

IPhone =/= Debian app - telemachos
http://lwn.net/Articles/392628/

======
mortenjorck
Yes, just like the dot com boom, this growth is unsustainable.

But again, just like the dot com boom, once the market has matured to blow
away the chaff, what remains will have proven pretty game-changing.

~~~
handelaar
The step in that process you left out was "years-long massive earthquake-level
crash leading to complete economic collapse of the micro-economy under
discussion", the kind where most of the casualties are _all_ the smart non-
founders in the industry.

Been there, done that.

The primary reason I'm involved in this community is that I was in London
before the first crash. Us internet people had been there for a decade or
more, but all the investment money was going to some twat in a suit who had no
cocking idea what was going on, or why.

Outside the little Nirvana that pg and company (among others) have created,
the same rules apply.

[All of the following may be completely Euro-specific.]

Talentless schmucks get all the money available because they're the
{sons|nephews|mistresses|cabana boys} of other people with money, and then try
to hire us to fill in the yawning chasms (they call them 'gaps') in their
plans.

The only winning move is not to play. Do your own thing, but ferchrissakes
don't start working for some family-moneyed fool because "appz R h0tt and
we're all gonna get rich". If you're gonna take a risk, at least ensure that
the risk beneficiary is you. The one major thing I've noticed in this little
playground of ours is this: it's not that you are going to have trouble
raising money - it's that you're going to have trouble raising money because
you're going to get lost in the deafening noise of trustafarian morons with
connections, and they're going to win that funding battle.

 _That_ is why we need to play out of revenues and/or do our thing on ramen
money: it's because the other method is massively stacked against us, and
massively stacked in favour of idiots.

~~~
dman
Very well put.

------
mralbie
These worthless apps are also a cost to Apple. It is getting harder and harder
to find quality apps on the App Store. The Store itself is now (a) the
'Featured' page, (b) the 'Top Ten' lists, and (c) Apple's 'Collections'. The
more difficult it is to find quality apps the more difficult it will be for
the ecosystem as a whole to improve.

Are there other examples of online stores with vast selections which genuinely
help users find quality products? Netflix is the only one I can think of. (And
don't get me started on Apple's 'Genius Recommendations'.)

~~~
rakslice
Why does everyone discount the idea of people finding apps through the search
box? Are the users assumed to be unimaginative and unresourceful? Is the long
tail too flat for anyone to make a living off of?

~~~
Splines
Maybe it's just me, but the process I use to determine what software I choose
is not done in the store. Research via reading reviews and recommendations
from others is usually the way I go about it.

The problem I have in the App Store (wrt. finding apps that are "free
floating") is that I don't know what's out there, and it's difficult to
predict what will show up when I type in a specific query.

I'm a gamer, so let's look at games. Typically, for my 360 and PC, I'm well
aware of new games that are on the horizon. Big name publishers and even the
smaller ones typically receive publicity well in advance of release, and on
release day/week there is usually something I can find on metacritic that
someone else has written about that game.

OTOH, in the App Store, I have very little idea on the quality of gameplay for
new games released that day. Finding reviews outside of the App Store for
games developed by one-man-shops is incredibly difficult.

Take the game "Red Conquest" as an example. I heard about it in an online web
forum. I never saw it in any App Store category list, and a search for the
term "RTS" is bound to contain so much fluff that I still wouldn't have found
it. It's a game that I think exemplifies the lost-in-the-shuffle problem in
the App Store. (FWIW, I love this game. It's brutally hard, but you can tone
down the difficulty to make it manageable. Small things, like the fact that it
boots in less than 5 seconds, or that it has bluetooth/wifi multiplayer, make
a big difference).

To summarize, it's difficult to search using the search box because you don't
know what you're looking for.

~~~
joubert
Metacritic also publishes iPhone game ratings, like they do for consoles:
<http://features.metacritic.com/features/topics/iphone/>

------
mclin
What about the barrier to entry: $100 + a Mac + an iPhone.

As compared to a computer, which pretty much everyone had by 1998. Also iPhone
programming is way harder than HTML. I had a mandatory high school class that
taught HTML.

Maybe I'm underestimating how many people are jumping on this, but my
intuition is it can't be as many as were jumping on web. Twitter/social media
marketing however... :P

~~~
akeefer
For many novice developers, web development imposes its own barriers to entry.
First of all, you need some server somewhere, which means you need to know
something about servers, maybe have some sysadmin skills, and likely that
you'll have to make some sort of ongoing cash outlay for it. Secondly, if you
want to get paid you need to figure out how to process payments, or at the
very least what ad network you want to attempt to embed.

On the dead simple end where you just want essentially a blog with ads, it's
easy. On the not-so-simple end, where you want to build an application you can
charge money for, the app store model is very straightforward. You don't have
to make any decisions about servers or hosts, do any sysadmin work, worry
about traffic spikes and scalability, and your cash outlays (aside from
development time) are all upfront and totally predictable. Similarly, payment
processing is already there and handled for you. And lastly, you don't have to
worry about SEO or distribution channels because you don't have a choice in
the matter.

It's easier to put up a web page somewhere than to build an app for the app
store . . . but for a large number of people building an app for the app store
is much simpler than putting up a web _application_. And that, I think, is a
big reason why the app store exploded.

~~~
mclin
oh for sure. I differ though in that that's not the comparison being drawn in
the article. TFA compares iPhone apps to pimply kids making web pages for
local businesses in < 2001, and not, as you suggest, to developing web apps.

I had a few friends in high school that made decent money making websites for
eg a local car dealership. It was easy because it's just HTML.

------
frankus
I would point out that there is as much difference between your basic piece of
ShovelWare and a real iPhone app as there is between a "Home Page" and a Web
app.

In both cases having a deep understanding of the platform and the skills to
build non-trivial stuff on top if it will be valuable after gold rush phase
has passed.

------
ddelony
I think that the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad platform has taken off because the
mobile Web is just painful to use right now in those tiny browsers.

Apple's fulfilling a niche that AOL did in the '90s. Where AOL provided
training wheels for the Internet, Apple does the same thing for mobile
computing. Unfortunately, AOL didn't figure out that users would eventually
outgrow the training wheels and discover the open Internet.

I guess the same thing will happen with the mobile Web once browsers improve
and people start to learn to design mobile Web sites for mobile devices. I
think Apple realizes this, since they're putting effort into HTML 5.

------
bcl
I don't totally disagree. But I don't agree either. Maybe that's because I'm
making enough off my ad supported app to pay my monthly iPhone bill. Not much
more than that, but enough.

<http://brianlane.com/software/nascar-iphone/>

and it isn't even pretty.

------
rakslice
What's more volatile than a discussion with a group of enthusiasts with chips
on their shoulders made of pure sodium? A discussion that pits two such groups
against each other.

When it comes to binary compatibility, Debian's answer is basically the same
as the App Store's: Use only our official packages and you won't have to worry
about compatibility.

With all the flamey comparisons about the contents of the iPhone App Store and
Official Debian Repositories, who develops for each, and what their
motivations are, what's getting lost is that in each case what connects the
developers with officialdom is some kind of approval process. By investigating
the App Store's approval process, the Debian project can get a lot of ideas
about what they might want to add to their own approval process (and what they
might want to remove from it).

------
Hoff
Whether you agree with a market or a business, it's your money and your choice
and your investments.

Whether you believe the market is the next great thing or unsustainable, if
it's trending up, that's money to be made.

Whether you think a widget is pretty or pretty ugly, it's money.

Whether you think the CEO is a genius or an idiot, if a company is going up,
it's money. (And if you're positioned for and inclined for a put or with a
CDS, a market or a business that's headed down can be money, too.)

Sure, the folks might eventually realize they're getting minimum wage, and
that those fancy tulip bulks are all worthless. The key is stepping off before
the bubble bursts.

Or you might wake up one morning, and realize that the business cycle has
shifted, and iOS is everywhere.

Welcome to capitalism. Place your investments.

------
einarvollset
Ehum.. What? Yeah there were a lot of shit webpages back in the day, but there
was also what became came ebay, facebook, google, etc, etc.

I don't see a lot of debian apps doing better than facebook..

~~~
telemachos
>> _I don't see a lot of debian apps doing better than facebook.._

There's no possible scale of values that you could use to evaluate this
comparison. It's not even apples to oranges. It's like saying Facebook is
doing better than beagles. The things don't fit into the same category at all.

Here's a random example: one of the Debian apps is aptitude. It manages
packages on the command-line. If you are a Debian sys-admin, it very likely
enormously important to you. Nevertheless, it makes zero sense to say it's
"doing better than Facebook." That sentence is just meaningless.

~~~
aaronbrethorst
Facebook is doing way better than beagles! Beagles are predisposed to
epilepsy; Facebook is not. Beagles did not generate $800MM in revenue last
year; Facebook did!

~~~
telemachos
I didn't know about the epilepsy. How sad.

Comparing Debian to Facebook in terms of revenue is literally senseless.
Debian is a free - free as in beer, free as in freedom - operating system. It
does not exist to make money. That was my real point since I suspected the OP
meant "doing better" in terms of money.

------
thought_alarm
As Apple's products get more and more popular with developers and users, the
anti-Apple criticism get more and more bizarre and inane.

~~~
telemachos
I'm not sure what you think is inane - I wouldn't mind hearing. And I read the
post as anti-Appstore more than anti-Apple. (I think it's an important
distinction in context.)

The poster is responding to this in the thread above him:

 _How many useful applications are in Debian's repositories?

<snip>

10 thousand? 20 thousand?

How long has Debian been around? 17 years?

Now compare this to iPhone: 3 years and ~140,000 applications._

The post isn't criticizing Apple so much as saying to _that_ argument, "You're
not counting parallel things here. The Appstore is filled with trivially small
apps - apps that amount to no more than a simple webpage. That inflates those
numbers."

What is it you find inane there?

~~~
thought_alarm
Funny you should mention the original post, because he makes a very good yet
obvious point:

> If 'Free Software' is to succeed as 'Free software' it needs to produce
> superior product and out compete

It was wrong of him to trot out total app count, because it's a meaningless
number, but there's no question that the iPhone has attracted a _huge_ amount
of developer interest. This has resulted in a large library of very well-
designed and compelling software across all categories, and has allowed
independent developers to reach more users than they ever could have dreamed.

Much of this developer traction can be attributed to Apple's management of the
App Store, but this kind of exciting software development was happening
_before_ the App Store, when developers did it just for fun and had to
reverse-engineer the APIs. If you weren't there in 2007, you have no idea how
exciting it was.

It says a lot about what can happen when you deliver a compelling piece of
hardware running a sophisticated platform. Of course, the reply addressed none
of it, and succeeds only in demonstrating a complete lack of understanding
about consumer software development in 2010.

~~~
telemachos
Thanks for the extended response. I don't believe that Debian (as the Free
Software under discussion here) is in any relevant sense competing with iOS
(or OSX, for that matter).

Debian's mission is to provide a universal (as much hardware as possible)
operating system freely (free as in beer, free as in freedom). This simply
doesn't strike me as the kind of thing that's competing with iOS in any
relevant sense.

So, I don't think the author fails to address that point. I think it's
irrelevant.

------
korch
While I agree with this point completely, I also think bitching about Apple's
iPhone and Ipad "apps" is a moot point. 5 years from now it's all going to be
html5, and all of these apps will run on any mobile device web browser.

Apple now has such a head start on their app platform that pretty much the
only reasonable strategy their competitors can do is collude and standardize
on html5 for all apps.

Then Apple has a very big problem—they will be in direct opposition to Google
and the rest of the organic, growing web. Never, ever bet against the web, nor
face the web upstream.

If you discount 3d games, image manipulation programs, and some other
specialized software that really can't "just be a web page", then what is even
left for "apps" to do that the web can't?

Apps should have been the web the entire time.

~~~
aboodman
Ah, 3d games and image manipulation. The last resort of all native arguments.
This is going to change pretty rapidly with native client I think.

~~~
pyre
That went over my head. By 'native client,' are you making a reference to the
fact that the push to make all of our apps run on a server is a swing of the
pendulum back to the 'mainframe' days and that some day people will be
expounding the virtues of writing software to run on the client as the 'new
thing?' Or is 'native client' a reference to some new browser technology that
I'm unaware of (which is possible)?

~~~
Raphael
new tech: <http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/>

------
codeflo
That's true, iPhone apps aren't like Debian packages at all. iPhone apps are
self-contained, sandboxed, can only access data that I allow them to, and if I
delete them, every trace of them is gone. A Debian package on the other hand
first of all has to pull 57 other packages in order to even work, each of
which splatters hundreds of files of all kinds all over my filesystem, and if
I uninstall a package, I can rest assured that at least two dozen
configuration files remain abandoned somewhere in /etc. I'm not sure how
someone could confuse the two.

~~~
telemachos
FUD:

    
    
        # remove package, its dependents _and_ purge config files
    
        aptitude purge <package-name>
    
        # purge config files from items that were removed but not purged
    
        aptitude purge ~c
    

And, to play Devil's advocate the other way around, because Debian's tools are
_not_ sandboxed, they can inter-operate sanely. You can, you know, share
things, print them, move them around. It's as if - shocking - you own your own
data. Imagine that.

I work pretty regularly with both Debian and OSX. They both have areas where
they excel. I think you're being pretty simplistic.

~~~
codeflo
Well, I want to make a few things clear here. First of all, I was being a bit
snarky obviously. I didn't know about "aptitude purge", but it's a bit ironic
that when googling for that, the first result is a forum post about someone
with orphaned config files that aptitude purge wouldn't remove... sounds
reliable.

I think it's time for desktop OS makers (and that includes Apple, because OS X
isn't any different from Linux or Windows in this regard at all) rethink the
way software is installed and organized. In my opinion, the way you can
install and try applications without consequences on iOS devices has a lot
going for it. Users _actually install stuff_ on their iPads, which they don't
on their Windows computers because they're scared of unintended consequences.

~~~
telemachos
_Edited to remove unhelpful rage_

It sounds like you don't know Debian very well. That's fine. No reason you
should. I know Debian reasonably well. I can tell you that in four years of
using aptitude, I have found a very small number of edge cases where it does
not work sanely, efficiently and helpfully. (To clarify it's really APT +
aptitude. aptitude is one possible tool to use APT.) It's not perfect; no
software is. But it's quite remarkable. I believe it to be a far better
packaging system than anything available for OSX, including Homebrew - which I
like a lot and which gets better all the time.

To respond to your follow-up, I deeply disagree about iOS representing a good
future for software. The kernel already implements one filesystem - and that's
a big job. Why would we want every application to have to reinvent that wheel?
Worse yet, how we will we allow and help users to share data between all our
little sandboxes if we go that route? I think the iOS sandboxing is a disaster
and huge step backwards for software.

A final question: in your original post you say if you remove an iPhone app,
no trace of it is left. How would you know? My point being that the system is
so locked down, there's really no basis for us to know that. For all we know,
iApps leave the drive cluttered with _their_ configuration files and
preferences. Maybe you develop for Apple and can show me I'm wrong (or someone
else can), but _as a user_ there's no real way for me to know this, is there?

~~~
codeflo
(Edit: This response was written at a point when the parent post was quite a
bit more unfriendly than it is now. I'll leave this here regardless, even
though it's out of context now.)

Was I in any way rude to you?

1\. That's not what I said.

2\. I admit that I don't use Debian, but internally, package managers don't
differ _that_ much. I was criticizing the model where software has to install
files all over the place. I think the proper response should be "make a
simpler model", not "write a complex tool that can keep track of this mess".

3\. So I was wrong and Debian packages come with cleanup scripts. That's good.
Am I right in assuming that those cleanup scripts are only as good as the
maintainer of the package, i.e. there's nothing inherent in the design of
Debian that makes this cleanup function work reliably. (Note that some config
files might have been created after installation, i.e. are not part of the
original package.)

4\. What?

5\. Have you talked to a casual computer user recently? They are afraid of
installing unknown software, yes. Almost everyone I know has had malware on
their PC at one point or another.

~~~
telemachos
You were not rude. My initial response was unhelpful and aggressive, and I
quickly edited it to respond to your arguments. I apologize for the initial
response.

For the record, regarding 3, there _is_ something in the design of Debian that
makes the cleanup function work very reliably. (Again, not perfectly, but very
reliably.) There are strict, strict rules for Debian maintainers in terms of
the pre-install and post-removal scripts that go with packages. These rules
help to maintain a very uniform system - even though its actively developed by
thousands of people all over the world who are often only loosely connected to
each other.

~~~
codeflo
Apology accepted. Much of my dislike for package managers is on theoretical
grounds (I use Macports, but only casually), so it's great to argue with
someone who actually knows something about them.

