App Store's Emphasis on Chart Positioning Squeezing Out Developers and Media Publications

[TrueBlou]

It might have been true at the start that Apple owed some success to the indie devs, but I'd guess most of them had their run and lost out to the big guys. Once the big guys came to town, the role of the indie changed forever. I would guess most indies don't show up on the charts as more than an blimp from time to time. Esp when you consider the number of indies out there. About the only thing I can think of for Apple to do is to make a separate section for indies to allow them to stand out a bit.

Not necessarily true to be fair. Indie doesn't just mean one guy coding away in his bedroom these days. Indie, as in not tied to a publisher covers a wide range of developers.

Some quite large, some small. Last I checked and I admit I may be out of date but springing to mind are, Realmac, 2D Boy, Zepto labs. Outside of iOS you have companies like Insomniac, huge developer but not tied to a specific publisher so technically still an indie. I could go on but I can't be arsed doing the research

Although obviously same rule applies, the bigger the indie the more attention they get and that's the crux of the issue.

 

[1458279]

It's also true that not all indies are created equal. Some put out some awesome work and should be rewarded. Sadly, not all are properly rewarded.

So, yea, I see your point. I don't know that Apple can or will do anything about it.

 

[TrueBlou]

It's also true that not all indies are created equal. Some put out some awesome work and should be rewarded. Sadly, not all are properly rewarded.

So, yea, I see your point. I don't know that Apple can or will do anything about it.

Sadly not all put out great work either (myself included when I began, slightly better now) the AppStore is so chock full of crap that I personally think tighter control is needed over what does and doesn't get approved.

Remember a year or two back Apple put a ban on fart apps, flashlight apps and suchlike that were just getting out of control. Well the same needs to be expanded upon, a lot.

For instance, during the flappy bird craze did we really need 30,000 games that were exactly the same bar the character and the frequency of the adverts rammed down the throat of any poor unsuspecting person foolish enough to download them. Of course we didn't, and it's this sort of nonsense that needs to be put a stop to first and foremost.
I'm not saying no similar apps at all but once there are a certain level of similar apps out there, and we all know when that point is reached so Apple must too. if you aren't adding anything unique, interesting or noteworthy then you don't get it on the store. (Simplified of course, but people would start throwing fruit at me if I started writing the equivalent of a short novel.)

Apple could also employ some significant changes to AppStore discovery. Even after all this time we still don't have any way of filtering down a search, it's just scrolling and scrolling, and scrolling. As a consumer, never mind a developer, I'm sick of that.

I also think that when a specific search term is entered, say you were looking for Ikea. Well, top of the list of results should be whatever app name matches the search term exactly. Then all the rest of the results. (Ok Ikea probably does, but you know what I mean.)

I've got apps out there that when I look for them myself I have to scroll past dozens upon dozens of apps bearing no apparent relation to what I typed in the search box. If I go to Amazon and type in garden hose, I don't expect to be bombarded with results for home colonic irrigation kits before I get to the thing I want to water my lawn with.

I'll stop ranting for now, the wife is glaring at me because I'm supposed to be getting ready to go out

I'll just finish up by saying this, I very much doubt Apple are in any hurry to do anything about the state of the AppStore as it is. They simply don't care as long as they have nice big numbers to boast about.

 

[Boris-VTR]

Apple isn't likely to change the app store for devs because devs need Apple more than Apple needs most of the devs. Although devs do pay to be on the app store, I doubt it adds up to much to Apple.

If anything, Apple should be concerned about how the users feel. The facts are that 64% of the users download ZERO apps in a month, go out to 74% and you get 1~2 apps per month.

Most users use a very small number of apps and if you aren't one of those, you don't have much meaning to anyone but yourself.

This is just like the web itself, how many web sites are there? How many hit the radar? As a percentage of all sites, it's what < 5% ?

It'll end up like real life, 1% of the people own 50% of the wealth, but just like the web, anyone that wants to maintain a web page, gets to keep it alive.

Devs created the race to the bottom, we could have stopped at any time and made the lowest price $.99, but we didn't. Mobile ads have lost much of their value, from too much spam, no rules for how many ads to ad blockers.

If a customer can get a good quality app for free, why would they look at a mid-range app? What customer need this many apps? How far do you go down a google search looking for something? 3 maybe 4 pages? More than a million apps is a joke, it was an advertising stunt years ago, now it's a problem for the "look at me, I'm going to be a rich app developer" crowd in a long, long line that the customer doesn't care about.

Sorry if this is harsh, but it's the truth. Remember the gold rush days, now look at the ghost towns they left behind when the gold ran dry.

Yet another bubble, just like DotCom or Housing.

Well if devs dont get any money from apple, then they dont really need apple right? Its logical. But appleneeds indie dev to release hundrets of app every day so apple can brag about billion apps in store.
Like i said before.....apple is good to developers by really constantly improving xcode and make development easy. Well i guess we cant have it all.

 

[1458279]

In a normal market, this would all work out because the amount of time to develop an apps vs the lack of money that most were getting would make many just give up. We need most devs to just give up and find something else to do.

However, development of simple apps just gets easier and easier. You can buy template code for a game for $10 and put it out there. I haven't studied Swift much yet, but I hear it's supposed to make programming easier.

The easier it is to put something out there, the more crApps there'll be.

At the same time, we don't have to use the App Store. I've been a professional business software developer for decades, and I'm working on a business app that I'll be selling direct, the app store will just be where to get the product from (or maybe direct).

Another option is to sell direct at something like a trade show and not use the App Store's discover at all.

Google still has the same problem (not as bad as it was). For years, google searches were flooded with results that figured out how to scam their search engine.

Sadly, the problem doesn't look like it'll go away any time soon. New devs come every day, hoping to get rich.

 

[casperes1996]

You know, a lot of people seem quite negative about this article, but honestly, it's one of my favourite pieces of MacRumors writing in a long time. Whilst the ending wasn't written that well, and did send a somewhat "money plz?" image, the rest of the article, which was the meat of it, was well written, and touched upon a serious problem that I for one have thought quite a bit about in the past, and am glad to see covered by sites such as this. As the platform grows bigger, there's not much to do on the front of improving discoverability for developers not able to advertise everywhere, but the curated lists Apple are putting together is a good idea, and if they look at apps without bias to wealthy advertisement money, and perhaps just pick apps that catch their interest when they're posted to the app store, it could go some distance to solve this issue. Speaking of a solution; That's the one thing I wished this article had had. Not necessarily a definitive one, as that's a crazy thing to ask for, considering it's not an easy task, but a pointer to possible solutions. You could argue that the article already has that, what with pointing at TouchArcade, and whilst that's a fine idea, that wouldn't hit the masses, like the app store once did.

PS. Anyone else keeps looking near the top of the forum threads for the "Post comment" button?

 

[1458279]

LOL, I couldn't find the

macro button and neither could another. You'd think the world would have more standardization by now

Kind of ironic that some developers are bashing TA/MR for "cross promotion" while app cross promotion has been going wild from the start. I remember, not too long ago, viral threads about grouping together as indies for the purpose of shameless cross promotion of apps.

For decades, I've developed software solutions for businesses of all sizes. One dis-advantage of smaller businesses is not having a mature / connected marketing department. While indies have advantages in being able to change direction and make decisions quickly, they don't have market weight and therefore reusable connections.

Remember, Microsoft never had the best OS, but they did have a great marketing team and become well connected.

Having an indie developer work as a business manager, marketing manager, programmer, UX designer, full stack developer, etc... has it's disadvantages.

The business of apps might be on fire, but it still follows most of the same basic rules as other businesses. WalMart, CostCo, and others make up the mass of product movement. You can't expect a mom-n-pop corner store to move the volume of a WalMart or get the same prices from manufactures.

Face a few facts, we indies have basically no power, if the lowest performing 1/2 the apps on the app store were dropped, who would care?

How many app marketing companies with "sure fire" ways to get your app on top, have come and gone? Indies don't work together to pool whatever power we have (or had) and now the market is so flooded that the challenge is greater than ever. It's a problem of too many jumping in trying to make a quick buck, that's screwing things up for those that are here trying to make things work.

 

[TrueBlou]

LOL, I couldn't find the

macro button and neither could another. You'd think the world would have more standardization by now

Kind of ironic that some developers are bashing TA/MR for "cross promotion" while app cross promotion has been going wild from the start. I remember, not too long ago, viral threads about grouping together as indies for the purpose of shameless cross promotion of apps.

For decades, I've developed software solutions for businesses of all sizes. One dis-advantage of smaller businesses is not having a mature / connected marketing department. While indies have advantages in being able to change direction and make decisions quickly, they don't have market weight and therefore reusable connections.

Remember, Microsoft never had the best OS, but they did have a great marketing team and become well connected.

Having an indie developer work as a business manager, marketing manager, programmer, UX designer, full stack developer, etc... has it's disadvantages.

The business of apps might be on fire, but it still follows most of the same basic rules as other businesses. WalMart, CostCo, and others make up the mass of product movement. You can't expect a mom-n-pop corner store to move the volume of a WalMart or get the same prices from manufactures.

Face a few facts, we indies have basically no power, if the lowest performing 1/2 the apps on the app store were dropped, who would care?

How many app marketing companies with "sure fire" ways to get your app on top, have come and gone? Indies don't work together to pool whatever power we have (or had) and now the market is so flooded that the challenge is greater than ever. It's a problem of too many jumping in trying to make a quick buck, that's screwing things up for those that are here trying to make things work.

Good points there, there aren't that many instances of one person being great at everything in this industry. And your right, there probably aren't enough indies willing to work together for the greater good. Certainly without one wanting to screw the other over for their own benefit at some point.

As a consumer I'd be happy if Apple did a massive sweep of the AppStore and spit the wheat from the chaff. In fact as a developer(ish) I wouldn't mind either.

I do it myself, I regularly revisit my old apps and evaluate if they are good enough to be on the AppStore. If I decide the quality is lacking, I remove it.

With my apps I make things I want to use or play. If I eventually get bored of them and decide they are crap or find much better options and can't improve my own beyond those, then I remove them.
Just today I removed all but three of my apps from the AppStore (and one of those is on a shaky nail.) Including ones that have been popular but they are either getting long in the tooth or I’m just not happy with them anymore.

I know I'm probably different to most developers, I've said before, I don't do it for the money. Not that I'd complain if I made lots But that doesn't mean I just churn out any old crap either, or at least I do my best not to. There's a certain satisfaction to be had from getting good feedback from something you have created and that's the bit I like.

I've never been one to just jump on a bandwagon or quickly churn out a clone of some popular app in an attempt to cash in. I’d sooner spend my time on a good flop than a quick cash in, yes I’m odd.
But as I suck at anything marketing related I never really expect my apps to perform brilliantly. So if and when they don’t, it doesn’t really bother me. Some have proven popular far and beyond what I would ever have imagined, most sink like a brick wearing a lead jacket, but it keeps me occupied and so long as I’ve created a decent enough app I’m happy. That standard has naturally varied over time as one would expect, the longer I do this the better I get. Another 30 or 40 years and I might actually be reasonably good

 

[1458279]

You are more the exception than the rule. I remember one post in another forum years ago when there were probably 250,000 apps of less in the apps store.

The post was "I have 12 apps in the app store and I'm not making any money..."

I went out and looked at his apps and they were all "todo list apps" ... there was the shopping list app, the things to do app,... in both free and paid versions, with the difference being the "fancy graphics" used in the paid version.

Basically he had ONE app that just happened to be in almost every "become a professional developer in a week" book.

He was pissed that he wasn't getting rich, I would have been pissed if he WAS getting rich.

One upside to all of this is that over time, software becomes more advanced. When I started, a simple database was all that was needed to compete. Look at the evolution of PC software. From Pong to AI based VR shooters, from database phone lists to full enterprise software on mobile devices.

If some wide-eyed "look mom, I'm a developer" kid want's to jump in and dilute the market with another work alike app, then fine... but sooner or later, the hill gets steeper and steeper. That's when some realize that programming is an actual profession.

 

[TrueBlou]

Ain't that the truth and maybe as you say that's a big part of the problem. You get people like me who plod along putting apps out when in reality we should probably find something else to occupy our time and leave this to those who actually know what they are doing.

Maybe the better thing for the industry as a whole would be a much higher bar of entry quality wise. If it doesn't come up to scratch it simply doesn't get released.

I'm old enough to remember the video game crash back in the Atari days and you know what, it deserved to happen. The quality was dire. Maybe if something isn't done to cut down on the endless shoddy rip/offs something similar could happen again, although I admit it's far less likely.

The whole race to the bottom thing has created an ecosystem where it can be very hard for good, talented developers to make money. Especially when some little *insert very, very bad word* comes along, rips off their work and puts it out for free. And if those good developers can't make money and be allowed the breathing space to innovate we are going to end up in a horrible situation where there's only countless angry birds and candy crush variants being made year after year.

Ok I've gone and wandered off on one a bit, bloody morphine, so I'm bringing myself to a stop before I go into full on rant mode

 

[1458279]

It's a bit of a double edged sword, on one hand, fierce competition can lead to outstanding products as we see in the battle for top-dog smart phones. Better battery life, cameras, displays, etc...

One of the things that's a bit different is that apps are all digital. People that download apps don't need to know how much time/money went into the product. The programmer could use Unity and put out a simple fun game quickly, or they could write their own game engine from scratch.

One programmer might create a solution to a problem in 1 hour, whereas another might take 2 weeks and fail to solve the problem. Yet in the end, the user only cares that the problem was solved.

On the other side, if we don't have new programmers that are willing to put in the time to be productive, the industry will suffer. If Apple want's top level apps 10 years from now, it's going to have to make the system work for those that are just getting started now. The Appstore doesn't work well for those starting out and the job market is quickly passing up new programmers because of all those that have a few years in already.

Apple could be hurting itself in the long run, but the same can be said for Android, WP, etc...

 

[TrueBlou]

So very true, competition is absolutely vital in any market. If it weren't for competition things would stagnate very quickly.

Regarding the people not knowing or indeed caring how much work goes into a product. I remember reading a review for a game a while back on the AppStore, I forget which one, and not one of mine. But it's stuck in my mind ever since.
I do remember the game being quite good, it was free and had no in app purchases that I remember. But the review this person left said how good the game was, how much they liked it, but they were only giving it two stars as it had adverts in it. They specifically said if the adverts were removed they would give it five stars.
I was dumbfounded, how the hell do people expect these developers to make a living.
The answer of course is that they just don't care but I'll bet they don't go to their work every day for free.

I know games can be quickly churned out by some people or as mentioned before they can go and buy a template and basically just change the name and that has probably had a bad effect on the state of the market. But that's not the case for everyone. Some development teams put a lot of time, energy and hard work into creating what they do. Trouble is there's just no way of separating the two sides of that coin.

I'm glad that when I started there weren't places you could just go and buy source code, not that I think I would have, but it forced me to learn the hard way and I I'm glad.
I wouldn't dare compare myself to proper developers. But learning the hard way has been good for me. My recipe app has evolved from what was basically a notepad in version 1.0 five years ago (it was my first ever app) to a far more advanced creature now. There's even one or two things I've not seen in other apps. If I hadn't learned the hard way that just wouldn't be possible. But I digress.

I think what I'd like is the impossible. For there to be some system of discovery or subsection of the AppStore that focuses more on the quality releases by these independent studios. There's a small amount of it but not enough. It would cost Apple nothing to create a dedicated indies section of the store and add in filtering to sort by date, average review, name and so on.

Review websites have their part to play in this of course but the trouble is they don't care enough about the small guy either. It's like I said before, when one of my games was new not a single website took notice of me. But when it got hundreds of thousands of downloads overnight they were falling over theirselves to review it, mention it or feature it. I think it should work the other way round.

I suppose at the end of the day when the dust settles, after all the AppStore is still relatively young. There will be so few small indies left it won't matter. The only ones that will be able to continue financially are either big guys churning out crap like candy crush. Or teams producing real quality apps and that's probably the way it should be. The only exception to that will probably be people like me, but even we're bound to get fed up of it eventually and leave it to the real developers.

No idea how much of that will have made any sense, just had my meds so things are a bit hazy lol.

 

[s2mikey]

The entire in app purchase model is annoying and irritating. You can thank all the cheap bassturds out there who just can NOT part with $3 bucks or $5 bucks to buy an app outright. Nope, they want free, free, free. Of course these people are the same group that have $400 a month cell phone contracts but that's for another argument.

So, the dev teams have little choice but to offer the app for free and then hit you with ticky tack fees as you play the game or charge to unlock stages or whatever. I hate it and it I want it to go away. I want to buy the FULL game, 100% unlocked and ready to play with NO ads. I will pay a fair price upfront for this but after that I expect to have the full game.

I'm to the point that I will ONLY buy games or apps that charge a fair price right off the bat and I get the entire app and its content right off the bat. Simple. Everyone wins.

Ugh.

 

[TrueBlou]

The entire in app purchase model is annoying and irritating. You can thank all the cheap bassturds out there who just can NOT part with $3 bucks or $5 bucks to buy an app outright. Nope, they want free, free, free. Of course these people are the same group that have $400 a month cell phone contracts but that's for another argument.

So, the dev teams have little choice but to offer the app for free and then hit you with ticky tack fees as you play the game or charge to unlock stages or whatever. I hate it and it I want it to go away. I want to buy the FULL game, 100% unlocked and ready to play with NO ads. I will pay a fair price upfront for this but after that I expect to have the full game.

I'm to the point that I will ONLY buy games or apps that charge a fair price right off the bat and I get the entire app and its content right off the bat. Simple. Everyone wins.

Ugh.

You'll get no argument from me there. As a consumer and a developer I hate that entire scenario with a vengeance.

The trouble is, as you say, the vast majority of people now aren't prepared to spend less than they will on a coffee for something that can give them weeks, months or years of entertainment. It's sickening.

Clearly the blame lies solely at the feet of the developers who got us into this situation in the first place. But with so few willing to take the stance that you will, we have to do something to get our work into the hands of consumers.

My next game for instance, due out shortly, is free. There are adverts but as I hate intrusive adverts as a consumer, in my game only a small banner, tucked out of the way during menus will be used.

Other than that the game imposes no restrictions. I hate the way in app purchases are used to fleece as much money from people as possible. I have one purchase in the game. It removes the adverts, adds a game mode and that's it. It's the equivalent of buying the game upfront but it's more like donationware, if people like it, it would be nice if they supported it and its future development which is why the purchase is called buy me a coffee. Of course, they won't.

The game itself creates its own levels and there are literally hundreds of millions of unique levels possible. That's what you get for free, if people don't want to pay, they don't have to. They can play it for years without limits or being pestered at all.

I'd much rather just charge $0.99 and be done with it but history has taught me that's a waste of time.

Mind you its not exactly groundbreaking stuff, it's just a word game. So maybe it's not worth paying for. But again, it's been made because I wanted to play it. I didn't want one of the ones from the AppStore where I'd play for a while then have to purchase more levels, or unlocks, or whatever other crap there was. I wanted something that if I wanted to I could still be playing five years from now, without having to spend extra money on and still be getting levels I'd never played before.

If that existed in the store I'd have bought it. If it already does, then I couldn't find it when I looked for it. Which brings us back to the cruddy AppStore discovery.

Like you I, as a consumer, just want to buy a game or an app and that be the end of it. I don't mind paying again if there's some massive expansion to it that clearly has taken a lot of work. Fair enough, I'll support that. But otherwise I'd rather just, well as it says on the AppStore. Pay once, play forever.

 

[1458279]

Getting deeper into the reality of business and economics (two areas I've studied for many years)... If you look at history, you see that things are invented or discovered that change the relationship between work and the output of work.

Example: Henry Ford's assembly line. It made the process of building the same cars cheaper (or faster). At that point, he could have made better cars or cheaper cars, or something in between.

With apps, there's no way to tell if an app is good or bad. The review process is a joke. Years ago, there was much discussion about the value of the icon, screen shots, etc... Indies where running around trying to figure out the magic combo of things to make the charts.

Being that every app is done when it hits the app store, meaning the work is already done, some can thing "what do I have to lose" and make it cheaper until it's free.

Much like the items you find at the discount store, they are made in China as cheap as they can get away with. Consumers are used to this.

Another issue is that the economy around the world is bad. We see some good stats, but the rich have never been richer and there are many more poor people now.

The other issue is perceived value. If you go to buy a car and one is $20K and the other is $40K, you'd expect to see a difference.
If you see a $5 app vs a $1 app, what would you look for to justify the 500% price jump when you have no standard for the value of the product.

Back in the old days, some used to make their software easier to pirate just to hurt their competitors. Some would offer huge discounts right before or after another product came on the market.

With no way to standardize value in the eyes of the consumer, this market isn't likely to change any time soon.

In one study, the percentage of people that actually buy IAP was very, very, small.

I downloaded 2 video editing apps years ago to see what they could do. One did nothing above recording video without buying $19 of IAP. The other did nothing without location services and data collection. Both were crap and were deleted.

Another issue with apps is that devs were using price as a marketing tool, they would come out high, then drop the price just to get downloads. They would keep jerking around the price as a promo tool. How's the consumer supposed to read that?

Also, Apple still (AFAIK) hasn't done anything about bootlegging apps. Free was in part an answer to Apple ignoring bootlegging of apps.

How many stories have we heard about devs stealing icons, artwork, etc... Apple has been very slow to do anything about this. They protect themselves, yet let us fend for ourselves.

They've lock us into a language that doesn't work on other platforms.

They paid at lease one game to delay their release on Android.

We have to face the fact that we need Apple much more than Apple will ever need us. They don't want an even playing field.

At the same time, Android has too much malware and suck dev tools, MS has dropped the ball more than once and still doesn't have much market share.

 

[TrueBlou]

I absolutely still think that of the three main players Apple has still got the best combination of developer tools and AppStore and there's no doubting that we need them more than they need us.

The quality and, let's be honest, theft of other people's work is still something that astounds me though. I'll never understand for example how a game that quite clearly uses Nintendo characters and artwork ever manages to get through the review process. Yet there are many of those on the AppStore even now.

Personally, some of my apps are paid only because I and others quite frankly think they are worth the money and I'd rather make little money from not selling many than no money giving them away for free. One of those has been worked on for five years. That's quite a lot of time and effort to give away for free, so I won't.

Sometimes I'll put out a free app, either because it hasn't taken more than a couple of months work. Or I want to try and get it into the hands of people after all the work that's gone into it. I don't like doing free apps but that's just the way the market is and it's not about to change.

For instance, I'm winding up a game just now that I've been working on for the best part of a year on and off, longer if you count the time I spent playing around with concepts.
I think it's pretty original and those who have played it like it. But once again I'm at that dilemma stage of what to do. Stick a price on it and let it disappear into obscurity or implement some free model with advertising and or IAP that I hate.

I know I've said before I'm not in it for the money and that's true. But that's not to say that I wouldn't like to make back some sort of compensation for the thousands of hours of work. I've run businesses before and the businessman in me wouldn't have it any other way. Not to mention that I don't really want to be one of the people who contribute to the whole race to the bottom nonsense. I'd like it to be quite the opposite, I firmly believe that the developers who spend so much time and effort on their work deserve fair remuneration (myself not included.)

As for the rip-off merchants. They can starve for all I care. But there are a lot of devs out there who probably aren't making anything like the money the deserve.

But none of this is new really. There have been countless examples of how the AppStore is and how some developers work for as long as there's been computer software. It's crap but I guess them's the breaks.

 

[1458279]

The nature of software is that it can advance very quickly. Look at the app when the iPhone 1st came out vs the apps now. Look at games over the last 10 years.

What this means is that the ability of a programmer to produce a quality product is very, very dependent on that persons ability to learn quickly. Someone can start today, and in 1 year can pass up the skills of someone that's been programming for 3 years.

Also, the tools change, if you've spent 3 years mastering reference counting, the value of that knowledge is mostly lost.

This means that there is hope for those that really want to dig in and have the skills to do it.

The natural value that the app store had, are mostly gone.

I'm personally developing mobile business software and intend to go direct to the businesses. As far as games and other types of apps, we need to find another path to reach the consumer.

We've seen all forms of reaching the consumer become instantly flooded. Just like pop-ups back in the early days of the web. Too many pop-ups ruined it.

We'll continue to ruin every single method we develop, until we make the buy in so high that only the quality apps will be there. This will require self control, as it's easy to get baited into selling out for the quick buck.

 

[9052042]

It might have been true at the start that Apple owed some success to the indie devs, but I'd guess most of them had their run and lost out to the big guys. Once the big guys came to town, the role of the indie changed forever. I would guess most indies don't show up on the charts as more than an blimp from time to time. Esp when you consider the number of indies out there. About the only thing I can think of for Apple to do is to make a separate section for indies to allow them to stand out a bit.

Yes that's true but the future of the AppStore is still indie driven. Lots of other platforms failed because they let the indie developers lose and as a result stagnated.

Apple brags right now that there are XXXXX apps supporting Apple Watch. There are only so many big guys so the rest are all indie. If they can't make a good living on the AppStore they won't bother making Watch OS apps.

So in the end it's all about the future. Right now Apple is enjoying the fruits of its previous indie developers. But not for long if this continues

 

[1458279]

I'm not too sure that Apple has to change anything in order to keep Indies because there's so many of them and they just keep coming.

As the world comes to terms with global trade and bubble markets, jobs will be harder and harder to find. Anywhere there is growth, there will be a flood of people looking for work. Those that have any kind of growth will be in control of their workers more that ever before.

In addition, if you run the stats on apps, you'd find that a very small percentage account for most of the usage and money. Apple saying they have some large number of apps in any market (watch/phone/pad) really doesn't do anything more than saying there's billions of web pages on the Internet... You could wipe out 1/2 the pages on the Internet and most wouldn't know or care much.

Much like FaceBook's membership numbers, it doesn't mean much to most because those are just more people they don't care about. Having more that 100 friends, just ends up with a steady stream of spam that nobody cares about. I don't need to see other people's Candy Crush scores

Over time, the apps will go from sophomoric "flash light" apps to more advanced apps and most of that will come from those that have the skills and resources to get there.

Notice how the flash light became a give away, built in feature, much like the web browser, file manager, and screen saver did on the PC.

 

[TrueBlou]

No doubt Apple doesn't have to change anything to keep or attract developers. Unless Apple does something monumentally stupid (which they have before) and lose their market position, although I do personally find that unlikely. Developers will flock to them like flies to, hmmm, let's say fly paper.

As a consumer I'd love for them to seriously overhaul the AppStore. It's just useless for finding anything (that they aren't interested in you finding.) Which is kind of crap when your looking for something a bit different.

As for the, let's call them weaker apps, I think Apple is quite wisely integrating a lot of those into iOS itself. We now have a built in flashlight, AirDrop is fine for probably the vast majority of users. Likewise the new notes app in iOS 9 will negate the need for many a simple note taking app for the majority and so on.

That's a trend I'm more than happy for them to continue with. Hopefully the less need there is for a lot of users to use anything but the default apps will help cut out a lot of the dross that clogs up the AppStore. Freeing up space for genuinely useful, original, innovative, entertaining or at least apps that improve upon the iOS default apps, from developers.

Don't get me wrong, when people start out they are significantly less likely to be creating top tier apps, that's fine we all start somewhere (nor am I trying to say that what I create could be considered "top tier" incidentally, although maybe not all too bad and I'm never happy with what I make so that drives me to improve my skills, but I digress, sorry, double helping of morphine, I'm floating round the room ) I'm just generalising.

 

[1458279]

As a consumer I'd love for them to seriously overhaul the AppStore. It's just useless for finding anything (that they aren't interested in you finding.) Which is kind of crap when your looking for something a bit different.

I think you hit on a key point... "t's just useless for finding anything (that they aren't interested in you finding.)" --- Apple controls what they want you to find... Just like Apple controls how your app functions with the HIG and many other rules.

Unlike Android, Apple controls the device, OS, apps, etc... They've always been control freaks. This backfired when they were in the PC business alone as the clones become high quality low price.

Apples already tried to kill off games made with Unity and other engines, then changed their mind, they started off not having native apps, then changed their mind.

I personally would like to see the mobile market have the OSs interchange between devices. Imagine a choice of iOS, BlackBerry, MS, or Android, just like on a PC.

I have 1 PC that runs both OSX and Windows. I can run Linux if I wanted to, all on one PC. Apple doesn't like this, but I can.

Apple has been lucky to have a great product and that Android has screwed up it dev platform and malware issues, otherwise, Apples control would hurt it just like in the PC days.

Truth be told, Apple is skating on fairly thin ice as far as market share goes. The market is not settled yet.

If you look at smart devices (phones/tabs) they haven't peaked yet. Probably soon, they'll all have great cameras (front and rear) as well has speed, battery life, switchable carriers, etc... At that point, the difference between Apple's offerings and others won't be much.

Apple would have died long ago, if not for desktop publishing. Killer apps made the whole PC industry, and they can make or break any device (and OS) maker.

MicroSoft came up with a great idea, a transaction system for 3rd world (developing) nations that doesn't use credit cards. This could be a game changer, most of the world doesn't have credit cards. In addition most of the world, can't afford an iPhone, MicroSoft has come up with some cheap options for poor countries... this is where most of the world lives.