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).
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 hundreds. 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.
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).
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.
I'm having trouble with your argument. After all, the 2600 was the original walled garden from which all others have sprung. It was also the source of court cases which set precedent for walled gardens. If I remember correctly, Atari ROMs had an image in them that the firmware checked for before allowing the ROM to run. But the image was copyrighted, so you couldn't sell Atari ROMs without giving a cut to Atari. The only exception was Tengen, who had a historical license due to being a spin-off of Atari.
What you say is true for the Atari 7800, not the 2600. The 2600 had no protection or verification at all; it wasn't remotely thought of when the 2600 was designed in 1977. The 2600 happily runs any ROM at all containing executable 6502 machine code. There isn't even any BIOS in the 2600. Literally all it does at startup is point the program counter to an address within the ROM address space.
The 2600 was walled-by-obscurity for its first several years, since the video chip was custom designed by Atari and not documented publicly, plus the tools to write and compile and run 6502 assembler were fairly primitive. But by 1982 or so, enough reverse-engineering had been done and the tools had matured and enough Atari expertise was available on the hiring market that the system was essentially fully open.
(I've been there - I wrote an Atari 2600 game my freshman year of college in 1997.)
OK, so I didn't remember correctly. I'm glad I put that disclaimer in my first comment! I tried to Google for it, but the late 70s is prehistory for Google.
I'm still having trouble buying the collapse of the walled garden as the reason for the video game crash of 83-84. Pac-man and ET are widely cited as two of the major causes of the crash, and those were in-house Atari productions so the walled garden wouldn't have helped there.
Well, garden collapse was one factor among many. It could be argued that Atari had to rush their shoddy Pac-man to market lest a competitor jump in with a clone first. Another factor was the appearance of pornographic games (Rule 34 applied even then) which hurt the field's reputation.
But there were plenty of other management and business causes of the crash too. Atari reportedly produced more ET cartridges than existed 2600 systems, hubristically deciding that ET would drive a wave of system buying. That sort of financial wizardry won't be saved by any amount of ecosystem walls.
I'd say that the openness of the system caused the failure of Atari itself more so than it caused the industrywide crash. Atari couldn't maintain premium game prices and volume against the flood of competition. (If better games weren't available, ET would have sold more in the vacuum.) A similar story played out in the PC market over the next decade: IBM created an open system, then got marginalized out of their own industry in a race to the bottom. But the whole PC industry always thrived.
I also think the crash itself is overblown in latter-day coverage. I was a kid and didn't notice anything at the time; Toys R Us still had shelves full of Atari games right up until the NES caught on. The bankruptcy of invincible titan Atari itself was a big event, but Coleco didn't fold until 1988 and Mattel and Magnavox trucked right on in other fields of business.
So tying all this back to the topic, remember that Apple's interest is Apple's own survivability and profitability. Apple's responsibility is not to maximize the adoption and utility of the mobile phone app market in general. Apple's goal is to capture the biggest slice of the pie for itself, and it perceives that it has the clout to do that by dictating terms. Whether they will go the way of the NES to market domination or the way of IBM's Micro Channel to obscurity is up to the market.
You are misrembering history a bit here. The "lockout chip" concept came with Nintendo's NES (Famicom in Japan). Tengen bypassed the lockout chip for their games (including their NES version of Tetris which many consider vastly superior to Nintendo's implementation) and this resulted in a lawsuit from Nintendo which was eventually settled because the court ruled that there was no copyright claim and that Nintendo's patent claim was probably too weak to stand (though the settlement occured before that was passed back to the USPTO).
Having said all of that, I too am confused with the argument here -- the videogame console market is very much a walled garden and has been for a very long time.
Don't quite agree with your statement "As the mobile app market continues to mature it will strain against its walled garden confines more and more". On the contrary, I feel that consumers will continue to appreciate walled gardens for their convenience, quality and trust worthiness.
I guess this argument will be tested by the Mac app store.
I don't think I've ever seen anyone blame the 80s videogame crash on raw number of available titles. Everything I've read to date points to the nose-dive in average quality.
i.e. People weren't driven away by the array of choices. They were driven away by bad experiences.
As an early 80s mom, dad, or child (the people who made the buying choices for video games) how do you decide what games to buy? When a dozen games are made a year and they are all generally good you can buy based on what looks interesting. Moreover, with such a small number of products the chance that someone you know has already played a recently released game and can give you an opinion on it is high. This meant that consumers had a high chance of getting something good just based on blind buying decisions and they also had a fairly easy time of learning about the gems. When the video game bubble hit full force the market was flooded with hundreds of games, many of them low quality, far too many for people to keep up with.
The system broke down, the chances of buying a good game just on chance were low, and thus the chances that any of your friends had happened to buy a good game was also low. It only took a few times of people getting burned for them to stop taking the risk and to curtail their game buying, staying content with the existing library of games they had. Even though there were still many quality games (donkey kong jr, joust, ms. pac man, and pole position were all released in '83), there was so much crap that people simply withdrew from the market. Moreover, the bubble was reliant on an unlikely massive growth spurt in video game buying, the game industry over leveraged itself, it would have crashed even without a collapse of consumer confidence.
> 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).
The game console industry is still very much based on walled gardens.
The example in my mind was Kongregate being removed from the Market. It got back on, but the comments from Kongregate referenced "competing app stores".
Kongregate was removed from Google Market, but that does not prevent it from being distributed separately (On Android you can download apps directly from the web and install them, without using the app store).
So you're using a custom rom or you're rooted. I thought it was obvious I was referring to stock. You can also run whatever you want on an iPhone if you root.
@jancona: I didn't sideload with ADB. I copied the .apk to my phone via USB and used a file manager to access my file system. Tapping on the apk installed it just fine. If AT&T disables sideloading with ADB, how do developers test their apps on AT&T's Android offering?
@lukeschlather: I'm using a Nexus One; it may not be possible for phones customized specifically by AT&T. If this is the case, it's pretty f'n unfortunate.
Which phones allow this? I'm honestly curious, I thought AT&T had switched that off on all models. Is yours grandfathered in or are they releasing new models with unknown sources enabled?
Given his "Stock 2.2" comment, best guess would be the Nexus One with AT&T bands. Since it wasn't sold by AT&T, it doesn't have the APK installation locked down.
Also, in the blog's comments you were asking if Google will allow the distribution of another App Market to be distributed via the Android Market, looks like they do:
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.
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.
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.
There are plenty of other platforms that can make money
List them, please.
Winmo has been a complete failure so far.
Android has shipped a lot of handsets, but the users don't seem to like to pay for apps.
Nokia is dead.
Palm is dead.
The next closest competitor to the Apple App Store is still nothing more than a tiny dot on the horizon. Maybe that will change, but most developers want to get paid TODAY.
I don't expect WP7 to immediately take the market by storm. If anything, Microsoft showed what they do with the Zune; they don't care for market dominance, just a share of that market will do them just fine. WP7 won't be the dominant phone, but I can see it being the new Blackberry and finding a great niche of paying customers.
> Android has shipped a lot of handsets, but the users don't seem to like to pay for apps.
This is the attitude I cannot understand. People won't pay money for things that don't provide value, regardless of platform. Choosing Apple because "iPhone users pay for stuff" is like opening a McDonalds by a public school because "they've got the money to buy things". The Android market isn't perfect, but it's getting better and better and people that make good apps for Android will likely be rewarded by great sales.
people that make good apps for Android will likely be rewarded by great sales.
Except that it seems most developers who have an iOS app and and Android app report far better sales from the iOS version of their apps.
In some sense you are correct, people will buy things that provide value to them. What is unclear is if the "value" in their Android handsets is the availability of apps, or the greater availability of free apps. People buying iPhones seem to expect to pay for additional apps. It's unclear if people buying Android devices expect to pay for apps, or if they expect it to be FOSS, where the majority of the apps are free. If it's the latter case, then Android may never be a profitable primary distribution source for developers, though it can be potentially monetized in other ways.
To my knowledge most developers aren't exactly earning a mint from either platform. There are success stories on each platform, although as the iPhone at one time had more users it seemed only logical to go for that market.
Android is now at a point where the average user couldn't care less about OS having open-source aspects. The reason few people buy apps for Android is because while there are a lot of apps most of them are awful or have free alternatives. This is what separates the iPhone experience from the Android experience, and in my mind this is why people don't spend big on Android, and why people would if the right app came along.
It can, but many prefer to be be to charge a price for an app and give a great user experience rather than making it free and stuffing it with ads. iOS allows you to do this far easier that Android does currently.
Totally agree. I'm a single developer/designer who makes a lot of money from the App Store. A lot of my friends have six figure incomes because of the App Store. When a platform puts money in your account and food on the table, it's a little difficult to rage against it.
Given that this is recurring revenue and not dependent upon new sales (though, yes, dependent on new content packs), I'd say it's pretty well done. With the caveat that Angry Birds is the outlier, not the norm.
My sympathies are 100% with Android but until the underlying audio & media APIs are much more mature I just can't implement the kinds of apps I'm interested in on Android. I'm keeping an eye on it though.
Absolutely. In a way the most shocking aspect of all this is that Google hasn't jumped at the opportunity to bring established app developers over to their platform. If Google continues to wait around and not refine their tools I can see Microsoft moving in to establish themselves as the underdog and as a strong developers choice.
What kind of apps? As of Gingerbread, the NDK supports OpenSL ES, which seems like a perfectly decent API for games and other low-latency audio applications.
Contrast this with iOS which provides the robust and featureful CoreAudio api. As far as I can tell there doesn't appear to be anything like the new Accelerate framework introduced in iOS 4 for Android either, so things like native FFT aren't available.
A year ago I would have laughed at the final statement that people will dump their iPhones faster than Apple is ready for.
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.
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.
Side note. My kids do not. They think my Android games are stupid.
Despite Android's popularity, people are not buying apps. The google app store is in danger now of getting people relying on free apps, so they may never be willing to buy apps. This is different to iPhone users. Of course, android app store may change as time goes on, and it gets new users, but the majority of apps in the android app store are free.
Also, it is not "I could care less", that makes no sense. It is "I couldn't care less".
I believe Google wants the Android Store to be full of free apps...that just happen to be supported by Google ads. Otherwise, Google doesn't get anything out of the Android platform.
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.
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.
Apple does not appear to take an interest in third party developers prospering beyond the PR value of "featured apps" and similar PR - they do not view app purchasers as the developer's customers - they assume that all customer's first brand loyalty is Apple above all. In the case of the Kindle app, Apple's attitude is that nobody buys the iPad as an ebook reader selecting it over competing readers - they are pretending that iPad ownership is a necessary condition for an interest in ebooks among iPad owners.
Predictability is the bread and butter of B2B relationships, and Apple doesn't get it. Instead Apple treats developers as consumers rather than partners - changing terms to the developer agreement as if they were a specsheet for a piece of consumer electronics.
You shouldn't trust any platform vendor. If you're too small to get a contract stipulating that they can't pull the rug out from under you, you should start developing only after making a careful calculation of risk/reward.
For many many years ISVs made money in "the Microsoft ecosystem".
Yes, sometimes MS pulled the rug out from under them and/or directly competed with them with unfair advantage. But not really that often.
They certainly never "pulled your app from the store". I'm still having a hard time getting my head around that concept and why anyone would invest development resources into that kind of platform.
The questions is: "will I make money on this platform?"
The answer varies from project to project, platform to platform. But it has nothing to do with 'trust' in the platform vendor.
If your answer involves "I trust the platform vendor" you're not making a decision, you're gambling.
> "I'm still having a hard time getting my head around that concept and why anyone would invest development resources into that kind of platform."
It's a risk like any other. (Non-gambling) business-people accept risk when they think they can make enough money to offset it.
Oh, except for every time that someone made a large enough profit (wordperfect, visicalc, Corel Office, Peachtree or Quicken) or made a big enough splash (Netscape/Mozilla, google, more recently mint.com) in their ecosystem.
"pulled your app from the store"
But, they can if you sell on XBox Live Arcade, or Windows Phone Apps Marketplace (especially if you have an open source license for your app that MS doesn't like).
Right, we can list a dozen or two Windows products that were possibly competed with unfairly by MS. Over a period of 20 years.
The vast majority of MS Windows software products fail for reasons other than the platform vendor screwing them over intentionally. MS has known from the beginning that the success of Windows was primarily dependent on ISVs developing for it.
The XBox and MS Phone stuff seem like different things entirely. XBox is specifically not intended to be a general-purpose application platform. I can't imagine the MS Phone will ever require more than a free download SDK to develop for it, although this "marketplace" is likely to be a more reviewed ecosystem.
especially if you have an open source license for your app that MS doesn't like
It's not a question of MS not liking it. GPL, especially v3, is designed specifically to prevent binary-only app distribution which is the app store business model.
Trust works as in the real world: you choose to interact or start transactions with people that you trust. Contracts are indeed used for protection, but contracts also contain fine-prints not meant for mere mortals to read, that's why trust is still so important.
Also in the real world, people that often violate the trust of others are sooner or later marginalized, excluded from the social circles that supported them.
Risk/reward calculations sound nice, certainly within the skills of any MBA, but impossible to do in our industry and whenever I hear people talk about it sounds more to me like trying to rationalize a bad decision.
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 need 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.
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.
Depending on what kinds of apps you write, this may never happen. How long do you think it will take, for example, for something like the Accelerate framework to be available in a usable form in a web api? It's hard enough to get something relatively simple like local storage standardized.
Unfortunately most of the apps that can be realized as web apps are just more of the glorified paperwork UIs I burned out on writing as a web dev in the first place.
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.
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 http://www.apple.com/webapps/
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.
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.
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.
The level of effort required to create a high-quality professional app is more than many dev teams are capable of. Despite the numbers you hear about 100s of thousands of apps the truly valuable apps are few and far between, Apple squanders those at their peril.
While that's true, it's hard to imagine a platform with millions of users willing to pay for apps and shortage of good developers. With the recent events it looks like Apple is mistreating all iOS developers, but in practice I think that most of them really don't have that much to complain about.
Even the devs who get screwed by Apple's policies seem to do no more than write an angry blog post, usually ending with something like "but if apple would like to pretty, pretty please make an exception or reconsider their policy we would love to re-submit our app".
I don't see any serious pressure coming from anywhere to be honest.
I disagree - I think that Apple's %30 cut will make a lot paid web services unattractive business propositions. Too costly for consumers, too uncertain for developers.
Deep, sophisticated web services do not pop up overnight. I think that Apple will feel pressure when their web store is completely overrun with $.99 games and low value apps... and Android users enjoy a comparatively deep pool of high quality services and publications.
I think that Apple will feel pressure when their web store is completely overrun with $.99 games and low value apps
This argument makes no sense to me. Apple's 30% cut is too high, and therefore app developers are going to tend to cut their prices? What sense does that make?
I thought the whole "problem" here was that the 30% cut was going to force publishers to raise their prices (across the board) to cover the additional distribution cost. And to sell product at those higher prices they will need to provide more value. Perhaps more value than they can provide.
The argument, I would assume, is something more along the lines that high-quality applications strain under the load of 30% royalties paid to Apple. This is definitely true in some cases. Ebooks spring to mind as the most obvious example as most publishers don't have 30% in their margins to give.
I'm not sure I completely agree with the premise. I do think that as Apple continues to push against the developer community you'll see a continuing downward trend in average app quality. The de-facto culture of the .99 app has already driven much of that, but at some point more sophisticated developers are going to be looking for greener pastures away from Apples control. The question is: how hard can Apple squeeze before that happens?
I'm seeing some of it now. The better developers have seemed to only make half-hearted attempts at Android ports thus far. Their attention has been so focused on the Apple cash machine that it's made it difficult to shift focus. So you see a lot of inferior ports dotting the Android market. With the uncertainty that Apple is creating in the development community, I'm betting that you'll see more and more developers hedging their bets and building out much higher quality applications on Android.
I'm sure Google is doing everything possible to court that. In the end Android benefits not because everyone wholesale leaves the iOs ecosystem, but rather because they start putting some of those iOS dollars to work making things better on Android.
That's how Apple loses in the end. Android has a huge distribution advantage. These decisions serve to erode the iOS app advantage. Once Android has achieved level pegging in apps I see nothing stopping it from taking over the world.
Apple hasn't raised their price, the problem is that they are requiring companies that sell a subscription or content outside of the app store to also sell the same thing in the app store and give apple a 30% cut. This is going to prevent a lot of good web services from having apps in the app store.
Low quality apps like $.99 games won't be effected.
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 hundreds. 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.
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).
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.