
Mobile App Developers Are Suffering - ingve
https://medium.com/swlh/mobile-app-developers-are-suffering-a5636c57d576
======
pjc50
The converse of the "long tail" distribution has to be the "high peak": a few
apps (and a few developers, like King) are making almost all the money. "99%
of the value is centralized to the top 0.01%", as we're increasingly seeing in
the real economy.

Everyone agrees that app store discovery is bad. What could be done about it?
Is there enough incentive for the platform holders to fix it? I'm not sure
about the "decay" metric, that would seem to reward spamming still further.

The "instant app" business is much more questionable. If you want the instant
transientness of a web page, why not write .. a web page? Is it because you
want permissions to access privacy-sensitive parts of the user's phone?

Or we could just accept that the market is full and that all the software
people are prepared to pay for is already out there.

(There might be an underserved market for niche expensive apps that would work
through Kickstarter, but you can't crowdfund apps because all purchases have
to go through the monopoly app stores).

~~~
vijayr
Isn't this a problem in most markets though? Take writing. Most authors starve
or make a pittance, while a handful of authors at the top make most of the
money. Stephen King comes to mind. Same with music.

~~~
ssharp
I think there are a ton of parallels between making money creating mobile
games and making money in the arts. I think part of the disillusionment with
budding game developers is that their core craft is still a very much in
demand. The core of what they do, programming, is worth a lot of money to a
lot of companies, so they assume they should be making a certain amount of
money from their efforts.

The demand for musicians is substantially lower and most people understand
early on that their chances of succeeding in the music business are slim and
it will be a massive amount of work to even give it a fair try.

If I ever got into game development, I'd treat it exactly as I treat music --
as a serious hobby.

------
manmal
Regarding the supposed barrier that is installing the app: I don't know. For a
paid service (as we are comparing apples to apples) the signup process on a
web app can be more tedious than clicking a button, entering your mobile store
password, waiting couple of seconds, and tap "Open app".

My candidate causes of the current situation:

\- People are used to paying very little for apps. On the one hand, apps have
been commoditized, yes, but on the other hand, web apps can be a lot more
useful and productive than a phone app. We'll see what the iPad Pro and
Android successors do about that. I'd suspect that there will serious money be
made in enterprise apps.

\- Competition (just swipe left and you find other purchase options) and
reviews (highest ratings always wins) - I think OP got that right. You CAN do
research about web apps before you subscribe to one, but that information is
never complete and you can easily shrug off a bad review on some forum and buy
that subscription nonetheless.

\- Lack of trial versions. I would never buy a $10 app that has one 2-star
rating. I would try it out, though. Note that almost every web app has a trial
mode - it's a huge conversion driver! That one's completely missing for apps.
I think that's also the reason why freemium has become predominant.

~~~
vbezhenar
> Lack of trial versions

A lot of apps have trial versions. Either publisher publishes 2 versions of
the same app: free trial version and paid full veersion or free version starts
in trial version and switches to full mode with in-app purchase.

Sure, it would be better for app stores to support dedicated "Trial" mode. I
don't really know, why they don't do that. But it's not that bad. Though I
might be the only chosen one, who can find "App from this developer" or does
read description from start to end :)

~~~
manmal
You are right, rhere are trial versions. The vast majority of apps doesn't,
though.

------
espinchi
We are suffering, but we won't give up so easily.

I am in the top 1-2% of Android developers [1], and while I've found it
relatively easy to reach decent traction with a few apps (say 1000 downloads a
day, or say $1000 a month), it is very challenging to keep an app in the very
top (25k downloads a day, or making more than $15k a month) for very long.

You can put a good fight during your first month, since you can make it very
high in the "Top New" rankings, but after that you are against the big guys.

As the article says, paid promotion is a prohibitive channel. At the usual
free to paid conversion rates, making ads pay off is extremely difficult.

These two points the article makes are flat out wrong:

> _The search function is unusable unless you know the name of the app you’re
> looking for_

Absolutely no. SEO (we call it ASO in the app store) is important, and keyword
search is a definitely a source of organic installs.

> _This means that unless you actively manage your reviews, expect to have a
> 2–3 star average._

No way, a high quality app can have a 4.5+, and many decent ones have at least
4.0+.

[1] Not me personally, but the small company I cofounded

------
louiechristie
[http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/installing.png](http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/installing.png)

------
skc
I'm kind of in the "so what" camp. Making mobile apps is a choice an
individual, team or company undertakes.

To then turn around and say these people are "suffering" is daft. You're a
dev, go make something else.

~~~
J_Darnley
Yes. Reminds me of the story about a game dev trying to publish on mobile,
failing, then blaming the customers for buying coffee.

[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151026/04132732631/ceo-m...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151026/04132732631/ceo-
mobile-company-blames-everyone-wanting-coffee-rather-than-his-game.shtml)

Mobile games are shit, "free", and casual.

~~~
bigtunacan
Some are shit; but there are some real gems out there too. The real problem is
with us developers. In the beginning of the app stores we were all charging
reasonable rates, but as the number of apps increased there was a race to the
bottom in pricing. Everyone kept lowering prices until everything was 99 cents
and then after that free...

This is of course in keeping with basic economics; when the supply is this
high we approach marginal costs. In the app market marginal costs are zero.

I agree with the overall view of the medium article that it is easier to make
money on the web (again) these days. If you aren't already a mobile big fish
developer then enterprise applications and contracting are the only ways to
consistently stay in the green.

~~~
20years
This I believe is where a lot of the problem is. It's hard to make money on
free or .99 cents. Consumers are now used to free and cheap so I think it's
going to be pretty hard to turn this trend around. App devs kind of brought
this onto themselves by racing to the bottom.

------
guelo
> If the status quo continues, expect the overall app quality to stagnate and
> developers to move on to other platforms that have a less skewed power law.

This prediction likely won't come true. I don't know why but the situation
hasn't changed in years and developers keep pumping out thousands of apps
including many high quality polished apps.

------
FollowSteph3
I think the biggest issue isn't the searchability of mobile apps but rather
the price point. At the current price point you cannot pay for any
advertisement unless your in the top 1% and hence your whole marketing plan is
then the App Store search results. If prices were more realistic and people
could spend on advertising then any app could be discoverable. This is
basically what happens when you go with bottom of the barrel pricing...

------
agentPrefect
This is quite interesting though. On the web, search engines were built to
fulfil a very specific need... finding content. The more open the web became
the better search engines could find what you were looking for. Now with apps,
they're being built at an extremely rapid pace, I wonder if we could expect to
see some content-finding framework popping up to solve the
saturation/discoverability issue.

------
smegel
> In the past four weeks, there were 45,000 new apps submitted to the iOS App
> Store alone.

That's...staggering. If I tried to guess I would have been an order of
magnitude out.

~~~
paulojreis
Soon (or, I don't know, now?) they'll need a deep purge. Or a "Google" for
their app store.

~~~
teddyh
The Google way of ranking search results does not work if there are no _links_
to the things being searched. Do apps “link” to other apps? Do web pages link
to apps?

------
dest
Add to this the segmentation of the market wrt Java and Objective-C/Swift. The
app converters are still not fully convincing in my opinion, while developing
a web app is directly cross platform.

Independently, the idea of an app ranking similar to HN or Reddit is
brilliant.

~~~
brbsix
I don't know for sure, but I would guess that the statistical distribution of
popularity on HN or Reddit is very similar to the hockey-stick shaped graph
illustrated in the article.

------
kraigspear
This type of article comes out a few times a year.

Comparing to the Web. How many new web sites are brought up each day, and out
of those how many will gain significant traffic, and generate any significant
revenue?

But finding Apps is hard? Yes it could be better, but you can use the Web to
your harts content to promote your App which is searchable, assuming that's
the problem.

This makes me think of the guy who did the Carrot weather App. An independent
developer that took an over saturated category and did something unique.

At the same time thousands of weather Apps, that all look like clones of each
other where submitted to the App Store, and nobody cares, but the problem is
the App Store right?

~~~
w0utert
There's always a handful exceptions to the general rule, Flappy Bird being
another example.

You only need to take a quick glance at the top selling/top grossing charts in
the app store each day to see that the ecosystem for mobile apps is completely
broken (at least on iOS, don't know about Android but I would be surprised if
it were any different). There's literally hundreds if not thousands of
alternatives for each app in the top spots of the charts that are objectively
better, but practically speaking undiscoverable. At least if you count out
Apple's own apps and those made by Facebook, Google, et al.

IMO someone (Apple or Google) needs to step up and re-invent the mobile app
ecosystem, as it's in their own best interest to attract more diverse, higher
quality applications, instead of having a handful of big developers suck all
the air out of the room. Right now, they're doing a lousy job by just dumping
the most downloaded apps into a few categories and calling it a day.

I imagine some beautiful, innovative discovery and distribution ecosystem for
mobile apps that provides equal chances for large and small developers, and
really lets users discover quality content, instead of funneling them into a
handful of 'top 10' list and pretending those are 'the best', 'the most
valuable', 'the most fun', etc...

~~~
devit
What's wrong with search?

If you want, say, a calendar app, search for "calendar" both in the App/Play
Store and on Google or Bing (along with "android" or "ios").

You'll usually find a bunch of link to apps, plus several webpages reviewing
several of them.

Once you find the names of some popular apps, you can also put all their names
on a web search and find more webpages comparing them.

It works just like searching for anything else.

------
yeureka
45000 apps per month... Maybe I should release my mobile game on desktop
instead.

~~~
pavlov
Whichever you do, you can't assume that someone else will take care of
discovery on your behalf.

On the web, it's obvious that nobody will find your site by accidentally
typing its URL. On mobile, many people still seem to assume that users can
find apps on stores without any marketing to drive them there. That hasn't
been true for at least five years.

Dominating mobile game companies like King (Candy Crush) and Supercell (Clash
of Clans) spend over 500 million USD yearly on marketing. Unless you have that
kind of money, you can't pay your way to the top of app store listings, so
your marketing should probably focus on some very specific niche.

~~~
w0utert
>> Whichever you do, you can't assume that someone else will take care of
discovery on your behalf.

Why not? Isn't that the whole idea behind syndication? What about adding more
information to filter apps on besides name, category and star rating?

I agree that marketing is a powerful tool, but from a developer point of view,
I find the premise that you need to spend obscene amounts of money to be
successful in the mobile app space, even if your app is of outstanding
quality, quite depressing.

~~~
JacobAldridge
That's business- it's fundamentally a combination of Product and Distribution.
Both need consideration (not necessarily obscene amounts of money). Most
'Product' people, including but not limited to developers, underestimate the
challenges of Distribution. Ironically, many are the first to call out the
flaws when a 'Distribution' expert starts talking about "a great idea for an
app/site/SaaS product, I just need someone to build it for me".

~~~
soft_dev_person
But it's not out of reach for Apple or Google to change the premise on their
own market places.

They just need motivation to do so, and avoid scaring away the majority of
developers that don't have a big company backing them up _might_ be that
motivation.

------
vbezhenar
The question is, whether Apple and Google think that something is wrong, or
they think that everything is all right. They are the ones who set the rules.
Will they receive more money when small companies will be able with less
effort to reach the top ranks? I'm not sure.

I don't think that Apple can't change their ranking algorithms. And if they
don't change them fundamentally for years, then probably they are OK from
point of Apple. And users probably are OK with that too. And if ISV are
suffering, who really cares? You can't pay for ads? OK, but BigCompany can, so
we will sell ads to BigCompany instead of you. That's how capitalism works. So
unless some government regulator forces Apple or Google to change ranking
rules, I doubt, that anything would change.

------
oxplot
I've developed a few apps, and the method that I saw huge potential in was to
promote the app to early adopters by submitting it to specialized forums like
xda-developers. These are the folks who go out of their way to give your app a
spin and spread the word elsewhere for free.

------
eptcyka
He's right on the fact that something has to be done. But autodownloading
things isn't necessarily the solution.

There's an over-saturation of applications out there and most of them are
useless. App developers need to recognize the fact that whilst smartphones are
becoming the primary computing devices for a large part of the market, the
usecases are largely the same as with most other computing devices - media,
finances, shopping and social interactions. And you can do most of that with
10 applications at most.

Personally I haven't come across an application that would prove to be useful
or enable a new use case for my phone in the past 2 years.

------
eggy
You can offer an Android app on your site if the user/discoverer has permitted
'unknown sources' for app downloads in their settings, but to me the issue is
trust. Not that the app store ensures you don't download malware, but people
are not too trusting of site offering apps. Peer-reviewed apks could change
that, and an app with malware would be found out before spreading too far.
Maybe this is a way to at least bypass the stores. This does not address
marketing and discovery.

~~~
swiley
For a long time I only downloaded open source apks. They're easier to find and
there's a good chance they're safe.

------
ralphael
Thanks for this, I really enjoyed the article. Its what I have been thinking
of for a while but quantified much better.

------
sharemywin
Kind of reminds me of desktop development in the 90s. If you want greener
pastures go to augmented reality or VR. Like hololens or Occulus. Throw in a
couple drones for good measure and you got yourself a platform to play in.

------
empressplay
Tags would be useful, if you were limited to two or three, to aid discovery.
Search in the app stores seems to be pretty useless.

~~~
manmal
The problem with tags is that we (software devs) know how to use them, but
many other people don't. Source: Research done by a startup I worked with.

~~~
soft_dev_person
But letting search be affected by tags more than the description text would be
a way to let the devs prioritize the most important keywords. Other people
don't really need to know anything about them.

As opposed to putting "tags" in the app title (motivation for all calendar
apps to be named something with Calendar) or X number of times in the
description text (motivation for unnatural copy).

Disclaimer: Based on what little I know about search priority in Google Play.

~~~
jchewitt
Steam implemented tags (and, appropriately enough, a personalized 'discover'
queue) and it helps.

On Amazon's non-app store, you can also buy search ads. Apple could implement
something similar and take a larger cut of the paid install market. There are
search ads on Google Play (see:
[http://adwords.blogspot.com/2015/07/launching-search-ads-
on-...](http://adwords.blogspot.com/2015/07/launching-search-ads-on-
play.html)).

------
MrPatan
That was fun! I can't decide if it was a joke, though.

It's still funny.

