
App Store shrank for first time in 2017 due to crackdowns on spam, clones etc. - bitumen
https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/04/app-store-shrank-for-first-time-in-2017-thanks-to-crackdowns-on-spam-clones-and-more/
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makecheck
A start. Now they need to shrink in-app purchases.

Seriously, I see games with over a dozen kinds of in-app purchases that total
well over $100 (sometimes individually that high), and many listed purchases
seem to be for repeatable things like gem bags. How much money can you
possibly spend on a game!? It should be completely against the rules for heaps
of purchases like these to even be an _option_. Basically, your app should
have a hard limit on the number of items, a _lifetime_ limit on dollars spent
in total, and this theoretical maximum spend should be displayed in giant
print next to the price when you download it. Furthermore, on every single app
update, if any in-app purchases are changed, the new total dollar amount
should be displayed in large text next to the updating button and such apps
should not be possible to install via auto-update on a device.

~~~
derefr
I agree that, for _normal_ people, these purchases would only be made as
symptoms of addiction, and so should likely be prevented or regulated like you
say.

However, I don’t think the people at the head of the revenue distribution for
these games (the “whales”) are really in the throes of addiction. They’re
actually spending completely normal amounts of money... for them. They’re just
ungodly rich.

Ask anyone from one of these mobile-casual-F2P game companies who their “real”
customers are—the ones they cater to with their designs. They have specific
profiles. At the company I worked at, the whales were Saudi princes, wasting
their oil money.

Personally, I see nothing wrong with US tech companies (slightly!) draining
the pockets of such people, and in exchange fueling their Veblen-goods
signalling competitions against their equally stupid-rich friends.

It’s like making money as an arms dealer, except nobody’s getting shot!

~~~
rrdharan
I wouldn’t be so quick to assume these folks can actually afford what they are
spending:

[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-07-06/zynga-
s-q...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2011-07-06/zynga-s-quest-for-
big-spending-whales)

There were many articles covering this topic during the Zynga peak years,
about folks developing gambling-type addictions to freemium games and spending
money they don’t have.

EDIT: here’s another article exploring these connections...
[https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/6/8544303/casino-slot-
machin...](https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/6/8544303/casino-slot-machine-
gambling-addiction-psychology-mobile-games)

And sadly even as far as violence is concerned - there was a horrific story a
few years back about a woman who murdered her infant in anger when the child
interrupted her FarmVille game.

~~~
derefr
I don't deny that these people do exist. My point was that
they—surprisingly!—don't pay the salaries of the devs at these game studios.
The whales do. The studios _can_ afford to keep the profit from the whales and
lose the profit from the addicted middle-class.

And many of these studios are going this way! Even back when I was at the
company I referred to (~2012), they were already building profiling logic into
their backend to try to find the people spending "out of their range" and,
effectively, stage interventions for them. They don't _want_ these customers.
They aren't their core demographic, any more than they're the core demographic
of casinos, or than alcoholics are the core demographic of bars. And like a
bar, they'd really rather "cut them off."

~~~
gruez
>And like a bar, they'd really rather "cut them off."

why? absent any legal requirements (which bars and casinos may have), isn't it
better from a business perspective to get some money off them before they go
bankrupt?

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> absent any legal requirements (which bars and casinos may have), isn't it
> better from a business perspective to get some money off them before they go
> bankrupt?

Not necessarily.

Suppose your customer has $500/month in disposable income. Then you want
$500/month from them. $1000/month is _bad_. It means they're borrowing money,
and every dollar they borrow they not only have to pay back, they have to pay
interest on -- at the crazy high rates that people with bad self control have
to pay. All of which comes out of the $500/month you could have had from them
going forward.

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megablast
Probably the big reason was removing all the non-64bit apps, and apps have
have not updated their UI to support > iphone 6.

~~~
mmacvicarprett
You are right, this is for sure the main reason, the title is misleading.

~~~
arielm
That’s definitely a large contributor, but if you look at the number of new
app releases you’ll see it went down quite a lot when compared to previous
years. That’s the other side of the equation for the decrease.

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wpdev_63
It would be great if google did tiding up in the play store. It's filled with
knock off and junk apps.

~~~
ASalazarMX
That would require _gasp_ employing more humans! The management algorithms
would not approve!

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osrec
About time they cleaned it up a bit. I find the app store a bit of a mess and
finding a good quality app for a particular task is rather difficult at times.
The best app is rarely the most "discoverable" so the more noise they remove
the better.

~~~
jandrese
Weirdly, some of the best apps I still use are 32 bit only and long since
abandoned. They're the ones that do their job without cloud nonsense or built-
in advertising or some damn "pro" version that requires a yearly fee and the
free version won't shut up about it.

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IBM
>Those are pretty interesting numbers. There’s actually a common misconception
that more and more apps are being developed using non-native tools so they can
be deployed to multiple platforms easily.

>According to our data, that’s not the case.

Well that's interesting.

~~~
jds375
That data appears to be relative to the number of native apps in the app
store, so that doesn't necessarily mean that moving towards non-native
development is a misconception. In addition, many apps are not moving to non-
native entirely... but instead module by module. I wonder how they account for
that and how it impacts their statistics.

~~~
arielm
We (Appfigures) looked at the SDKs that apps use to determine what's native
vs. non-native. This method will catch "partially" non-native apps as well as
fully non-native apps as the former will need to have the non-native SDK even
for a single module.

~~~
mi5ha
So basically these stats are representation of the usage of your SDK over your
userbase right? And it seems that your SDK is not that popular with those
using non native technologies?

Are your SDKs installed on at least 90% of all apps in PlayStore? If not 90%
what is the percentage?

~~~
arielm
This data is for all new apps released and has nothing to do with our user
base. In fact, we don't have an SDK.

The report uses data from our SDK identification engine, which works for all
apps.

~~~
mi5ha
It would help if you released more details about your methodology. So you are
not working on a sample of the millions of apps? You are working on all of
them? Your "SDK identification engine" can detect in what technology each and
single one of million apps in both stores is created with? Really? How?

Do you download each binary and examine its content? Even paid ones? Large
ones? Obfuscated?

What is the error margin of your methodology? Or you are 100% precise? Sorry I
am honestly interested in the details, and I didnt find error margin anywhere
for this study or details about methodology.

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mythz
A lot of it is also their new policy of removing old Apps that haven't
received an update in a long time, of which from last year they started
removing my earliest Apps.

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everdev
I've also read somewhere and it send true for me that users typically engage
with only a small number of non-OS apps regularly (maybe 3-5?). I know when
considering launching a business, apps seem more like swinging for a home run.

