No one wants to invest time and effort to develop for a platform that has a horrible review process. You have to invest multiple people's months worth of work without knowing if that particular snapshot of your app will offend the reviwer.
The lack of native apps is the App Store reviews process fault.
And the only reason for that review is that Apple won’t let any software run on the platform. If Apple is the gatekeeper, any bad software that makes it through is their fault. They would never be able to keep up with it all or give private APIs a fair analysis, so they gatekeeper approvals and simply block anything they can’t vaguely autoanalyze.
The App Store revenue is a poison pill that will eventually start killing them. It’s already holding back their platforms, and the law can’t not bring down the hammer forever. The iPhone, iPad, Watch, and the Vision Pro would be truly remarkable platforms without the arbitrary, puritan rules.
It's amazing how SoundCloud had "everything" and they threw away. They had the unique Indy artists, they had the DJs and music producers, and they opted to move to compete with Spotify on a money loosing bet, without putting the effort to build the Player in at least every single platform supported.
They did even more harm to themselves by blocking open source players that were doing "their work for free".
If there is one big mistake they did early on was to block API access. The other one was to bet on "record labels contract" rather then becoming the source for Originals.
There is nothing in the world that is as good as soundcloud was in 2012. It wasn’t scalable at that time, but it was an incredible melting pot of discoverability. I used to spend a lot of time on a site called CitySounds (it no longer exists) that was a geofenced soundcloud firehose. It allowed me to listen to the latest music from bedroom DJs in Sao Paulo or a live polka band from Vienna or a Russian children’s recital. Most of it was garbage, but it was diverse and interesting garbage, and that made it compelling to me. At the time, I ran a radio show, and being able to connect with a high school kid in Italy who was making cool hip hop beats was a way more meaningful human experience than playing another Pitbull track. And I think our listeners appreciated it too.
It was as close as the world could practically get to copy-left, remix culture, and they threw it away because the founders lacked guts or vision or both, and the company was taken over by people who believe in a homogenized distribution model. It hurts my soul that we don’t have tools like old soundcloud - with the exception of last.fm, which keeps holding on. Last year, I would have said that bandcamp is carrying the torch, but I don’t think that’s true any more… perhaps the fediverse has an opportunity to step in here… perhaps we just need a new crop of founders who believe in a world full of diverse musical culture.
Edit: I'll also add that the world lost an amazing tool when Echonest was bought. It would have been so cool to see that product blossom into a platform for general purpose music production and discovery. But instead, we get access to a nerfed version locked behind Spotify's API
By 2014 it wasn't great though, as too many people were using it as a "link dump" for whatever music they were making, because they all heard that SoundCloud was great for getting discovered.
> There is nothing in the world that is as good as soundcloud was in 2012.
Around 2009-2010 the local scene was thriving with netlabels. Most of those netlabels were just a static HTML page with a list of releases, a ZIP file and an album cover. If you ended up at some event, you'd discover the netlabel and you'd look at their releases on their webpage. Soundcloud came at just the right time for me to become the Web 2.0 equivalent of the indie music scene. You'd discover an artist at some event, or via a netlabel release, and then find out what else they were doing and just keep up with them. If you were a musician it was just too convenient.
> It was as close as the world could practically get to copy-left, remix culture, and they threw it away because the founders lacked guts or vision or both
This is exactly what was happening locally. A few of those netlabels had releases under creative commons licenses, with artists encouraging people to remix their tracks, offering up stems for download and the whole scene thrived on some really neat remixes, which usually ended up on Soundcloud and you ended up discovering that remixer's original work in the process.
I think the tide turned when everyone started to just dump everything on soundcloud. At some point it became so popular that DJ mixes started to dominate feeds, people just started dumping other people's work on there and then not-quite-so-indie labels started using it for promotion. It was a matter of time before the rights holder collection agencies started smelling blood in the water and the first articles of "soundcloud is not paying royalties" appeared.
It's around that time that Soundcloud just became less and less useful to me. The local netlabels and indie scene ended up using Soundcloud less, opting for Twitter and other social media for promotion while releasing on Bandcamp. People who used to be very active there just reposted other people's releases until those fizzled out too. Over the course of a year or two it went from the place to discover exciting new music to the place nobody paid attention to.
> perhaps the fediverse has an opportunity to step in here… perhaps we just need a new crop of founders who believe in a world full of diverse musical culture
I honestly think it was lightning in a bottle, the right thing at the right time. The once diverse radio landscape had been dying for a while, with each station sounding the same and no longer catering to various subcultures, which often weren't very advertiser friendly. The variety of record stores were disappearing in favor of online distribution leaving only the really big chains who rarely bothered with promoting the new and unknown unless it came from a major label. With the record labels railing against online distribution at the time and various well known artists going off and directly releasing their music online, few really wanted to have anything to do with traditional labels.
I think the success of the local netlabels at the time came from all that which in turn at least locally fed into soundcloud being the missing link. I don't think you can really recreate all that, certainly not the momentum the copyleft licenses had. Adding the fediverse to it feels like just adding an extra set of hoops to jump through for discoverability.
With the Bandcamp situation I do feel it's time for something new and exciting, but it will coast on inertia for a while like Soundcloud did before becoming a shadow of its former self.
All these web companies ran on gatekeeping their data to employ frontend teams. They look even more valuable to the financiers seeking to keep the aggregate busy so they don’t have time to focus on the expropriation of their labor and deflation of their buying power.
But it’s a terrible long term strategy as it cuts off the group who would pay for API access only. But also a community of frontend first users who don’t care about APIs but design and functionality that works for them, means frontend first users jump to the next company with a frontend. If there was an API fee and key, and open frontends of various styles, Sooundcloud wins.
There are API only streamers out there but they tend to focus on serving big tech. Apple I know specifies quality levels but actually passes some streaming requests along to wholesaler backends that deal with all the API and licensing crap for them.
So software makers should give their competitors their software with a liberal free “as in beer” license and then try to compete with them.
This isn’t a workable or sustainable model. The companies leveraging free software don’t have to work nearly as hard on software which means they can focus 100% on ops and marketing. And of course they don’t give anything back to the software creators.
> So software makers should give their competitors their software with a liberal free “as in beer” license and then try to compete with them.
This is literally what they did when they released their product code under an OSS license. It was their free choice.
> This isn’t a workable or sustainable model. The companies leveraging free software don’t have to work nearly as hard on software which means they can focus 100% on ops and marketing. And of course they don’t give anything back to the software creators
The other companies might not need to work so hard, but they also have little to no control.
If you can't build a sustainable business on a piece of software when you are the steward of that software, control the product direction and backlog etc., then you're not very good at the business.
Or, put another way, if your business success hinges on people not competing when they have access to (and license to use) your source code, when releasing it under an OSS license demonstrates that you're not very good at the business.
> If you can't build a sustainable business on a piece of software when you are the steward of that software, control the product direction and backlog etc., then you're not very good at the business.
The elephant in the room here is that software is incredibly expensive. Developing and maintaining a large project requires a large team of high salary software devs.
I’d estimate the cost of building, supporting, and maintaining Vault at $3-4M a year bare minimum for the core team and related overhead. It also takes a ton of energy and focus all the way to the top of the organization.
The company building and maintaining the software must spend that. Someone just using the software to resell in the cloud or rebranding it can instead put all that money and mental energy into marketing and ops.
The company that does not have to maintain the software has a massive advantage. They’re freed from that burden.
> The elephant in the room here is that software is incredibly expensive. Developing and maintaining a large project requires a large team of high salary software devs.
There's plenty of expensive, major open source projects that seem to have figured this out. The fact that Hashicop can't doesn't mean the model is broken, it just means Hashicorp aren't very good at this.
> Someone just using the software to resell in the cloud or rebranding it can instead put all that money and mental energy into marketing and ops.
It's not that simple. Once again, the "reseller" doesn't have control over the direction of their business. Which means they should always fail, long term, relative to the org that actually spends the money on controlling the development.
If you can't compete and outmanoeuvre someone who's simply slapping a label on your software, you probably shouldn't release your software under an OSS license.
> The company that does not have to maintain the software has a massive advantage. They’re freed from that burden.
I think it's pretty clear that we both take very different views on what maintaining and developing software means. You see it as a massive burden, I see it as an enormous advantage / opportunity.
> There's plenty of expensive, major open source projects that seem to have figured this out
Like? Red Hat are the only one, and they sell very special software. I can't think of any other ones that are successful as a fully open source project that also has a sustainable profitable business build on top of it.
Last names are also not limited to ASCII. There all sorts of special caracters depending on the language like üáàãéèç-' (the single quote is specially important because its normally blocked due to SQL injection, but its a common character in italian/french/spanish names).
Preventing people from writing their own names because you decide to use a regexp from stackoverflow is also bad.
The scope is mutable. What was asked in the quote, is different from what it became when planing started and is different from what it endup 6 months down the road.
I've migrated away from Evernote when they converted their MacOS and iOS apps from native to "Electron based". Simple things you expect from a "note taking app" to handle, like, search through text files, or "selecting multiple notes" were severely limited due to the technology limitations.
You could only select 50 items per time in the new "javascript" based desktop version, because that was too much state for react to handle.
The other thing that they broke was the apple pencil support. Using it would result in several seconds of latency.
I was a paying customer at this time, I've canceled my subscription entirely. I checked the app a few times after that to see if they managed to improve anything, the didn't. It only got worst.
So, if you have a native app, you have a moat with it, don't ruin your only opportunity to stand out.
Have you considered sending a MR for the "very small" things that bugs you? GitLab team member here... I have a personal list of things I wish will be prioritized, but there is only much you can do with the scope the application has and the amount of coworkers. So when things really piss me off, I reserve some time and send a MR to fix that.
That's what I've done before joining the company, so it works ;)
Brazil unbanked population in 2011 was ~41%. Having a bank account was not a straightforward process and included higher costs for the vast majority of the population.
Having a bank account would normally means you get a card that could only withdraw money from an ATM. If you wanted a "debit" card that would cost more.
Credit card were something out of reach for many. Low income folks alternative for credit were to rely on general stores own credit bureau.
With the liberalization in the banking system and the many fintechs that disrupted the market, the unbanked number droped to a single digit in 2021, and with pix, many just skipped the debit card all together.
The lack of native apps is the App Store reviews process fault.