The step in that process you left out was "years-long massive earthquake-level crash leading to complete economic collapse of the micro-economy under discussion", the kind where most of the casualties are all the smart non-founders in the industry.
Been there, done that.
The primary reason I'm involved in this community is that I was in London before the first crash. Us internet people had been there for a decade or more, but all the investment money was going to some twat in a suit who had no cocking idea what was going on, or why.
Outside the little Nirvana that pg and company (among others) have created, the same rules apply.
[All of the following may be completely Euro-specific.]
Talentless schmucks get all the money available because they're the {sons|nephews|mistresses|cabana boys} of other people with money, and then try to hire us to fill in the yawning chasms (they call them 'gaps') in their plans.
The only winning move is not to play. Do your own thing, but ferchrissakes don't start working for some family-moneyed fool because "appz R h0tt and we're all gonna get rich". If you're gonna take a risk, at least ensure that the risk beneficiary is you. The one major thing I've noticed in this little playground of ours is this: it's not that you are going to have trouble raising money - it's that you're going to have trouble raising money because you're going to get lost in the deafening noise of trustafarian morons with connections, and they're going to win that funding battle.
That is why we need to play out of revenues and/or do our thing on ramen money: it's because the other method is massively stacked against us, and massively stacked in favour of idiots.
I keep wondering why Jobs keeps pushing HTML5. He too must realize the unsustainability of it all. A collapse has to happen -- and then how many "real" apps will remain for sale? And how many devs will migrate to the web where they don't have to have the approval of Apple or Google or any other hardware maker in order to create and publicize/sell something?
Jobs never liked the idea of Apps in the first place (probably because he knew it was unsustainable); he was fully prepared to go with a pure-webapp strategy until developers revolted. He's probably trying to get back out of that market as quickly as possible.
Is that the case? I thought it was more of an issue of the SDK and the APIs not being ready at the time that they wanted to launch.
I can't imagine that Jobs hates the notion of apps.
On the other hand, I don't understand why anyone involved with the Mac platform, where uniform interfaces are a big deal and microcriticism of widgets is so common, would ever champion the Web as a platform.
These worthless apps are also a cost to Apple. It is getting harder and harder to find quality apps on the App Store. The Store itself is now (a) the 'Featured' page, (b) the 'Top Ten' lists, and (c) Apple's 'Collections'. The more difficult it is to find quality apps the more difficult it will be for the ecosystem as a whole to improve.
Are there other examples of online stores with vast selections which genuinely help users find quality products? Netflix is the only one I can think of. (And don't get me started on Apple's 'Genius Recommendations'.)
It is a cost to Apple, but it is a problem they are actively addressing in R&D. I'm basing this statement largely on discussion from yesterday's HN post (the guy claiming to be "snubbed" on potential Apple business deal): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1440303
Why does everyone discount the idea of people finding apps through the search box? Are the users assumed to be unimaginative and unresourceful? Is the long tail too flat for anyone to make a living off of?
Maybe it's just me, but the process I use to determine what software I choose is not done in the store. Research via reading reviews and recommendations from others is usually the way I go about it.
The problem I have in the App Store (wrt. finding apps that are "free floating") is that I don't know what's out there, and it's difficult to predict what will show up when I type in a specific query.
I'm a gamer, so let's look at games. Typically, for my 360 and PC, I'm well aware of new games that are on the horizon. Big name publishers and even the smaller ones typically receive publicity well in advance of release, and on release day/week there is usually something I can find on metacritic that someone else has written about that game.
OTOH, in the App Store, I have very little idea on the quality of gameplay for new games released that day. Finding reviews outside of the App Store for games developed by one-man-shops is incredibly difficult.
Take the game "Red Conquest" as an example. I heard about it in an online web forum. I never saw it in any App Store category list, and a search for the term "RTS" is bound to contain so much fluff that I still wouldn't have found it. It's a game that I think exemplifies the lost-in-the-shuffle problem in the App Store. (FWIW, I love this game. It's brutally hard, but you can tone down the difficulty to make it manageable. Small things, like the fact that it boots in less than 5 seconds, or that it has bluetooth/wifi multiplayer, make a big difference).
To summarize, it's difficult to search using the search box because you don't know what you're looking for.
What about the barrier to entry: $100 + a Mac + an iPhone.
As compared to a computer, which pretty much everyone had by 1998. Also iPhone programming is way harder than HTML. I had a mandatory high school class that taught HTML.
Maybe I'm underestimating how many people are jumping on this, but my intuition is it can't be as many as were jumping on web. Twitter/social media marketing however... :P
For many novice developers, web development imposes its own barriers to entry. First of all, you need some server somewhere, which means you need to know something about servers, maybe have some sysadmin skills, and likely that you'll have to make some sort of ongoing cash outlay for it. Secondly, if you want to get paid you need to figure out how to process payments, or at the very least what ad network you want to attempt to embed.
On the dead simple end where you just want essentially a blog with ads, it's easy. On the not-so-simple end, where you want to build an application you can charge money for, the app store model is very straightforward. You don't have to make any decisions about servers or hosts, do any sysadmin work, worry about traffic spikes and scalability, and your cash outlays (aside from development time) are all upfront and totally predictable. Similarly, payment processing is already there and handled for you. And lastly, you don't have to worry about SEO or distribution channels because you don't have a choice in the matter.
It's easier to put up a web page somewhere than to build an app for the app store . . . but for a large number of people building an app for the app store is much simpler than putting up a web application. And that, I think, is a big reason why the app store exploded.
oh for sure. I differ though in that that's not the comparison being drawn in the article. TFA compares iPhone apps to pimply kids making web pages for local businesses in < 2001, and not, as you suggest, to developing web apps.
I had a few friends in high school that made decent money making websites for eg a local car dealership. It was easy because it's just HTML.
iPhone programming (i.e. ObjC + optional C/C++) is harder than HTML+CSS+JS+(PHP/Python/Ruby/Java/whatever)?
Despite stuff what HTML is made for (like static websites), almost everything else is much easier to develop in ObjC with Cocoa (in some IDE like Xcode).
Let's take a simple 2D top-down game (like Legend of Zelda) as an example, with an inbuilt level editor and some way to save/load games on/from your local disk (or for the web equivalent: somewhere in some database).
That is quite easy to do with ObjC. I, for example, started to learn coding with Visual Basic many years ago, and that example was my second project (after a few weeks of coding -- never ever coded before). (Ofc VB is way different than ObjC but they are similarly easy to handle.) The point is, leave some newbie alone with Xcode and he will manage to implement something like this (without much extra documentation because most stuff is straight forward).
Now, let's leave some newbie alone to implement that in HTML + JS + whatever serverside language he prefers. He maybe will fail already to setup the web server.
I know how hard web apps are, but the article isn't about that. It's about kids making static HTML pages, pre CSS and JS for everything except rollovers, which they certainly succeeded at.
Please also include -
a) ~30 dollars to buy an objective c book
b) N hours to learn a new language when youre perfectly productive in another language.
This attitude is perplexing to me. a) If you have internet access, why would you need to buy a book? b) Unless you're a strict Prolog or ML enthusiast, Objective C is similar enough to what you already know that you could probably be productive inside a weekend or two.
Also, learning a new language or library that's different enough from what you know that it takes more than a few hours to be comfortable (generally) makes you a better programmer.
Sorry, I do realize you were mostly trying to pile onto the IPhone cost tally, but I'm always surprised to see other programmers imply that learning new things is inherently hard and undesirable.
a) Because I stare at a computer screen ~10 hours a day at work. When I am reading in the evening I prefer to have a book, which I can underline and scribble in.
b) Every programmer over time develops tiny helpful apps that make life bearable, having to rewrite all those apps / utilities in a fresh new language is a burden that I would like to avoid.
c) Admittedly I am a bit more aggrieved than most people because my languages of choice are lisp, scheme and python.
I prefer to read from books but the information in most programming books is out of date very fast. For this reason, I prefer learning languages from the web.
When I began programming in the late 1980s, we learned Turbo Pascal running on 80286s that cost around $2000. I'd call $2,000 worth of hardware in 1980s dollars a pretty high barrier to entry, wouldn't you?
Now your only barrier to entry is a Mac mini and an iPod touch. Both of which can be had for less than $1,000 in 2010 dollars. The real barrier of entry is about 25% of the price we paid in the 1980s.
I would point out that there is as much difference between your basic piece of ShovelWare and a real iPhone app as there is between a "Home Page" and a Web app.
In both cases having a deep understanding of the platform and the skills to build non-trivial stuff on top if it will be valuable after gold rush phase has passed.
I think that the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad platform has taken off because the mobile Web is just painful to use right now in those tiny browsers.
Apple's fulfilling a niche that AOL did in the '90s. Where AOL provided training wheels for the Internet, Apple does the same thing for mobile computing. Unfortunately, AOL didn't figure out that users would eventually outgrow the training wheels and discover the open Internet.
I guess the same thing will happen with the mobile Web once browsers improve and people start to learn to design mobile Web sites for mobile devices. I think Apple realizes this, since they're putting effort into HTML 5.
What's more volatile than a discussion with a group of enthusiasts with chips on their shoulders made of pure sodium? A discussion that pits two such groups against each other.
When it comes to binary compatibility, Debian's answer is basically the same as the App Store's: Use only our official packages and you won't have to worry about compatibility.
With all the flamey comparisons about the contents of the iPhone App Store and Official Debian Repositories, who develops for each, and what their motivations are, what's getting lost is that in each case what connects the developers with officialdom is some kind of approval process. By investigating the App Store's approval process, the Debian project can get a lot of ideas about what they might want to add to their own approval process (and what they might want to remove from it).
I don't totally disagree. But I don't agree either. Maybe that's because I'm making enough off my ad supported app to pay my monthly iPhone bill. Not much more than that, but enough.
Whether you agree with a market or a business, it's your money and your choice and your investments.
Whether you believe the market is the next great thing or unsustainable, if it's trending up, that's money to be made.
Whether you think a widget is pretty or pretty ugly, it's money.
Whether you think the CEO is a genius or an idiot, if a company is going up, it's money. (And if you're positioned for and inclined for a put or with a CDS, a market or a business that's headed down can be money, too.)
Sure, the folks might eventually realize they're getting minimum wage, and that those fancy tulip bulks are all worthless. The key is stepping off before the bubble bursts.
Or you might wake up one morning, and realize that the business cycle has shifted, and iOS is everywhere.
>> I don't see a lot of debian apps doing better than facebook..
There's no possible scale of values that you could use to evaluate this comparison. It's not even apples to oranges. It's like saying Facebook is doing better than beagles. The things don't fit into the same category at all.
Here's a random example: one of the Debian apps is aptitude. It manages packages on the command-line. If you are a Debian sys-admin, it very likely enormously important to you. Nevertheless, it makes zero sense to say it's "doing better than Facebook." That sentence is just meaningless.
Facebook is doing way better than beagles! Beagles are predisposed to epilepsy; Facebook is not. Beagles did not generate $800MM in revenue last year; Facebook did!
Comparing Debian to Facebook in terms of revenue is literally senseless. Debian is a free - free as in beer, free as in freedom - operating system. It does not exist to make money. That was my real point since I suspected the OP meant "doing better" in terms of money.
Though eBay and Google were, Facebook was not part of the DotCom bubble.
Maybe I'm just overlooking it, but I'm not seeing a claim that Debian is or was more successful than any company that was founded during the DotCom bubble.
Maybe I did, but you still missed mine and added zero additional value to the conversation. So let me spoonfeed you my point:
The OP claims that 99.99% of all websites back in the day were shit, just like 99.99% of all iphone apps today are shit. He then makes a remark that suggests that Debian is a superior platform because the number of debian apps is small/manageable.
Now, I pointed out that out of the vast majority of shit of the early web came a bunch of valuable companies, and I conjecture that it was in part due to vast number of websites were built that it became _more_ likely that the web as a platform would be successful and that some websites would become hugely valuable.
From that I consider it a risky bet to say that the vast number of iPhone apps in itself makes the platform inferior.
I then finished off by pointing out that no debian _apps_ that I was aware of had in any way become as successful as a bunch of websites I could care to mention. Maybe it was that which confused you - they are separate but related points.
I don't think he missed your point at all. Would you say that GCC as one of the debian apps others here have mentioned was less successful?
It arguably helps power Facebook, Ebay, Google, Amazon,... and any number of other of those sites you mentioned. Or perhaps Python? is it less successful?
Or perhaps you defined successful in terms of revenue only? In which case that's a very narrowly defined term and the case could be made that such a narrowly defined definition of success adds "zero additional value" to the conversation.
Dude that makes no sense, sorry. Re-read my comment; my point is: high number of apps does not correlate negatively with importance of platform or value of whatever is created on that platform.
But it doesn't correlate positively either. The 'article' is in response to someone claiming that having X apps created in Y years obviously means that a platform is 'more quality' than another, which is rubbish logic.
Define better. Is better defined in terms of who makes more money. It is true that apples done a phenomenal job of creating an ecosystem where developers get paid for creating applications. The OSS world lacks such an ecosystem, which is why OSS apps have not been able to "change" the world. btw included as debian apps - gcc, apache , virtually every compiler and programming language known to man. Lastly debian comes with the dignity of allowing you to program in a language that you want to. Much of this applies to all other free operating systems too.
I'm not sure what you think is inane - I wouldn't mind hearing. And I read the post as anti-Appstore more than anti-Apple. (I think it's an important distinction in context.)
The poster is responding to this in the thread above him:
How many useful applications are in Debian's repositories?
<snip>
10 thousand? 20 thousand?
How long has Debian been around? 17 years?
Now compare this to iPhone: 3 years and ~140,000 applications.
The post isn't criticizing Apple so much as saying to that argument, "You're not counting parallel things here. The Appstore is filled with trivially small apps - apps that amount to no more than a simple webpage. That inflates those numbers."
Funny you should mention the original post, because he makes a very good yet obvious point:
> If 'Free Software' is to succeed as 'Free software' it needs to produce superior product and out compete
It was wrong of him to trot out total app count, because it's a meaningless number, but there's no question that the iPhone has attracted a huge amount of developer interest. This has resulted in a large library of very well-designed and compelling software across all categories, and has allowed independent developers to reach more users than they ever could have dreamed.
Much of this developer traction can be attributed to Apple's management of the App Store, but this kind of exciting software development was happening before the App Store, when developers did it just for fun and had to reverse-engineer the APIs. If you weren't there in 2007, you have no idea how exciting it was.
It says a lot about what can happen when you deliver a compelling piece of hardware running a sophisticated platform. Of course, the reply addressed none of it, and succeeds only in demonstrating a complete lack of understanding about consumer software development in 2010.
Thanks for the extended response. I don't believe that Debian (as the Free Software under discussion here) is in any relevant sense competing with iOS (or OSX, for that matter).
Debian's mission is to provide a universal (as much hardware as possible) operating system freely (free as in beer, free as in freedom). This simply doesn't strike me as the kind of thing that's competing with iOS in any relevant sense.
So, I don't think the author fails to address that point. I think it's irrelevant.
While I agree with this point completely, I also think bitching about Apple's iPhone and Ipad "apps" is a moot point. 5 years from now it's all going to be html5, and all of these apps will run on any mobile device web browser.
Apple now has such a head start on their app platform that pretty much the only reasonable strategy their competitors can do is collude and standardize on html5 for all apps.
Then Apple has a very big problem—they will be in direct opposition to Google and the rest of the organic, growing web. Never, ever bet against the web, nor face the web upstream.
If you discount 3d games, image manipulation programs, and some other specialized software that really can't "just be a web page", then what is even left for "apps" to do that the web can't?
Once you've overcome the current limitations of HTML by adding native code, offline mode, hardware support, local file access, and so on, is it really meaningful to call the result a "web" app? It's more like a native app written to a cross-platform layer (huh, somebody told me those were evil) that you can easily install from a web page.
The names "web" app and "native" are far too coarse grained to be meaningful. The important parts are the details.
Zero install or heavy weight install? Cross platform or single platform? Offline accessible or not? Safe for anyone to use, or not? Deep linkable or not? Etc.
These attributes can be mixed and matched. And will be.
That went over my head. By 'native client,' are you making a reference to the fact that the push to make all of our apps run on a server is a swing of the pendulum back to the 'mainframe' days and that some day people will be expounding the virtues of writing software to run on the client as the 'new thing?' Or is 'native client' a reference to some new browser technology that I'm unaware of (which is possible)?
Low latency audio, hardware access, virtual memory, et al aren't handled at all or well by NaCl. So something on the scale of Photoshop with it's ability to edit 250MB+ images is nigh impossible with NaCl. Something on the scale of Logic Audio or Cubase, impossible.
Also, with a network bottleneck, mutli-GB 3D games will be unpleasant at best.
That's true, iPhone apps aren't like Debian packages at all. iPhone apps are self-contained, sandboxed, can only access data that I allow them to, and if I delete them, every trace of them is gone. A Debian package on the other hand first of all has to pull 57 other packages in order to even work, each of which splatters hundreds of files of all kinds all over my filesystem, and if I uninstall a package, I can rest assured that at least two dozen configuration files remain abandoned somewhere in /etc. I'm not sure how someone could confuse the two.
# remove package, its dependents _and_ purge config files
aptitude purge <package-name>
# purge config files from items that were removed but not purged
aptitude purge ~c
And, to play Devil's advocate the other way around, because Debian's tools are not sandboxed, they can inter-operate sanely. You can, you know, share things, print them, move them around. It's as if - shocking - you own your own data. Imagine that.
I work pretty regularly with both Debian and OSX. They both have areas where they excel. I think you're being pretty simplistic.
Well, I want to make a few things clear here. First of all, I was being a bit snarky obviously. I didn't know about "aptitude purge", but it's a bit ironic that when googling for that, the first result is a forum post about someone with orphaned config files that aptitude purge wouldn't remove... sounds reliable.
I think it's time for desktop OS makers (and that includes Apple, because OS X isn't any different from Linux or Windows in this regard at all) rethink the way software is installed and organized. In my opinion, the way you can install and try applications without consequences on iOS devices has a lot going for it. Users actually install stuff on their iPads, which they don't on their Windows computers because they're scared of unintended consequences.
It sounds like you don't know Debian very well. That's fine. No reason you should. I know Debian reasonably well. I can tell you that in four years of using aptitude, I have found a very small number of edge cases where it does not work sanely, efficiently and helpfully. (To clarify it's really APT + aptitude. aptitude is one possible tool to use APT.) It's not perfect; no software is. But it's quite remarkable. I believe it to be a far better packaging system than anything available for OSX, including Homebrew - which I like a lot and which gets better all the time.
To respond to your follow-up, I deeply disagree about iOS representing a good future for software. The kernel already implements one filesystem - and that's a big job. Why would we want every application to have to reinvent that wheel? Worse yet, how we will we allow and help users to share data between all our little sandboxes if we go that route? I think the iOS sandboxing is a disaster and huge step backwards for software.
A final question: in your original post you say if you remove an iPhone app, no trace of it is left. How would you know? My point being that the system is so locked down, there's really no basis for us to know that. For all we know, iApps leave the drive cluttered with their configuration files and preferences. Maybe you develop for Apple and can show me I'm wrong (or someone else can), but as a user there's no real way for me to know this, is there?
(Edit: This response was written at a point when the parent post was quite a bit more unfriendly than it is now. I'll leave this here regardless, even though it's out of context now.)
Was I in any way rude to you?
1. That's not what I said.
2. I admit that I don't use Debian, but internally, package managers don't differ that much. I was criticizing the model where software has to install files all over the place. I think the proper response should be "make a simpler model", not "write a complex tool that can keep track of this mess".
3. So I was wrong and Debian packages come with cleanup scripts. That's good. Am I right in assuming that those cleanup scripts are only as good as the maintainer of the package, i.e. there's nothing inherent in the design of Debian that makes this cleanup function work reliably. (Note that some config files might have been created after installation, i.e. are not part of the original package.)
4. What?
5. Have you talked to a casual computer user recently? They are afraid of installing unknown software, yes. Almost everyone I know has had malware on their PC at one point or another.
You were not rude. My initial response was unhelpful and aggressive, and I quickly edited it to respond to your arguments. I apologize for the initial response.
For the record, regarding 3, there is something in the design of Debian that makes the cleanup function work very reliably. (Again, not perfectly, but very reliably.) There are strict, strict rules for Debian maintainers in terms of the pre-install and post-removal scripts that go with packages. These rules help to maintain a very uniform system - even though its actively developed by thousands of people all over the world who are often only loosely connected to each other.
Apology accepted. Much of my dislike for package managers is on theoretical grounds (I use Macports, but only casually), so it's great to argue with someone who actually knows something about them.
well, as a user, there's no real way for you to know that aptitude purge completely removes everything, you have to trust that it works. Sure, as a power-user or developer, you can go look around /etc or /usr/share or wherever and remove all those configuration and documentation files, but will you?
I used debian for about a year, I trusted that aptitude purge removed as much as it could. I knew that trust was misplaced, but for my purposes as a user, it was good enough.
Similarly, for iOS devices, I don't know how well it removes config files and whatnot. I simply trust that it removes everything. I have slightly more trust in iApp config files being removed because these apps are sandboxed, and it's a relatively simple matter of removing the directory the app fills.
I hear what you're saying, but I think you misunderstood me.
I wasn't trying to distinguish regular users from power users. I was trying to distinguish all users (however knowledgeable) from specially licensed developers. I was trying to make about about the openness and freedom of Debian as a platform versus the locked-down nature of iOS.
Also, I disagree about your trust: it wasn't misplaced.
> I deeply disagree about iOS representing a good future for software.
Now that's a point worth discussing. iOS is locked down to the point where I would almost call it unusable -- we don't disagree here. However, I'm also convinced that some steps in that direction are needed to keep the "general-purpose computer" viable as a mass-market device. A computing environment that's open enough so that software can be useful, yet closed enough so that it can't be harmful. (Harmful defined in the broad sense that it can't have any unwanted or permanent effect on the system, including: changing the homepage, installing toolbars, running persistently in the background and so on.) All this has to work in the absence of a central authority.
He did say that it has to work in the absence of a central authority. It's hard for a central authority to control your device when it doesn't rely on a central authority.
Maybe we just need to re-imagine the operating-system level security model in a way that tries to tackle the security issues that we have today.
I think the original article is talking about how trivial use-cases are being sold as standalone apps in many cases, how does the packaging issues in debian relate to this ? Besides I hope you know about "apt-get purge", I am yet to see a debian package leave things behind after a purge.
But again, just like the dot com boom, once the market has matured to blow away the chaff, what remains will have proven pretty game-changing.