

Bjork Brings Biophilia to Android With a Little Help From Apportable (YC W11) - collinjackson
http://blogs.wsj.com/venturecapital/2013/07/17/bjork-brings-biophilia-to-android-with-a-little-help-from-apportable/

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Kapura
This seems as good a place as any to dump thoughts about "app-albums" in
general. One thing that I always try to remember is that we're living in the
future, and it's foolish to assume that things from the past will work the
same way in the future.

Hence, app albums. Album apps. Whatever. Point is, people have smartphones
now. The music experience is changing because of that. I'm down with it. In
fact, $13 for an album with all the extra app functionality seems pretty good,
seeing as the standard iTunes album price is $10.

But the problem with creating this sort of future-music experience is that it
leaves some people behind. It used to be simply an iPhone app, but now there's
an android port. Guess what: my phone still can't get it, because my phone's
version of android isn't supported by the app. I couldn't get the Magna Carta
Holy Grail app either. Apps aren't a universal format like a record or a cd or
an MP3. They therefore necessarily leave some people behind.

You could argue that every media shift does that. But when the album becomes a
sort of multi-media experience, it's tragic that somebody would need a
different device that in almost every other respect is functionally identical
to their current device to experience it.

Which is what makes a service like apportable important: it's expanding the
audience of this numedia album experience. I doubt there are many people who
want to limit who has access to what art or information, but the problem with
being so future is that you're imposing those limits in the pursuit of making
something unique.

Maybe I'm overthinking it. But I hate feeling like I'm missing some part of
the experience because I'm happy with the phone I have.

~~~
callmeed
No, I don't think you're overthinking it. If anything, you're giving them too
much credit.

App albums are totally lame IMO. Just like having apps for a small to medium
retail/service business are generally lame. It's not worth the effort for most
people to find and download this app.

Look at Bjork's iPhone app reviews. There are 763 ratings. From what I've
read, you can multiply ratings x 30 to get a rough estimate of sales [1]. That
would put sales at 22,890 units. At $12.99 that's a net (after Apple's cut) of
roughly $208K. Maybe that covers Bjork's cost of developing the app, producing
all the additional content, and her additional time needed. Maybe. But I'm
skeptical.

Even if it was profitable for Bjork or Jay-Z, the problem is smaller artists
are going to try and emulate this and it's going to fail miserably for them.

[1] [http://osxdaily.com/2011/04/27/estimate-sales-downloads-
of-i...](http://osxdaily.com/2011/04/27/estimate-sales-downloads-of-ios-
itunes-app-store-apps/)

~~~
jarek
App albums remind me of the trend in the late 90s to build a lame Win32 .exe
wrapper around a website and ship it out on CD-ROMs. It made some sense as a
response to slow internet connections, but in retrospect it was an obviously
time-limited, user-limiting idea. App albums are similarly just a response to
limited standard "interactive experience" capabilities. They'll go away in
time.

The most use a Mac user could get out of one of these today is opening the
HTML files directly in a browser, if the files can be accessed. Same deal with
accessing any actual music/images/video/text in an app album on an
"unsupported" phone (which, keep in mind, could be a new iPhone or Android a
couple years from now).

~~~
drzaiusapelord
My thoughts as well. This is just like the enhanced CD of old. It was a
proprietary pain in the ass.

Meanwhile, I have mp3s from the 90s that play and sound just fine. Not sure if
the Apple or Google stores will even exist in 20 years, but my mp3s will
always play.

Also, it took them two years to make the android port. That tells me how
little invested they are in future proofing this thing. What happens when the
next couple of versions of iOS or android break it? I doubt they're going to
be there to support it. So this is music as temporary gimmick. I can't say
this is a good thing. This app is more like a game Bjork wrote the soundtrack
to as opposed to an album with games.

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zbowling
Apportable blog post on the announcement with a more technical explanation on
how Apportable works exactly: [http://blog.apportable.com/apportable-
raises-2-dollars-dot-4...](http://blog.apportable.com/apportable-
raises-2-dollars-dot-4m-led-by-google-ventures)

~~~
zbowling
Collin is doing an IAMA on the story:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1iiyxu/i_cofounded_app...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1iiyxu/i_cofounded_apportable_and_helped_bj%C3%B6rk_convert/)

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yoda_sl
If they are able to get the UIKit framework up and running, then they will
have the killer platform overall. I can see already the advantages for games
that are mostly OpenGL but with UIKit it will be 'game over' :-)

~~~
zbowling
We have something new coming down the pipe for UIKit soon. Stay tuned.

~~~
yoda_sl
I am :-)... already signup for the free plan, and I can see the Indie plan has
the "Advanced framework"

Suggestion: you may want to have somewhere a screencast showing a standard
UIKit app demoed, may be the standard Widget catalog demo that's available
with Apple SDK.

~~~
collinjackson
Good suggestion, we'll make sure to include UICatalog

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nnq
Side question, but... _why develop for a closed platform like iOS first, and
then port to an open(ish) platform like Android?_ (now, I know some answers,
but I really hope people don't start doing this for new projects, even if
Apportable is as good as they say...)

~~~
pavlov
Why not? It's basically the same as developing a desktop app for Mac first,
then porting it to Windows. It makes much more sense than going the other way
-- you'll never get a good Mac app if the platform wasn't considered from the
start.

The more closed platform has a stricter standard for user experience. It makes
sense to build around that standard, then port it to the "free-for-all"
platforms with necessary adaptations.

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bornhuetter
Apportable looks like a fantastic product. Does anyone know if such a thing
exists going in the other direction (Android to iOS)?

Anything to help with making it easier for developers to make reliable cross-
platform apps is very valuable to the industry.

~~~
BHSPitMonkey
That seems like the direction that would be less vulnerable to
copyright/patent claims. I could easily see Apple raising hell over the
compatibility layer Apportable ships with their "ports". Android, itself being
an open-source project, would be immune to that.

~~~
jtheory
Sure, but Apple, being sometimes a little overeager to keep the apps they
accept "of the right sort" \-- ideally fully native, really -- could see an
compatibility layer and decide to simply refuse to approve any apps using the
bundled Android layer.

~~~
BHSPitMonkey
They would have in the past. These days they do allow a variety of mechanisms
that let not-exactly-native apps run in iOS.

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codereflection
The Apportable people are sitting on a goldmine.

~~~
pjmlp
Most likely, the cold truth about mobile development is that the guys selling
middleware, trainings and even certifications are doing much more money than
most app developers.

It is the usual story about selling shovels in any gold race.

~~~
tsunamifury
Not even close. You think middleware and trainings are a 5 billion dollar
market?

~~~
pjmlp
Which guys are getting 5 billion dollar from their apps?!

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dirkdk
congrats Collin, Zac and others! Awesome technology, perfect for porting non-
standard UI apps from iOs to Android

~~~
joshbaptiste
indeed.. wondering how this is done technically.

~~~
zbowling
This is a video I gave at iOSDevCamp on how it all works:
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHNq3D4ko74](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHNq3D4ko74)

and the slides: [https://slid.es/zacbowling/objective-c-for-
android](https://slid.es/zacbowling/objective-c-for-android)

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BenjieGillam
This couldn't have happened at a better time for the apps we're working on in
the coming months! Congratulations on launching and all the best for the
future :)

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collinjackson
I'm doing an IAmA about this story:

[http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1iiyxu/i_cofounded_app...](http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1iiyxu/i_cofounded_apportable_and_helped_bj%C3%B6rk_convert/)

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qwertzlcoatl
I hope it doesn't come with the privacy intrusion of a Jay-Z.

------
zbowling
Original title was "YCW11 Objective-C for Android startup Apportable gets 2m
led by Google Ventures".

More on that story:
[http://pevc.dowjones.com/Article?an=DJFVW00020130717e97haong...](http://pevc.dowjones.com/Article?an=DJFVW00020130717e97haongz&cid=32135029&ctype=ts)

