9 ms·

The Missing App Economy (2022)

59 points by danielinoa 3y ago

sharemywin 3y ago
the problem with web is there's really no dispute mechanism and you don't know if you can trust an unknown website. doesn't mean you can't make it work just more friction that costs money.
- candiddevmike 3y ago
  In the process of pulling an app off the app stores. Yea, there will be more friction, but to me, a person finding my app organically and having a more direct relationship with them means more to me and has been more valuable than the low conversion sales I get from casual app store browsing.
  - thyselius 3y ago
    I’d love To hear more about this
    - candiddevmike 3y ago
      Contact info in my profile =D
- teg4n_ 3y ago
  Isn’t that the purpose of credit cards and other payment processors like PayPal?
  - sharemywin 3y ago
    can you dispute subscriptions through credit cards or just the individual transaction. plus you don't know if your credit card info is just going to end up on the dark web. I think it's part of the reason people don't try new apps and stuff as much.
rchaud 3y ago
To paraphrase the article: with the Google-Apple mobile duopoly, consumers are stuck between a rock (web apps) and a hard place (native apps). It isn't in Apple's interest to allow web apps on iOS to have feature parity with native apps, because that's where Apple's moat is. It isn't in Google's interest to allow mobile web browsers the freedom to behave like desktop browsers (extensions and filesystem APIs), because web ads are how Google establishes its moat. The solution seems obvious; A phone with a barebones OS that can run a desktop-class browser. This is what the MokoPhone and Nokia N900 tried many years ago. Even Palm called its mobile offering WebOS, because they knew that competing via app store counts was a dead end.
- PaulHoule 3y ago
  I’d say Safari is not bad at all on an iPad. I remember a lot of people carping because of bad ideas from PWAs not being implemented (spam spamifications, half-baked rube goldberg schemes that accomplish half of what Netscape Netcaster did back in the day…) but really all the real web apps and even demos like visualization of NeRF models work on my iPad.
  - EarlKing 3y ago
    > spam spamifications As much as I dislike notifications, they're becoming a necessity in a world of decommoditized email. If I could know that my mail would actually get through when I send it to a willing recipient (as opposed to the almighty Google System Lords deciding that my mail should be dropped because their chicken entrails said it looked like spam that day) then there'd be no need to reinvent email as notifications... but here we are.
    - PaulHoule 3y ago
      One of the drivers for email newsletters, ironically, is that bloggers don't trust Google to send visitors their way repeatedly, so they harass their users incessantly hoping to bypass the Google search monopoly although this runs headlong into the Google email monopoly. To be fair though I remember working for firms that were struggling mightily to deliver mail to AOL in 2005.
spacebanana7 3y ago
I recommend spending some time on OnlyFans to see what social networks can look like without the App Store. Video fundraisers, paid messages, creator subscriptions, tips, interactive live streams and tiered subscriptions all work together to allow creators to flourish financially. Apple’s 30% rules cripples YouTube’s ability to imitate these features and even restricts the viability of these features for platforms like Patreon who have a critical chunk of their engagement coming from iOS
- moomoo11 3y ago
  Sure, I'm glad it works that way for them. However, I'm glad Apple's rules exist so I don't have to deal with those and low-quality apps. I'm in the 98% majority that's fine with not having xxx or crap apps in the app stores. Every time I use the android play store I'm just overwhelmed by the number of low quality crap.
  - spacebanana7 3y ago
    Apple’s rules on social payments primarily affect content creators and other big tech orgs like FB/YT/TT. Whether Apple allows adult content is a separate matter from whether Apple takes a 30% cut from bloggers and video makers who produce digital content in exchange for payment.
- pen2l 3y ago
  Nearly everything in that space comes with a sea of confounding factors; biological imperative is fickle thing. I find it akin to gambling, in that folks with impulse control disorder are most susceptible to making rash and often ill-advised decisions. Point I'm trying make is you can't sensibly extrapolate lessons from there and apply them to a different space. Sadly. Because it is an absolute cashcow and I reckon it probably makes for like a quarter of Stripe's income.
  - spacebanana7 3y ago
    Social interaction can be just as much of a biological imperative as reproduction. I bet many people would be willing to pay $500 for a FaceTime call with MrBeast. Or pay $50 to choose which makeup their vlogger tries on. Maybe even $100 for their favourite comedian to make a joke about them.
lapcat 3y ago
(2022)
ozten 3y ago
One of the biggest problems for "apps" and entrepreneurs is distribution. Everything this article is talking about was true when HTML5 launched (2010 era) and so many mobile device APIs became web standards. What the App store has, that is hard to reproduce, is distribution.
- vivegi 3y ago
  The web already cracked the distribution problem. Javascript on the browser was the only choice for your frontend code, however, WASM is already shipping on all current browsers except IE and Opera Mini (which is a miniscule percentage of browsers in use today). It is just a matter of time where WASM becomes the ABI of choice for crossplatform app development as the binary deployment vehicle where you can program in any language and have the app delivered as a WASM package via HTTP/HTTPS. Apple's App Store moat will dry up when people (esp. devs) realize that they can get close to native performance for web apps delivered this way and the vanity of an icon on the phone/tablet screen isn't worth forking 30% to big apple.
  - brookst 3y ago
    It's not about the technologies of distribution. Apple's moat is the 1B users who go to the app store to search for apps. No amount of WASM is going to get developers in front of a billion qualified purchasers. I shipped an app in the App store. Over a few years, I made mid-six-figures from it. I never once begrudged Apple their 30% because without the app store I would have made next to nothing, certainly not enough to justify building and supporting the app. What was I going to do, set up a web page and hope my SEO skills were good enough to get a small trickle of users? I often wonder if any of the people outraged at Apple's 30% (now often 15%) cut have actually tried to market an application. That is a tiny, tiny price to pay for the upside.
  - theK 3y ago
    > the vanity of an icon on the phone/tablet screen isn't worth forking 30% to big apple. I think the biggest problem here is that these icons on the home screen are great retention drivers and if you go through an app store the OS creates it for you while through the browser you have to actively decide to do it. Its also funny how the iPhone initially only had web shortcuts for the screen (and arguably invented the pwa) only to immediately change course once they noticed that Apps are their moat.
gumby 3y ago
Honestly I prefer a native app to a web app because the web browser is basically an O/S running inside an O/S and there's a annoying amount of gain mismatch / poor coupling between the two. Native (non electron) apps on the Mac just integrate with the other OS capabilities (e.g. text selection, drag/drop all work consistently and interoperate properly; keystrokes, shortcuts, system context menu & integrations, etc just make using the machine smoother. This is also true under iOS. I don't like apps that are just a wrapper to a web view, but they do protect in one way: if you fumblefinger when entering an address in the browser it can autocomplete to a phisher, while my bank's app is in a known place on my screen.
- TobyTheDog123 3y ago
  I'd argue bookmarks achieve much of the same result, but I see your point. Cross-platform, as much as I'd like it to work, just doesn't seem to ever feel native. I'd very much like to see a transpilation-based cross-platform development framework that generates real Swift/Kotlin/Javascript for iOS/Android/Web, but I'm not sure if it's possible with all of the nice developer experience goodies that developers would come to expect (namely hot reloading) -- but maybe!
  - gumby 3y ago
    People have been trying to make that work since the 80s. The different interfaces don’t have the same metaphors or semantics so cross-platform UI toolkits are always restricted to worst-case lowest common denominator capabilities. You see this outside UX too — few programs are written to pure POSIX because usually you want to do more than that core.
- Bonus20230510 3y ago
  > I don't like apps that are just a wrapper to a web view... Devs are just too aware that they do it to maximise profits and not to maximise UX quality. It's just like Linux guys building console tools and pretending they are better than a (good) UI.
  - 3y ago
lazzlazzlazz 3y ago
It should be obvious to everyone now that centralized platforms (like Apple's App Store) might be generous and foster innovation during their growth stages, but then become extractive and limit innovation in later stages. After all, they have total control of the platforms. This is why decentralization matters.[1] The problem is that "decentralized" protocols often end up becoming de facto centralized because they lack key economic features.[2] And centralized platforms fill the gaps by offering those economic features — at the cost of giving them total control of the network.[3] This is why the most innovative and most interesting web applications occur in the browser, which is open and permissionless — and where web domains are mostly decentralized in nature. The only way to ensure a platform retains something close to its original economic properties is to ensure it remains decentralized, but it's hard to resist centralization. I know HN hates it, but there is a class of protocols that use cryptography and Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus mechanisms and are designed to resist centralization... and they have explicit and verifiable economic properties. They're known as crypto, and involve blockchains. And this appreciation for decentralized-by-design systems is colloquially called web3. [1]: https://cdixon.org/2018/02/18/why-decentralization-matters https://cdixon.org/2018/02/18/why-decentralization-matters [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGfS6pPJ5jo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGfS6pPJ5jo [3]: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a-technological-approach-to-free-speech https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a...
- wwweston 3y ago
  I don't see hate for protocols or cryptography on HN. But I do see (a) skepticism about the actual decentralized (vs distributed) nature in practice (especially where the topic is financialized tech or even an end run around all the learning that's gone into the social codebase about finance). (b) realize that decentralization presented by things like the web are essentially "good enough" that capabilities are strong, personal or entrepreneurial latitude is pretty wide, and obstacles are few.
  - lazzlazzlazz 3y ago
    EDIT: Thanks for this comment — I edited the original for clarity. I'm talking about crypto as in Ethereum, which are designed to resist centralization. HN wrongly thinks of crypto as a financial system (which it can do, for good and bad reasons thanks to its permissionlessness), instead of a family of methods for making composable, decentralized protocols with built-in economics (blockchains).

59 points by danielinoa 3y ago

the problem with web is there's really no dispute mechanism and you don't know if you can trust an unknown website. doesn't mean you can't make it work just more friction that costs money.

candiddevmike 3y ago
In the process of pulling an app off the app stores. Yea, there will be more friction, but to me, a person finding my app organically and having a more direct relationship with them means more to me and has been more valuable than the low conversion sales I get from casual app store browsing.
- thyselius 3y ago
  I’d love To hear more about this
  - candiddevmike 3y ago
    Contact info in my profile =D
teg4n_ 3y ago
Isn’t that the purpose of credit cards and other payment processors like PayPal?
- sharemywin 3y ago
  can you dispute subscriptions through credit cards or just the individual transaction. plus you don't know if your credit card info is just going to end up on the dark web. I think it's part of the reason people don't try new apps and stuff as much.

rchaud 3y ago

To paraphrase the article: with the Google-Apple mobile duopoly, consumers are stuck between a rock (web apps) and a hard place (native apps). It isn't in Apple's interest to allow web apps on iOS to have feature parity with native apps, because that's where Apple's moat is. It isn't in Google's interest to allow mobile web browsers the freedom to behave like desktop browsers (extensions and filesystem APIs), because web ads are how Google establishes its moat. The solution seems obvious; A phone with a barebones OS that can run a desktop-class browser. This is what the MokoPhone and Nokia N900 tried many years ago. Even Palm called its mobile offering WebOS, because they knew that competing via app store counts was a dead end.

PaulHoule 3y ago
I’d say Safari is not bad at all on an iPad. I remember a lot of people carping because of bad ideas from PWAs not being implemented (spam spamifications, half-baked rube goldberg schemes that accomplish half of what Netscape Netcaster did back in the day…) but really all the real web apps and even demos like visualization of NeRF models work on my iPad.
- EarlKing 3y ago
  > spam spamifications As much as I dislike notifications, they're becoming a necessity in a world of decommoditized email. If I could know that my mail would actually get through when I send it to a willing recipient (as opposed to the almighty Google System Lords deciding that my mail should be dropped because their chicken entrails said it looked like spam that day) then there'd be no need to reinvent email as notifications... but here we are.
  - PaulHoule 3y ago
    One of the drivers for email newsletters, ironically, is that bloggers don't trust Google to send visitors their way repeatedly, so they harass their users incessantly hoping to bypass the Google search monopoly although this runs headlong into the Google email monopoly. To be fair though I remember working for firms that were struggling mightily to deliver mail to AOL in 2005.

spacebanana7 3y ago

I recommend spending some time on OnlyFans to see what social networks can look like without the App Store. Video fundraisers, paid messages, creator subscriptions, tips, interactive live streams and tiered subscriptions all work together to allow creators to flourish financially. Apple’s 30% rules cripples YouTube’s ability to imitate these features and even restricts the viability of these features for platforms like Patreon who have a critical chunk of their engagement coming from iOS

moomoo11 3y ago
Sure, I'm glad it works that way for them. However, I'm glad Apple's rules exist so I don't have to deal with those and low-quality apps. I'm in the 98% majority that's fine with not having xxx or crap apps in the app stores. Every time I use the android play store I'm just overwhelmed by the number of low quality crap.
- spacebanana7 3y ago
  Apple’s rules on social payments primarily affect content creators and other big tech orgs like FB/YT/TT. Whether Apple allows adult content is a separate matter from whether Apple takes a 30% cut from bloggers and video makers who produce digital content in exchange for payment.
pen2l 3y ago
Nearly everything in that space comes with a sea of confounding factors; biological imperative is fickle thing. I find it akin to gambling, in that folks with impulse control disorder are most susceptible to making rash and often ill-advised decisions. Point I'm trying make is you can't sensibly extrapolate lessons from there and apply them to a different space. Sadly. Because it is an absolute cashcow and I reckon it probably makes for like a quarter of Stripe's income.
- spacebanana7 3y ago
  Social interaction can be just as much of a biological imperative as reproduction. I bet many people would be willing to pay $500 for a FaceTime call with MrBeast. Or pay $50 to choose which makeup their vlogger tries on. Maybe even $100 for their favourite comedian to make a joke about them.

lapcat 3y ago

(2022)

ozten 3y ago

One of the biggest problems for "apps" and entrepreneurs is distribution. Everything this article is talking about was true when HTML5 launched (2010 era) and so many mobile device APIs became web standards. What the App store has, that is hard to reproduce, is distribution.

vivegi 3y ago
The web already cracked the distribution problem. Javascript on the browser was the only choice for your frontend code, however, WASM is already shipping on all current browsers except IE and Opera Mini (which is a miniscule percentage of browsers in use today). It is just a matter of time where WASM becomes the ABI of choice for crossplatform app development as the binary deployment vehicle where you can program in any language and have the app delivered as a WASM package via HTTP/HTTPS. Apple's App Store moat will dry up when people (esp. devs) realize that they can get close to native performance for web apps delivered this way and the vanity of an icon on the phone/tablet screen isn't worth forking 30% to big apple.
- brookst 3y ago
  It's not about the technologies of distribution. Apple's moat is the 1B users who go to the app store to search for apps. No amount of WASM is going to get developers in front of a billion qualified purchasers. I shipped an app in the App store. Over a few years, I made mid-six-figures from it. I never once begrudged Apple their 30% because without the app store I would have made next to nothing, certainly not enough to justify building and supporting the app. What was I going to do, set up a web page and hope my SEO skills were good enough to get a small trickle of users? I often wonder if any of the people outraged at Apple's 30% (now often 15%) cut have actually tried to market an application. That is a tiny, tiny price to pay for the upside.
- theK 3y ago
  > the vanity of an icon on the phone/tablet screen isn't worth forking 30% to big apple. I think the biggest problem here is that these icons on the home screen are great retention drivers and if you go through an app store the OS creates it for you while through the browser you have to actively decide to do it. Its also funny how the iPhone initially only had web shortcuts for the screen (and arguably invented the pwa) only to immediately change course once they noticed that Apps are their moat.

gumby 3y ago

Honestly I prefer a native app to a web app because the web browser is basically an O/S running inside an O/S and there's a annoying amount of gain mismatch / poor coupling between the two. Native (non electron) apps on the Mac just integrate with the other OS capabilities (e.g. text selection, drag/drop all work consistently and interoperate properly; keystrokes, shortcuts, system context menu & integrations, etc just make using the machine smoother. This is also true under iOS. I don't like apps that are just a wrapper to a web view, but they do protect in one way: if you fumblefinger when entering an address in the browser it can autocomplete to a phisher, while my bank's app is in a known place on my screen.

TobyTheDog123 3y ago
I'd argue bookmarks achieve much of the same result, but I see your point. Cross-platform, as much as I'd like it to work, just doesn't seem to ever feel native. I'd very much like to see a transpilation-based cross-platform development framework that generates real Swift/Kotlin/Javascript for iOS/Android/Web, but I'm not sure if it's possible with all of the nice developer experience goodies that developers would come to expect (namely hot reloading) -- but maybe!
- gumby 3y ago
  People have been trying to make that work since the 80s. The different interfaces don’t have the same metaphors or semantics so cross-platform UI toolkits are always restricted to worst-case lowest common denominator capabilities. You see this outside UX too — few programs are written to pure POSIX because usually you want to do more than that core.
Bonus20230510 3y ago
> I don't like apps that are just a wrapper to a web view... Devs are just too aware that they do it to maximise profits and not to maximise UX quality. It's just like Linux guys building console tools and pretending they are better than a (good) UI.
- 3y ago

lazzlazzlazz 3y ago

It should be obvious to everyone now that centralized platforms (like Apple's App Store) might be generous and foster innovation during their growth stages, but then become extractive and limit innovation in later stages. After all, they have total control of the platforms. This is why decentralization matters.[1] The problem is that "decentralized" protocols often end up becoming de facto centralized because they lack key economic features.[2] And centralized platforms fill the gaps by offering those economic features — at the cost of giving them total control of the network.[3] This is why the most innovative and most interesting web applications occur in the browser, which is open and permissionless — and where web domains are mostly decentralized in nature. The only way to ensure a platform retains something close to its original economic properties is to ensure it remains decentralized, but it's hard to resist centralization. I know HN hates it, but there is a class of protocols that use cryptography and Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus mechanisms and are designed to resist centralization... and they have explicit and verifiable economic properties. They're known as crypto, and involve blockchains. And this appreciation for decentralized-by-design systems is colloquially called web3. [1]: https://cdixon.org/2018/02/18/why-decentralization-matters https://cdixon.org/2018/02/18/why-decentralization-matters [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGfS6pPJ5jo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGfS6pPJ5jo [3]: https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a-technological-approach-to-free-speech https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a...

wwweston 3y ago
I don't see hate for protocols or cryptography on HN. But I do see (a) skepticism about the actual decentralized (vs distributed) nature in practice (especially where the topic is financialized tech or even an end run around all the learning that's gone into the social codebase about finance). (b) realize that decentralization presented by things like the web are essentially "good enough" that capabilities are strong, personal or entrepreneurial latitude is pretty wide, and obstacles are few.
- lazzlazzlazz 3y ago
  EDIT: Thanks for this comment — I edited the original for clarity. I'm talking about crypto as in Ethereum, which are designed to resist centralization. HN wrongly thinks of crypto as a financial system (which it can do, for good and bad reasons thanks to its permissionlessness), instead of a family of methods for making composable, decentralized protocols with built-in economics (blockchains).