Opinion
thinks it’s partly people, not just Apple, to blame for the tough economics of living on the app store
A look at the economics of the App Store
Every new year, we hear in Apple’s financial results about the latest giant cheque it wrote to developers (given the state of the American banking system, this might even be literally true). Billions paid out! The gold rush continues!
Meanwhile, talk to a developer working at a company that doesn’t have huge private funding, or doesn’t make a game that starts with ‘Clash’, and the story is different. The biggest free apps or games with in-app purchases eat up the vast majority of that money, crowning a few app oligarchs while everyone else battles for scraps. You’ll have heard the phrase ‘race to the bottom’ a lot, with the blame often laid at the feet of Apple itself for not cultivating an ecosystem that values software (because it benefits too much from the glut of free apps, since they make its hardware more attractive to buyers).
I don’t for a second think Apple is blameless for the state of the App Store (especially in its use of the charts as such a prominent discovery tool, which rewards pure momentum rather than long-term quality or sustainbility – something the new App Store is starting to address, a mere nineyears later), but I also think pointing all the red string on our ‘Who killed the big indies?’ investigation board towards Cupertino just leads us down the wrong path.
One reason the economics of the App Store are dissatisfying is that Apple users are used to seeing a much healthier economy that’s still going strong: Mac apps. If one Apple product supports a broad range of quality software at prices that maintain businesses comfortably, why wouldn’t another Apple product? Apple must have dropped the ball, right?
Except the iPhone isn’t the Mac. The Mac is something you choose to buy into quite deliberately, because the ‘default’ is to go Windows. And so it has a high percentage of users who are willing to invest in high-quality software that improves it.
The iPhone is the ‘default’ phone, though – Android phones sell massively, but no one model outpaces the iPhone. People buy it because it’s the nicest to use, at an affordable price. They’re not necessarily invested. This means that hoping for a repeat of the Mac ecosystem was folly – the ecosystem it was likely to repeat was that of Windows apps, and that’s what happened: most users just want a few bits of essential extra freeware to get by with.
Until Apple grows iOS to be as synonymous with productivity as the Mac – giving it the value that people see in that platform – things won’t change. Maybe when the inevitable iOS-powered laptop appears, that familiarity will foster a new attitude. Maybe people will start looking for app recommendations again, and be willing to pay. Or maybe we’re already at the point of no return for iOS developers, and we need another operating system reset.
Apple is starting to address key App Store issues after nine years