
 The HTML5 vs. iPhone payment argument is nonsense - mbrubeck
http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2010/03/the_payment_arg.html
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mseebach
Heh. It feels like the same sentiment there was around shareware back in the
day. Suddenly, there was this idea that if you could hack three buttons
together in Delphi, you not only _could_ , but you ware _entitled_ to make
money from your software. I've lost count of how much shareware I've used,
where I had the distinct feeling that more effort went into "protecting" the
copy against piracy then making the software itself.

~~~
bad_user
Shareware is also alive today in the App Store ... many apps have a limited
free version.

Because of the similarity I also think Apple's App Store isn't sustainable,
because there will be so much crap that users will only go for established
brands (it's already happening, even with Apple's strict control ... which
serves more to ban competitors of Apple's own offerings).

~~~
gte910h
The reason many apps start as crap is due to the _arbitrary_ nature of the
"standards" set by apple. They literally reject your app for any reason (or no
reason), even after "suggesting" several changes that cost quite a bit of
money. It is professional malpractice to council your clients to build
anything other than the bare minimum before publishing (if you're a third
party app developer as I am).

So basically, Apple gets crap apps because good apps are too risky to build as
Apple can reject it ex post facto. There isn't a way to even say, pay them 20k
dollars to do a preapproval study. So no one is willing to drop the big bucks
required to put out complex full featured apps until the app has been in the
store and selling for awhile.

Apple's approval process makes only iterative development worthwhile, and
biases what people SHOULD be doing towards low cost work.

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drewcrawford
iPhone developer here.

> The first and most obvious way is just getting paid by a client for creating
> the app. Now that’s a payment model I can believe in...

At least 75% of the contract offers on my desk are people who want to sell an
app direct to consumer (not an online ordering system or advertising; a game
or a utility or calculator, etc.) So developers (albeit 1 step removed) are
still very subject to the app store market pressures. If clients can't make
money then there will be no contract work. Unlike other markets where there
are other sales channels, in the iPhone world, Apple is the only sales
channel.

As for the motivations of developers, I think the author's got it wrong, or at
least he's got it wrong for me. I might write an app to scratch my own itch,
but I wouldn't polish it, document it, pay an artist, or promote it without
the nominal income that a niche app provides.

I'm not in it for the big million-dollar gambles. But if an app can pull in
$5k year-on-year for about a week's worth of actual work, that's a very
attractive investment for me.

You don't have to be EA to get rich on the app store, you just need to work
hard and be patient and consistently churn out high-quality products.

~~~
halostatue
The estimation is wrong, too.

1\. Many apps can be written in 2 - 4 weeks time.

2\. Many developers aren't paid $125/hour.

I wrote an app for a client that's now on the app store. The development time
was six weeks _part time_ , and my rate was substantially lower than $125 per
hour (in part because I have ownership of the source and the client has a
royalty-free perpetual licence). The client was responsible for the graphics
work (custom button designs, icons, etc.) and the content. Counting his own
time, he probably spent around $5k total.

I'm not sure if the app has made its investment back, but I suspect that a
large number of the 150,000 apps are $5k-or-less investments and a few of them
are $10k-or-more. A rarefied few will be even more expensive.

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johnrob
I'm not sure I buy the argument of '1.5 billion spent developing iPhone apps'
vs '500 million in developer revenue'. Even if every hour of iPhone
development only gets 30% payment in the macro sense, then I'd wager it's
still wildly more lucrative then the startup world at large. Many startups
never earn a cent before dying.

