
The Evolution of the App Store and the App Business - wallflower
https://denzhadanov.com/the-evolution-of-the-app-store-and-the-app-business-b16b3eddfa57
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tonyedgecombe
_" Our 135 person team has built more than 40 products. 32 of them failed, but
we didn’t give up."_

That matches my experience, after my first product I thought I knew enough to
avoid the mistakes and it would be easy the next time. It turns out it's hard
to know what will succeed and what will fail.

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happybuy
We've relatively recently launched a new adblocking app on the App Store (and
Mac App Store) with a subscription based business model.

In our first year we've found many of the same learnings as this article and
have written about our experiences; [https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/ad-
blocker-year-in-review...](https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/ad-blocker-year-
in-review-2018/)

We believe that subscriptions - although currently going through an adjustment
and acceptance period - are the future for apps that provide ongoing value.

For apps that don't provide ongoing value, then yes, it may be difficult to
survive & one-off payments are probably the only feasible revenue model in
those cases.

~~~
jbob2000
It’s kind of weird to charge money for an ad blocking service. Instead of me
giving $20 to the content owners by putting my eye balls/clicking on ads, I’m
paying you $20 to remove the ads and the content owner gets $0. At least when
the ad blocking is free, nobody makes money. But charging for adblocking is
essentially stealing and I’m not sure how I feel about that...

~~~
beerlord
We need some kind of internet-wide micropayment infrastructure that
distributes a cent per website visited. Like the Spotify of the internet. I'd
happily pay $10/month for such a service, with the proceeds going to
Youtubers, Streamers, News outlets etc. Google or Facebook would seem in the
perfect place to manage such a system, but they seem more intent on slinging
ads.

~~~
cpbotha
This is exactly what the Brave company is setting up.

New chromium-based but privacy-focused browser, also called Brave. You pledge
a certain amount per month (this is opt-in). The time spent by all Brave users
determines how much of that pool of cash is distributed to all of the sites
that they visit.

See [https://brave.com/](https://brave.com/) \-- they have just released their
beta and it's pretty amazing. Payments in the new beta are not yet live
though.

~~~
hennsen
If it requires installing something extra that you otherwise don’t need the
mass market won’t join...

Also in general the masses probably will never see why to pay 10 bucks or
whatever for quality content as they are happy being served the other stuff...
i mean, ads wouldn’t be so successful if there weren’t people viewing the crap
content they are placed in... even less being clicked on.

But there are thousands of people even responding to spam mails and sending
money to some Nigerian Kings...

Wait. How about paying quality content from these. I mean, just telling them
your brother has a million in the bank and they just need to pay 1000 to get
it out and be rewarded with 10% etc... instead of nothing as usual, they get
quality content! Ok after reading too much of that they won’t do it anymore.
Selfdestructing Business.

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xte
The evolution was simple: in the FOSS world we invent the concept of repos,
this concept after decades of good work was grabbed by the proprietary world
that understand the unsustainability of their traditional model and imported
with a limited and locked-in version named "app stores".

Now proprietary firms understand that they can't continue evolve commercial
software, it's a dead end, so they found a way to lock-in FOSS leaving it
inside proprietary environment.

