We Are the App Store

Walled gardens are great when a medium is brand new. Without history and without a critical mass of knowledgeable individuals it's very much more difficult for individuals to find offerings of sufficient quality, and then from there to filter based on individual preferences and needs. Such was the case with mobile apps when the iphone came around. The quality of mobile apps tended to be rather poor at the time and there was a bewildering array of them. The iphone introduced a huge new chunk of people to smartphones, the appstore model was an attempt to raise the quality bar of mobile apps and to make it easier for users to find and buy apps. And it worked spectacularly well, propelling a once questionable development arena to enormous heights of popularity (and in some cases profitability).<p>If you look back on, for example, video game development you can see the problems that can occur without such walled gardens. The home video game market boomed in the late 70s and early 80s, with families buying new games like hotcakes. A lot of game makers jumped on the bandwagon and pumped the market full of low quality games. Whereas in previous years the total number of games for the Atari 2600, for example, had been in the low dozens in 1982/83 this number ballooned to <i>hundreds</i>. Consumers could no longer have much confidence in which games to buy and so they stopped buying, leading to a massive crash of the video game industry in the US that lasted until Nintendo came along with its own walled garden approach.<p>However, the video game industry has matured since then, and walled gardens are no longer very helpful (there are far more than sufficient resources these days to determine which games to buy and which to avoid based on individual preferences).<p>As the mobile app market continues to mature it will strain against its walled garden confines more and more. Increasingly such hand-holding is less necessary and more and more restrictive. Apple has a choice to recognize that the market is changing and to adapt or to ignore the changes and pretend as though it's still 2008 while the world passes them by.

"Both Apple and Google have demonstrated that they want to be the only source of commercial apps for their platform."<p>Have Google really done this? Isn't there soon to be Playstation app store among others? And you can always download files away from the Market?

As bad as this sounds, I think that those who wish to get in bed with Apple deserve what they get. There are plenty of other platforms that can make money, and after my post on the lack HN thread regarding why people don't move over to Android produced few answers. It is also a topic of much discussion on the Readability blog post; a topic the author has yet to address.<p>The App Store can be very good for those who work with it, but in the same way that using Adsense can be good for those who use it. There are other options; they may not be the industry leaders, but they are viable options and you'd be a fool to turn down a platform with 100 users just because a tough platform with 110 users is better known.<p>In the same way that some men are attracted to insane girls, it seems that some developers simply cannot get enough of Apple's tough, kinky, anti-trust-bound love.

A year ago I would have laughed at the final statement that people will dump their iPhones faster than Apple is ready for.<p>Today, after working with Android for a year, I could care less if I had an Android instead of my iPhone. In fact, I find myself carrying around my development device for various apps and usability reasons.<p>I'm over angry birds. I'm tired of seeing all the polished over-done games in the app store. I prefer the simple, indie games of Android, I like the personality of the Android Market, I like the browser on my Galaxy, etc, etc.<p>Side note. My kids do not. They think my Android games are stupid.

Well said. I've been using the iPhone since September 2007, but if Apple loses the Kindle app and Netflix app, I'll have no qualms about jumping to Android. Strong support from top tier web services companies (Rdio and Amazon come to mind) is my favorite thing about iOS - Apple underestimates how quickly they could lose that pivotal advantage.

I don't like the new restriction even though Apple obviously is in their good right.<p>But beneath this there is a deeper concern that is now making me consider choosing the web over learning to develop for iOS: I don't trust Apple. I love my iPhone and iPad, but these frequent and unpredictable changes to the TOS makes it quite a liability for me as a developer. Making a product/startup always involves the what-if-google-does-it risk, but this new what-if-apple-shuts-you-down risk is more disturbing imo.

This is the same sort of thing I've noticed with sites like eBay and Etsy. Particularly the latter - the administration and a certain brand of users act like all glory and power derives from the establishment, and you <i>need</i> them and should be thanking them for their existence. Another group of people feel that the credit goes to the people who fill empty gray templates with content and bring the site to life.<p>This actually works out to be somewhat similar to politics. Reading forums and blogs, you can observe people's politics in their feelings about companies like this. Conservatives and religious folks often feel you should give respect to the site authority, while liberal people feel the customers deserve more credit and need more power. It's just like unions vs. management.

Until we have viable alternatives, it seems rather fruitless to complain about the power that Apple has in terms of dictating App Store policies. I'm a fan of the HTML5 developments, but it doesn't offer anywhere near the level of sophistication available to native apps on iOS. To get developers like myself to abandon the investment we've made in terms of mastering Objective-C and iOS, a web-based alternative must at least offer comparable functionality.

I am currently considering my first smart-phone, and I want really want to go with Apple because I do like the refinement of iOS and the hardware that runs it, but their App Store policies are giving me pause. It seems to me that Apple's greed is getting the better of them.<p>I really hope that Apple will realize that even if they aren't getting a cut of in-App purchases, these Apps do add desirability to the iOS platform.

Apropos RefinedPixel's comment (in the post's page) about webapps, the other day I accidentally found <a href="http://www.apple.com/webapps/" rel="nofollow">http://www.apple.com/webapps/</a><p>However, the current 'most recent' entries are dated December 3rd of last year. The small print does say "Apple is providing links to these applications as a courtesy [...]"

It's part of Apple's thinking that if an app can be satisfactorily built as an HTML5 app, there's no need for it to be in the App Store. If an HTML5 app meets consumers' needs, then there's no need for a native app.<p>But the crux of this entire debate is whether users will demand iOS versions of applications. Apple thinks they will, and they think they deserve a cut for it.<p>There are lots of emotional arguments being made right now, but it seems like this is a simple business decision for developers. If a developer doesn't see enough value in iOS (given its development costs), then he shouldn't build an iOS app, end of story.

for every dev who leaves the app store there are 100 waiting to join. that's the main problem - you can't pressure apple as long as there are masses of devs willing to play by apple's rules.