5 ms·

I Can Save The AppStore

21 points by comatose_kid 18y ago

DenisM 18y ago
I think he's trying too hard to sell his new onyx venture. But the idea has merits, so let it be. It'd be nice if it wasn't just for games though.
- petercooper 18y ago
  He took a very long time before he got to it. The point the top 50% makes it a pretty good one. There's a real race to the bottom going on on the App Store.. :(
  - DenisM 18y ago
    I kind of agree. Unique apps have a small chance, easily substituted apps have no chance. It's actually a very nice little snowglobe model of how all the other markets work. You can be told a hundred times that your solution must stand out from the crowd, but there is nothing like seeing 10 identical copies of your application competing with you side by side. That really gets the message through. The other fun part is addressable market fallacy - it's easy for a junior entreprenuer to say that "game market on iPhone is 13 Million people * $10 / year and if we only get one percent of that we'll have 1.3 million". It's also easy to get proven wrong really, really quickly. The way I see it App Store is converging to the mean - your typical market where consumer's biggest problem is choice as there is too much competition. The solutions to this problem that will emerge will likely be similar as well.
qqq 18y ago
partial summary: the app store promotes whatever sold the most units yesterday. this gives an incentive to sell more units at a lower price, even if that's not the ideal pricepoint. it should promote whatever sold the most real dollars yesterday, instead.
mattmaroon 18y ago
He's sort of missing the way markets work. In time one of two things will happen: 1) People will find way to make very good money off of free apps. To my knowledge this isn't the case yet on iPhone, but it's certainly happened on the web and facebook. or... 2) People will start making their apps cost money. It's an unfortunate fact of markets that you have times like this, where it's still in transition.
- kwamenum86 18y ago
  In response to 1)...free products and services are not always monetized so easily. Most free things on the web use display ads for revenue (which is rarely a GREAT way to make money) and Facebook loses millions a year. I think the Onyx plan is interesting but I don't think it will "save" the AppStore. It is a cool little framework for building communities into GAMES. Fine. I take nothing away from that it is a great concept. But there are plenty of apps that are not games [Disclaimer: assumption on my part because I don't own an iPhone]. What keeps the AppStore going is great applications, regardless of price, not frameworks. He really presented a poor argument. Came off looing like an advertorial.
  - teej 18y ago
    Key phrase: "on Facebook". People are making a non-trivial amount of money from non-advertising revenue streams from games on Facebook.
  - mattmaroon 18y ago
    I agree with you on 1) which is why I think 2) will be the more common route.
andylei 18y ago
While Onyx sounds like a pretty good idea, the argument that low prices are killing the App Store don't make much sense. If selling games for cheap leads to losses, how do big developers not go out of business? There's no "loss-leading" here. Once BigDeveloperCo sells you their crappy version of Tetris for 99 cents, there's no secondary product to get more money from you. They just lose money. They'll go bankrupt. If lower prices don't cause big developers to lose money, then small developers should lower their price points too, and they wouldn't lose money either. In the long run, prices for games will converge to their economic costs of producing them. And yes, competition means that its hard to make money. The App Store is not dying. Perhaps you don't like the quality of software that most people like, but people are buying Apps like crazy. If they weren't, there wouldn't be lots of developer competition to bring down App prices.

21 points by comatose_kid 18y ago

I think he's trying too hard to sell his new onyx venture. But the idea has merits, so let it be. It'd be nice if it wasn't just for games though.

petercooper 18y ago
He took a very long time before he got to it. The point the top 50% makes it a pretty good one. There's a real race to the bottom going on on the App Store.. :(
- DenisM 18y ago
  I kind of agree. Unique apps have a small chance, easily substituted apps have no chance. It's actually a very nice little snowglobe model of how all the other markets work. You can be told a hundred times that your solution must stand out from the crowd, but there is nothing like seeing 10 identical copies of your application competing with you side by side. That really gets the message through. The other fun part is addressable market fallacy - it's easy for a junior entreprenuer to say that "game market on iPhone is 13 Million people * $10 / year and if we only get one percent of that we'll have 1.3 million". It's also easy to get proven wrong really, really quickly. The way I see it App Store is converging to the mean - your typical market where consumer's biggest problem is choice as there is too much competition. The solutions to this problem that will emerge will likely be similar as well.

qqq 18y ago

partial summary: the app store promotes whatever sold the most units yesterday. this gives an incentive to sell more units at a lower price, even if that's not the ideal pricepoint. it should promote whatever sold the most real dollars yesterday, instead.

mattmaroon 18y ago

He's sort of missing the way markets work. In time one of two things will happen: 1) People will find way to make very good money off of free apps. To my knowledge this isn't the case yet on iPhone, but it's certainly happened on the web and facebook. or... 2) People will start making their apps cost money. It's an unfortunate fact of markets that you have times like this, where it's still in transition.

kwamenum86 18y ago
In response to 1)...free products and services are not always monetized so easily. Most free things on the web use display ads for revenue (which is rarely a GREAT way to make money) and Facebook loses millions a year. I think the Onyx plan is interesting but I don't think it will "save" the AppStore. It is a cool little framework for building communities into GAMES. Fine. I take nothing away from that it is a great concept. But there are plenty of apps that are not games [Disclaimer: assumption on my part because I don't own an iPhone]. What keeps the AppStore going is great applications, regardless of price, not frameworks. He really presented a poor argument. Came off looing like an advertorial.
- teej 18y ago
  Key phrase: "on Facebook". People are making a non-trivial amount of money from non-advertising revenue streams from games on Facebook.
- mattmaroon 18y ago
  I agree with you on 1) which is why I think 2) will be the more common route.

andylei 18y ago

While Onyx sounds like a pretty good idea, the argument that low prices are killing the App Store don't make much sense. If selling games for cheap leads to losses, how do big developers not go out of business? There's no "loss-leading" here. Once BigDeveloperCo sells you their crappy version of Tetris for 99 cents, there's no secondary product to get more money from you. They just lose money. They'll go bankrupt. If lower prices don't cause big developers to lose money, then small developers should lower their price points too, and they wouldn't lose money either. In the long run, prices for games will converge to their economic costs of producing them. And yes, competition means that its hard to make money. The App Store is not dying. Perhaps you don't like the quality of software that most people like, but people are buying Apps like crazy. If they weren't, there wouldn't be lots of developer competition to bring down App prices.