Part of Paul's reasoning depends on Apps being central to the iPhone experience the same way software is central to the desktop experience. I'm not totally sure this is the case. While apps are certainly a major component to the iPhone, are they really the major factor in end-user adoption? With the exception of games, how many killer iPhone apps are there that don't already ship with the phone? The phone shipped for an entire year without an App Store at all. I even read something not that long ago that said the majority of apps sit unused on people's phones after they get them.
Now, this doesn't mean that developers won't want a developer friendly phone, or that Apple is hurting their reputation with developers. I'm certain it has been frustrating to deal with the whole process. However, if 3rd party software isn't essential for the iPhone as a platform, then developer satisfaction moves down a bit in terms of importance in Apple's eyes.
Now, it's clear that games are major for the app store. Games are also a special class of software application that benefits disproportionately from having access to the hardware at a low level. They also have properties more similar to music and movies (incidentally, things the iTunes store is good at selling). Except for the simplest games, they require a lot of up-front design work and investment. It's rare that a released game goes through a ton of rapid iterations to "get it right". Games may still have bugs after release, but in general the functionality they are going to have is there on day one. They also ship with the final sound effects, music, artwork, etc... Games are also probably very unlikely to "duplicate existing functinoality" or any of the other cases where "normal" apps hit barriers. Perhaps Apple has (intentionally or unintentionally) created an environment optimized for game approval?
I'm certainly not defending the app store process, but I just wonder if the software development community has a disproportionate view of its importance to the iPhone as a whole.
There was a story on here (or somewhere) a while back about how 70% of iPhone apps go unused after the first month of purchasing. Couldn't agree more. AFAICT there is no killer 3rd party app for the iPhone. I'd posit that 95% of the iPhone's awesomeness is wrapped up in the following four (OEM) components: 1) Browser, 2) Maps, 3) E-mail / SMS, 4) Visual voicemail. Everything else, including games, is just fluff for most users. Relative to those four, I think the app store is a relatively small driver of adoption. I don't think a lot of people are that wedded to it, and I don't think it makes Apple a particularly large amount of money either. Which would explain why they continue to neglect it in spite of the vociferous scorn of a few programmers and pundits.
I too noticed the similarity to the console game development. Usually console game developers have to go through lengthy approval process of the platform provider. Still developers accept that (although grudgingly), since once approved and the released, that will be the end of the process; no more bug fixes; the team dissolves and everybody starts working on the next project. (PC games are different, and certainly network games are continuous development, but console games have this feeling of "done is done").
Part of it may be a byproduct of the way the console games distributed on ROMs or disks. That may change, for consoles nowadays have network connection and can get updates anytime. There's another part, however, that some type of games fits this "done is done" philosophy. Like novels or movies, which you don't expect them to be improved over time.
Well, I don't defend the app store process either, and I believe majority of software should be developed in the iterative process. It's just interesting that games may be a marginal area that has some peculiar properties.
Here's my guess about Apple's thinking. Note that I don't own an iPhone or iTouch. So I don't have any experience with the App Store or submitting applications to it, and can't say that it is or is not working this way but....
Apple wants iPhone apps to "just work" They don't want a plethora of buggy, half-baked, inconsistent apps in their store, because this would diminish the brand. It would be like a typical Linux distribution where half the apps implement their own peculiar UI conventions, crash often, or just don't work at all.
So it is like developing a game. You get one release, one chance, to get it right. It needs to work. Maybe a lot of app developers don't get this. There are published standards about conventions, icons, behavior, etc. The app is expected to be FINISHED and WORKING before you submit it to the store. Don't count on deploying 27 follow up patches and updates to customers -- imagine the chaos if every iPhone app needed updates multiple times. Users (most of whom are not hackers) would, after a while, just give up and abandon the platform.
So, when an app is submitted, it is reviewed, and if it's found to be buggy, or it doesn't work, or it works in an unconventional way, then they don't want it. And they're not in a particular hurry to waste more time on you when you didn't follow the instructions the first time.
I don't know, I'm just speculating. But this seems plausible to me.
I agree. I've recently posted a comment about this in another App Store thread here on HN.
I think this is a good "oh yeah, this is why we do it" argument, but is probably more of a by-product of the review process and less of Apple's original incentive.
A lot of the technical decisions that are made are motivated by business and profit. Not to say that this is a negative thing - Apple is a corporation after all. There are plenty of things I've seen done that are dumb as hell at my employer (at a technical level) but are motivated by external reasons that seem implausible or illogical because the guy writing code is too far removed from the information and the decision.
however, speaking as a guy who has went through the process for 8+ apps so far, that's not the pain point.
It's more about repeatedly encountering dumbass reasons for rejections, and dumbass long delays to get feedback on things that should take about 1 minute, not 2-4 weeks to get feedback on. It's about getting rejected for 1 thing, and then they don't bother to finish reviewing the app and discover the other 2 things that they know they would reject it on during the next submission, so you don't find those out until 2-4 weeks later, and so on, ad nauseum. It's about rejecting for inane reasons (that they can "fix", if they wanted to, and had a brain, by running a small piece of software on, shotgun-style) like 'this config value over here doesn't match this value over there, so please make those the same', or even worse, vague mysteriously-worded rejections, or rejections that contain explicit instructions for "fixing" the issue and then you follow them, resubmit and they reject again.
Dumbasses. I keep coming back to that word over and over again when dealing with their review process/people. We're talking about a company with supposedly billions of dollars in cash in the bank and until a few months ago or so reportedly had what 50 full-time reviewers on staff? (Do the math on what it would cost to even triple that staff and you'll see it's a tiny drop in the bucket compared to the profits that keep rolling in.)
You're sort of right, but that's true for all other platforms as well, so it doesn't really tell us anything about the state of app use on the iPhone platform.
The OS bundled ones are the ones people use the most. Across the board.
If I had to guess, I'd say third party apps are just as often or more used on iPhone than on, say, Windows and Mac OS X. Simply because, on iPhone, a lot of web apps out there are used via a special-purpose iPhone app rather than the web interface.
We probably have a different view on what is a killer app. From my perspective: Windows - Outlook Express, IE. OS X - Mail, Safari. I can't recall the last time I fired up "Photoshop, Excel, Quicken, Final Cut" and I bet 90% of randomly selected users couldn't either.
"Killer app" usually means the app that motivates you to switch platforms. For PS3 or Xbox 360, it's the game that made you want to buy the console. For Windows in the '90s, you needed MS Office to get your work done, so you bought a PC. All other things being equal -- i.e. assuming the system has a web browser and the other essential software has cross-platform equivalents -- the killer app is what kills off rival platforms.
When I hear someone say "I wish I had an iPhone right now", it's usually because they're either (i) lost, or looking for something, and want access to Google Maps, or (ii) in the throes of gadget envy. The App Store addresses (ii), but not with any single app -- it's just the idea that there are thousands of fun toys that only iPhone users get to play with.
So there are a couple of killer features, but nothing that can't be replicated on other phones. Not necessarily as well, but that's not the point: without exclusivity, the iPhone will not get the same kind of dominance Windows has.
As reliance on mobile devices and their capabilities increase, this could become less of an issue.
It is still a luxury for most people - "oh cool look at this app," but it still comes down to those that can afford an iPhone. I can imagine there are many family squabbles involving parents that bought their kid an iPhone that racked up an App Store bill the parents didn't originally intend.
iPhone is not a business phone overall - and therefore doesn't have "critical apps".
The point I was replying to was that "... third party apps are just as often or more used on iPhone than on, say, Windows and Mac OS X".
I really doubt this is true given the lack of any killer mobile apps. I don't personally consider any of desktop apps in the list I gave 'killer', but fairly sure they've sold lots of computers.
I think you may be right, but I have a couple misgivings.
The year that iPhone existed without the App Store, no smartphone competitors came close to replicating it's core functionality and user experience. I don't think that's quite true anymore, and so I think that the App Store is one of the iPhone's key advantages. Specifically, the iPhone didn't need the App Store to differentiate itself from RIM and WinMo in 2007, but I think it absolutely needs the App Store to differentiate itself from the Pre and Android in 2009.
I don't think there is one killer 3rd-party app on the phone that everyone needs to have, but there could very well be many third party apps that smaller niches need to have. For me personally, MLB At-Bat (live streaming of baseball games) and the Kindle reader are actually the two biggest factors keeping me from switching to Droid. Those applications could easily be ported to Android, but haven't been yet, and in both cases a third party holds the distribution rights for the content so it's not like me or another hacker could replicate those apps easily.
> While apps are certainly a major component to the iPhone, are they really the major factor in end-user adoption?
All the ads I've seen lately for the iPhone are of the "there's an app for that" variety. So Apple themselves seem to think that the apps are a critical factor.
That being said, the iPhone sold very well before there were any apps at all.
I know lots of people who bought in iPhone or or iPod touch because it could run some unique app. It was a different app in each case and in each case it was an app I personally saw no use for, but for them it was a killer app.
Any app that makes someone get an iPhone instead of something else is a "killer app" as far as Apple is concerned, even if it only sold a total of 27 copies and lost the developer a lot of money. So even if the iPhone doesn't have any one killer app, the sheer diversity of apps means there is probably a killer app out there for most people, and that is vital for Apple.
It may not have started out as central to the experience, but I think that it's starting to quickly become just that and Apple knows this or at least they want it to be. So far all the recent iPhone commercials I've seen only focus on the thousands of apps you can get for the iphone - not the iphone's "awesome" feature set. I was looking at a friend's iphone the other day and I saw page after page of 3rd party applications. My wife wanted an iPod Touch because she saw some applications she wanted. Another person I know bought an iPod Touch just so they can run a bird identification program. I don't think these are unusual cases. What's funny is that in the beginning, Apple didn't even want to provide an API for native applications. They wanted all developers to use the Web API. When developers balked at that idea Apple reluctantly laid out plans for native applications.
What's funny is that in the beginning, Apple didn't even want to provide an API for native applications. They wanted all developers to use the Web API. When developers balked at that idea Apple reluctantly laid out plans for native applications.
I wouldn't believe that for a minute. The App Store would have been part of the iPhone product plan from day 1. It's too big, too complex, too strategic, and (yes) too well-executed to be a panicked response to developers' demands.
That's how Apple under Jobs has always done things: major features are not "supported" or "planned" or "offered" or "part of the company's philosophy"... at least, not until they appear out of nowhere one day.
I'm not so sure about that. From an interview with Steve Jobs in the NY Times 1 Nov 2007:
“I don’t want people to think of this as a computer,” he said. “I think of it as reinventing the phone.”
"We define everything that is on the phone,” he said. “You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.”
The iPhone, he insisted, would not look like the rest of the wireless industry.
“These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them,” he said. “That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.”
From an interview with Steve Jobs in the NY Times 1 Nov 2007
But the App Store was announced to the public only seven months after that, in June of 2008.
If they did all that work in seven months, my resume will be on someone's desk at Apple by Monday. Seriously. I don't want to compete with any large companies that can move that fast. They win.
No, the only reasonable conclusion is that you can't take Jobs at his word when he appears to rule something out.
Then again Apple already had the libraries for native app development because they were developing apps themselves. They already had iTunes. And you know what? The same people that approve iTunes music submissions also approve App Store submissions. Most of the pieces were in place - they just had to put them together. 7 months doesn't seem too long for a version 1 app store.
Edit: And the question isn't really were they going to have an app store or not - they very well could have been thinking along those lines but reserving it only for software they themselves were going to create or with select partners - the question is whether they were going to open it up to general developers which I think they did not want to do.
Developer relations are central to Apple as a whole. Apples needs iPhone developers, desktop developers, web developers and developers for whatever they do after the iPhone. If Apple creates hostile feelings in the developer community with its App Store behavior, Apple is going to have ongoing problems regardless of whether it needs third party developers at the moment.
Not really :/ They need people developing webapps.
To be honest, I think the appstore is just a stopgap until webapps become mature enough to take over (And wifi is prevalent enough). I wouldn't put too much effort into the appstore, and I don't really blame Apple for being half hearted about it. It's certainly not the future.
Now, this doesn't mean that developers won't want a developer friendly phone, or that Apple is hurting their reputation with developers. I'm certain it has been frustrating to deal with the whole process. However, if 3rd party software isn't essential for the iPhone as a platform, then developer satisfaction moves down a bit in terms of importance in Apple's eyes.
Now, it's clear that games are major for the app store. Games are also a special class of software application that benefits disproportionately from having access to the hardware at a low level. They also have properties more similar to music and movies (incidentally, things the iTunes store is good at selling). Except for the simplest games, they require a lot of up-front design work and investment. It's rare that a released game goes through a ton of rapid iterations to "get it right". Games may still have bugs after release, but in general the functionality they are going to have is there on day one. They also ship with the final sound effects, music, artwork, etc... Games are also probably very unlikely to "duplicate existing functinoality" or any of the other cases where "normal" apps hit barriers. Perhaps Apple has (intentionally or unintentionally) created an environment optimized for game approval?
I'm certainly not defending the app store process, but I just wonder if the software development community has a disproportionate view of its importance to the iPhone as a whole.