They are also insanely inexpensive. I can't imagine making something as good as Procreate and then only charging $10 for it. If I had an idea for something complex on the iPad I would have serious reservations about developing it. You can't charge reasonable prices for software unless you do it in $0.99 chunks.

chronogram 7y ago
Procreate is the killer app of the Apple pencil and maybe even the iPad Pro. The pricing is indeed strange. There are people paying $999 for a tablet, $129 for the pencil, just to run a $10 app.
- frosted-flakes 7y ago
  When you put it like that, yeah, mobile app pricing is messed up. Compare that to desktop programs like Adobe Creative Cloud, which costs more than $500 a year. Or console games, where the console costs about $300 (Switch Lite) and a single game costs almost $100. (All priced CAD, rounded.)
  - dvdkon 7y ago
    It all depends on perspective. From my point of view, Adobe's pricing is definitely messed up and I know a few people who are still using pre-CC versions because they don't want to pay for a subscription, especially if they only use Photoshop occasionaly. On a similar note, I pay on average 5USD per (PC) game by tracking sales and would only consider paying more than 10USD for new games that I want to play really badly (e.g. DOOM Eternal). Console game pricing always seemed way too high to me, I'd spend what I saved on not building a PC in just a few AAA titles.
    - c22 7y ago
      For an even more extreme perspective, I haven't paid for software of any sort in over 20 years, and I don't pirate either. I don't play games and if I want to edit a photo I figure out how to do it in gimp. I've been busy the last two decades too. I've built websites, used CAD to design and machine dozens of physical objects, designed circuit boards, wrote and compiled software, made music, simulated chemical reactions, created and edited text documents, converted files from all sorts of formats to other formats, deployed databases with millions of rows, run two small businesses, and sent and received thousands of communications over myriad channels. All using free and open source software. If there's something I want to do with a computer and I can't find a free solution that does it I write new code to accomplish my task (but honestly, this almost never happens these days).

rchaud 7y ago

> What in the world happened? Business incentives changed. The early iPhone/iPad app ecosystem focused on showcasing creativity. The UI was new and unique, and apps were created to take advantage of the gyroscope for games, or the audio input for apps like the guitar tuner thing in this article. But that doesn't put food on the table, especially if the land baron is taking a 30% cut for every sale. Why bother creating complex apps that push device capabilities to their limits, when what the majority of the market wants to do with their phones is tap away at a Candy Crush/Clash of Clans clone, or scroll mindlessly through one of 3 social media apps? It simply became more lucrative to create clones of products where market demand had been validated, and stuff it full of ads and in-app purchases.

kick 7y ago

A lack of constraints mixed with a lack of real benefits. Late-stage iPhoneOS was magical because of the constraints people were working with. If you tell a developer, "Hey! Here's hardware with effectively no possible limits," they'll never write anything of value for it. A text editor and a way to do something you're already doing 5% faster. If you tell a developer, "Hey! Here's hardware that's extremely slow and limited by today's standards, make something magical," they'll move the sun and stars to get you something that'll wow you. Early-stage iOS was magical because of the new frontier offered; the constraints had mostly disappeared by then, but the ground was new and it presented what was effectively a new way to interface with the machine.

hyperpallium 7y ago
True, constraints promote creativity, the form of a sonnet or the rules of a fictional world or 8 bit graphics. But in this particular case, they used the new strengths of the device that enabled things not possible before (removing constraints), yet thought their idea might be too much for it (hence the prototype), and their later idea was too much for it (needed a bigger screen). So their ideas didn't benefit from the constraints. An upcoming test of your hypothesis is the PS5 100x SSD. Will it promote or stifle creativity? The sense of the "magical" is the newness. Miracles, when commonplace, become commonplace. (Though I am still in awe at billion/sec pocket electro-computers... OTOH no one else is, it's just a cheap phone).

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

sixQuarks 7y ago

You may be looking at things with rose colored glasses. The #1 app in the early days was something called Fart App.

BenGosub 7y ago

Music production software is currently booming in the IOS world, there are professional producers using the iPad to make music e.g. Madlib announced that he made all beats for the album Bandana on his iPad