

Apps Are Not Software - laujen
http://eliainsider.com/2010/11/16/apps-are-not-software/

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scott_s
I come from a world where all code is software, in order to distinguish it
from hardware.

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davidw
The way to tell is that you can kick the hardware.

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mayank
That works perfectly fine with old boxed software too. And by jove, have I
kicked a lot of software.

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gte910h
Eh, we'd have always written software that small if we could have managed to
get paid for it.

The reason apps are special is _that you can get payment for them_ without
credit card and support fees blowing you out of the water. That wasn't a
possibility before.

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enjo
I never paid 30% to a credit card company, and apps certainly come with a
support burden.

I'd argue the biggest difference is in the ease of installation. The big thing
Apple has done is figure out how to take disparate software and make setup
easy and automatic. That's were the support benefits come in. When selling
software for Windows, Mac, or even Palm you spent most of your support budget
just helping people install it.

Beyond that, however, the economics of the app store certainly aren't better
than what we traditionally had. There are literally thousands of 'small apps'
that have been sold for as long as the internet has existed. The various MP3
players (like winamp) spring to mind immediately.

The only difference with the app-store is that discoverability is a whole lot
harder and the downward pricing pressure has meant that traditional
advertising works pretty poorly (it's hard to buy traffic when your conversion
is $1).

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crs
You also do not have to host the app your self, so your not paying for the
bandwidth. That cost is included in the 30% cut apple takes.

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enjo
That's a really small cost, however. Bandwidth is stupid cheap.

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erikstarck
During the 90s there was a popular new development process called Rapid
Application Development (RAD). Sort of a predecessor to agile methods.

Now it seems we have Rapid Application Consumption. Funny how things change.

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mooism2
Apps are a special case of software in general behaving more often like media
and less often like tools.

