

Is tomorrow Armageddon for Mac developers? - dholowiski
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/government/for-traditional-mac-developers-armageddon-comes-tomorrow/9825

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ghshephard
Put another way - in the last Ten years as an owner of:

    
    
      o PowerBook - 2000
      o PowerBook - 2003
      o MBPro - 2007
      o MBAir - 2010 
    

I have purchased the following Applications:

    
    
      o VMware Fusion+Upgrade
      o Windows XP
      o Microsoft Office (Twice - 2011 rocks my world)
      

Yet - I have 40 or 50 apps on my laptop (VLC, Colloquy, Acorn, ChickenofVNC,
etc, etc..)

Looking at my iPad + IPhone, I see that I have approximately 200 applications,
purchased, on average, for about $3 each + a few premium apps (Omnigrafflle,
OmniFocus - $50/each) Subscriptions to the Economist, Zinio, PressReader, WSJ,
and copies of Time, Wired, The New Yorker, PosSCi.

Reviewing my itunes Bills - I see I have spent approximately $40/month on
applications - or about $1500 in the last three years, not even including
content - which adds another $2k I don't even _think_ about purchasing $1.00
Apps, I just do it. I'm also comfortable buying, with a bit of research, the
nicer $5- $10 Apps.

None of which seemed to have hurt the price points of Applications like
Omnifocus/Omnigraffle that much.

I expect that my behavior on the iPhone/iPad will carry over to the Macintosh,
once a nicely curated store is available for me.

I _love_ rewarding developers - I just need the channel that I feel
comfortable in doing so. The Apple Store is that channel for me.

~~~
dmix
I've had the same experience with Steam.

I don't think I purchased a single PC video game since I discovered torrents
and usenet (unless I needed a multiplayer key).

But recently I've been buying games on steam for the pure convenience of
having a nice store with trailers, one click purchases and quick downloads.

Compared to having to deal with shady torrent sites, torrent download speed
shaping from my ISP and cracks.

~~~
alxp
There's also lots of $2 games on Steam and it hasn't killed the premier
developers' ability to charge $30 or $40 or more for their AAA titles.

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boredguy8
These used to be shareware-level games that (at best) would get bundled for $5
with 99 other games and the author hoped for some payment (or would unlock a
feature for a small price). So think of it as a massive pricing _increase_ ,
not a price _decrease_. As fun as, say, Angry Birds is, it doesn't compare to,
say, Worms 2.

Seriously: I remember playing an Air Hockey line-drawn 3D game on my friend's
Macintosh LC (I think it was). His dad had downloaded it free.

I'm not denigrating the work of these devs: let's just not pretend we're
creating epic worlds and employing hundreds of designers for these releases.
And as always: if your product is worth more, people will pay more for it. If
you've been able to keep your price high solely because of some platform
insulation, be happy the ride lasted as long as it did.

~~~
iuguy
> As fun as, say, Angry Birds is, it doesn't compare to, say, Worms 2.

Except for me Worms is currently £1.79 for the iPhone. Worms 2 is £2.99. I get
what you're trying to say, but this Christmas EA had their games on sale for
59p (about 99c I think) and they were mostly good games too. The Mac game
market is nowhere near as mainstream as PC and Consoles, and there's a risk
that mainstream developers may choose not to port games if they're competing
with £2.99 games with equivalent quality to Worms 2 or Fifa 11 on the iPhone
(in terms of use of native platform).

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pwelch
IMHO The author is blowing this out of proportion. He is comparing an iPhone
photo editing app to PhotoShop or asimple iPhone game like chopper to games
like Halo.

These are two different levels of software. It is amazing what software can be
written for mobile apps today but they are still not as fully functional as
their desktop equivalents. The Mac App Store is going to be a big push for
Desktop App developers to lower their costs slightly but you are still getting
more functionality out of Pages for Mac OS X rather than Pages for iPad.

Though Mobile Apps may continue to grow as an industry I think we are still a
few years away from seeing a serious threat to high functionality desktop
applications.

~~~
wzdd
Also, iPad applications seem to be up to twice as expensive as iPhone
applications -- even if they're essentially the same app. I expect the same
mystical price expansion will happen for Mac apps.

~~~
bigfudge
I always thought this was a result of developers realising they started too
low with the iphone and adjusting accordingly.

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hugh3
Only a little. While prices will get driven down, the total amount of money
getting spent on Mac apps will increase hugely.

I've been using macs since the days of the Plus, but when was the last time I
actually paid money for a boxed piece of software apart from MS Office?
Probably about a decade ago. And I'm not talking about piracy -- I just
haven't felt a sufficient desire for any third-party piece of software that
would entice me to go down to one of the very few places where such things are
available by retail (even the Apple Store has a rather embarrassing small
corner of mac software).

It's times like this I wish I had some time to actually write some Mac apps.

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jokermatt999
Nope. Look at Steam, for a good example. There are plenty of indie games
priced at the ~$10 dollar level, and there are also AAA titles priced at ~$60.
Neither one has doomed the other. The games market allows for simpler, low
priced indie games, but there is still space for the blockbuster games that
cost 5 times as much. They're different products, and different markets.

I don't know enough about Mac software to speak for that though. I'm a
Windows/Linux user, and virtually every piece of software I use is free or a
corporate application.

~~~
dmix
But most mac apps _are_ created by indie shops.

Are there ever any "Blockbuster" mac app releases?

You rarely see marketing for mac apps. Most of the big names (ex photoshop,
word) are so established that they don't need to bother worrying about price
(or possibly even using the app store). But still thats a small percentage of
the market.

~~~
alxp
Omni Group are the best example of a great Mac developer that isn't huge like
Adobe or MS. They sell best-of-their-kind software for the iPad for quite high
prices, and are doing very well. I don't see this changing in the Mac app
store.

------
kemiller
The app store means

    
    
      * nearly zero worry about piracy* 
      * much much easier discovery process for average users
      * much higher purchaser confidence (due to b and c)
      * lower purchase activation energy
     

All of these together mean that apps which traditionally scraped by as
shareware, thrilled if they got 5% conversion, can now just sell at an
impulse-purchase price of $1-5. Larger professionally-produced titles, like
games, that have always had problems with piracy, no longer have to overcharge
the people who do pay in order to compensate for those who would have paid,
but didn't.

*: Part of this analysis is based on the assumption that if the app store DRM gets cracked (likely), the procedure is sufficiently unpalatable that it cracking is not widespread. There are a large number of pirates of convenience out there, who if faced with an app store where what they want is noticeably less expensive than it was before, might decide it's not worth the risk/bother.

~~~
orangecat
_Part of this analysis is based on the assumption that if the app store DRM
gets cracked (likely), the procedure is sufficiently unpalatable that it
cracking is not widespread._

There are no jailbreaking hassles with Macs, so probably all pirates will have
to do is download a single app/kernel extension/whatever. And I wouldn't be
surprised at all if Apple uses that as an excuse to lock down Macs in the next
few years.

~~~
kemiller
I don't think any of us know that until we see it in action.

------
tednaleid
Sure the price will drop by an order of magnitude, but the number of units
sold will skyrocket. I bet by at least that same order of magnitude. The
current number of units sold by a developer through their own store is
microscopic. The incremental cost for selling another unit is almost zero.

The ability to be part of a store that every mac computer has installed
automatically, with super easy purchasing, credit card processing, and
installation, will offset the drop in price.

It also gets developers out of the business of maintaining their own
storefront, payment processing, etc. A cost that is a burden on many of the
existing developers.

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geoffpado
No. <http://bit.ly/a4Qb2Z>

EDIT: Bit.ly'd because apparently HN doesn't allow apostrophes in links.

~~~
nfg
Link that works:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_Law_of_Headlines>

~~~
geoffpado
Derp. Thanks, completely forgot about URL encoding.

------
mkramlich
I've been selling $5 apps for Mac and Windows for over 3 years now already,
completely independently and homegrown, so this won't impact me much. :)

There was a point in the past where I did a lot of research in the traditional
PC/Mac shrinkwrapped boxed retail bricks-and-mortar software market, and the
pricing model was rather shocking. Speaking in very general terms, and
especially more about PC software, what I found was that for a say $50 priced
unit of software, in a box there at a retail store, about 50% of that went to
the retail store, about 25% or so went to the distributor, 20% to the
publisher, and then only about $3-5 went to the actual developer.
(Approximately, details varied.) Add-in traditional publishing industry
shenanigans that try to turn developers effectively into sharecroppers, and
almost require huge hype-driven sale numbers, and the situation is even worse.

Now with things like Steam and the App Store and with PayPal, etc., developers
can publish software directly, much more easily, and the distributor/online-
retail middleman takes a smaller cut, so say the retail price can be $5 and
the developer takes home 70%-97% of that, depending on if more like App Store
or PayPal model, respectively. So the take home income per unit for the
developer can be about the same, but at a much much lower retail price point,
which is a net win for consumers. And since there are less publishing
shenanigans with compensation structure, it's actually possible to sell a
small number of units per month and achieve at least Ramen profitability.
Which at least buys you runway to develop additional stuff or work on side
ventures, so it's a virtuous cycle/snowball effect.

~~~
Stormbringer
Which begs the question, would _you_ publish on the Mac app Store?

I agree with what you are saying about the traditional bricks and mortar
approach being an exercise in rogering the developer. Which was why when the
iTunes App Store opened up I thought it was a _huge_ deal that they were
_only_ taking a 30% cut, and yet were doing all this other stuff effectively
for free: hosting, payments processing.

But - if you already have all that set up and in place, is it still attractive
to you? If only for 'marketing' purposes? E.g. to say that you're on there, to
be searchable etc.

NB: I realise that the walled garden is very restrictive, so your particular
apps might not apply, ignoring that, is there any aspect of the deal that
appeals to you?

~~~
mkramlich
I am considering making distributions for the Mac App Store, yes. But I've had
higher priority things on my plate in recent months.

But yes, it could be a net win, or at least an additional channel. The biggest
potential net win, in my mind, is that even if my net take home pay per unit
is about the same for a Mac App Store sold unit, if it gets exposed to a
larger number of eyeballs, the overal revenue stream should be higher. And may
be a different, non-overlapping demographic as well. So yes, I am considering
it and if it looks like a net win I'l do it. I haven't studied their
packaging/platform requirements yet, however. Some of my apps may have
technical or content qualities which are disallowed or at least problematic
due to their requirements/policies.

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amichail
Doesn't the smaller Mac market mean that prices will be higher than those for
iOS?

~~~
xenophanes
Yeah that's exactly what I was thinking. If iOS developers try to sell a ton
of copies for a dollar, they'll soon discover there are less people buying.
Prices may go down some but they won't hit iOS levels.

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tewks
This article is ridiculous because the author does not address the fact that
volume will increase dramatically: a $3 app on the Mac app store will
undoubtedly sell many times, perhaps 10+ x, more than the app distributed on a
CD/DVD via Amazon for $30.

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stretchwithme
How many copies does a typical Mac application sell? What are the margins,
marketing expenses for comparable apps in both worlds? Or are mobile apps
almost always tinier and less capable or just too different to compare?

And do you even have to sell your app in the new store? Or will you have to
because you will now suddenly have competitors? Is your app that easy to
duplicate or is it that selling will be so much cheaper or it will be easier
to get attention? And if its not better in some way, why would you stop
selling your app the old way?

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wan23
Commoditize Your Complements. Cheaper and more abundant Mac software improves
the experience for users, which should increase the appeal of the platform. If
it works then it should mean more money being spent on Mac software in the
long run, even if it's less per unit. If it works out any way similar to iOS
the most popular apps will make a ton. The traditional developers just need to
make sure that their software is the best, and if they can't beat the new guys
then can they really complain?

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kevinburke
This is a testable prediction. Rather than speculate, is anyone willing to bet
money on the price movement of Mac apps over the next 6 months, and at what
odds?

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bad_user
Prices are dictated by the market, since everybody wants to generate as much
profit as possible. Not to mention covering development costs as soon as
possible.

iOS is more popular than OS X. Selling for iOS means more copies sold. It's
not hard to do the math and nothing stopped the hordes of iOS developers from
attacking the OS X market anyway.

If anything this will provide a channel for crappy apps that you can develop
in a weekend and still generate some revenue for it (instead of giving it away
for free).

And Windows has had a shareware culture for quite some time (tones of crappy
games included, e.g. Zuma). It did nothing to stop the selling of quality apps
for higher prices, as prices are only affected by other apps in the same
category.

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neovive
I agree that there could be some price pressure due to increased competition
and choices. However, given the inherent differences between iOS and OS X
apps, I don't see many iOS developers being able to instantly compete with the
established independent Mac developers and companies (e.g. Panic, Omni Group,
etc.). The years of experience of the established Mac developers shows through
in their quality. If anything, they may need to alter their marketing a bit to
justify the premium pricing.

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JonnieCache
One person's app store is another person's package manager.

