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Under the Radar

1: Adapting to the Market

 

00:00:00   - We should do the intro.

00:00:01   I suppose that's the question.

00:00:02   (laughing)

00:00:04   - I guess we didn't work all that out yet.

00:00:06   - Didn't work that out, it's fine, it's all right.

00:00:07   - All right, so this is episode one of Under the Radar.

00:00:10   I'm Marco Arment.

00:00:12   - And I'm David Smith.

00:00:13   - You may know our other podcasts.

00:00:15   David has been doing Developing Perspective for many years.

00:00:20   I did Build and Analyze first,

00:00:21   now I do the Accidental Tech podcast and Top Four.

00:00:24   And this is gonna be a show about development, basically.

00:00:29   It's kind of like the sequel, the combination of build and analyze with developing perspective.

00:00:36   And in the spirit of developing perspective, never being longer than 15 minutes, David,

00:00:40   how long is this show going to be?

00:00:41   Never longer than 30 minutes.

00:00:43   So let's get started.

00:00:44   Let's get started.

00:00:45   I think the place to start seems, right now, we're recording just after the Apple TV app

00:00:50   store launched.

00:00:53   And it went online I think on last Friday and it's had the usual fanfare and the things

00:00:59   that go on with that.

00:01:00   But neither one of us launched anything on day one.

00:01:04   And for myself, it's the first Apple product I've ever not been in the store on day one

00:01:08   for, which is interesting.

00:01:11   Yeah, I'm the same way, I think.

00:01:13   I mean, I was there for the watch and the Apple TV and I even got one of the early access

00:01:20   developer units because I thought I might use it and it just literally sat on my desk

00:01:25   and I was so busy doing other things because I was working on Overcast and trying to get

00:01:31   the 2.0 update out the door. And that kind of precluded this because if I'm going to

00:01:35   make an Apple TV app it has to be all about streaming because local storage with the Apple

00:01:39   TV is so limited and I didn't have the streaming engine done yet. So I worked on the iPhone

00:01:45   and I've been doing bug fixes on that since,

00:01:48   and I have literally not even opened

00:01:51   like an Xcode project with the TV.

00:01:54   I haven't even seen the TV simulator.

00:01:56   I have not written a single line of TV code yet.

00:01:59   Have you?

00:02:00   - Yeah, I got a developer kit as well,

00:02:02   and I wrote a version of Pod Wrangler, my podcast client,

00:02:07   for the Apple TV, and it works, and it plays.

00:02:12   I didn't spend the time and energy

00:02:14   get it ready for day one, though.

00:02:16   But it's an interesting developer platform because it is essentially iOS, just minus

00:02:21   a bunch of stuff.

00:02:23   There's a couple of new things, but essentially it's just iOS UI kits with a different input

00:02:28   mechanism rather than obviously being touch-based.

00:02:31   It's remote control-based.

00:02:32   But I used it, and it's fine and easy.

00:02:36   The thing that ultimately I think slowed me down, though, is I just became...

00:02:41   There's just so much else to do and so many other things that, like, if I'm trying to

00:02:46   be on every Apple platform as a one-man shop, it's essentially impossible now.

00:02:51   And so I looked at the Apple TV and I'm like, "It's gonna be a long time before there's

00:02:53   a big market there."

00:02:56   And so I just didn't prioritize it.

00:02:58   Yeah, and, you know, and I feel like, you know, we're coming at this from two different

00:03:02   viewpoints here.

00:03:03   You know, I tend to work on a very small, I tend to work on usually one app for a span

00:03:08   of years.

00:03:09   I very rarely have additional apps.

00:03:12   I'm not very good at splitting my time

00:03:13   between multiple apps.

00:03:15   I pretty much just do one thing,

00:03:16   and I try to make that one app big and complicated

00:03:19   and appeal to a ton of people in order to keep it going.

00:03:23   Whereas the background you come from is,

00:03:26   I think, much more interesting, honestly,

00:03:28   because when people, and this is one of the reasons

00:03:31   I wanted to do the show with you,

00:03:32   and one of the reasons I wanted to call it Under the Radar,

00:03:35   because when people do,

00:03:37   when people think about Apple developers,

00:03:39   tend to think about the handful of well-known ones who make mass consumer apps that you

00:03:46   may have heard of. So apps like Tweetbot or Net News Wire or the apps from Panic that

00:03:51   a lot of developers have heard of or use or are wowed by. And there's this massive number

00:03:56   of developers who we don't usually hear about in this circle of Apple enthusiasts and tech

00:04:03   and stuff, and I think you are a very, very good example

00:04:07   of this massive market, and I think you do it better

00:04:11   than most people would do it.

00:04:13   And so what you do is not like the high profile,

00:04:18   you know, high attention, Mac, blogger,

00:04:23   long term ecosystem kind of thing.

00:04:27   You do something way more pragmatic.

00:04:29   And so can you maybe just go into that briefly

00:04:33   for anyone who doesn't know you yet,

00:04:35   who's listening to this for some reason.

00:04:37   Can you go into what exactly you do and how you got there?

00:04:40   - So I've been an iOS developer essentially

00:04:44   since the App Store started, about seven and a bit years ago.

00:04:47   I didn't quite make the day one of the App Store,

00:04:50   mostly because of business approval stuff.

00:04:54   But I've been developing ever since then.

00:04:55   And since then, I've launched,

00:04:58   I think I recently worked this out,

00:05:00   something like 52 unique app concepts in the last seven years.

00:05:05   So it works out to be about one every two months or so.

00:05:08   It hasn't been exactly that even of a pace, but that's roughly the average.

00:05:13   But I've been making a good, steady, comfortable living from it for about six and a half of

00:05:19   those seven years.

00:05:21   And so I have lots of different products in a lot of different areas.

00:05:25   I tend to, like at this point, I have probably five or six

00:05:29   that are like my main income makers,

00:05:32   and they each, the biggest one of them

00:05:34   only makes up a third of my income.

00:05:36   So it's a very diversified type of thing.

00:05:38   And that's my, the approach that I found

00:05:40   that works well for me is to make lots of small bets

00:05:45   and see which one pays off in the store

00:05:48   rather than trying to take the approach.

00:05:50   Like with Overcast, if I remember right,

00:05:51   it's like you spend 18 months working on it.

00:05:54   - Yeah.

00:05:55   as like a big major focus.

00:05:56   And like for me, the longest I've ever spent

00:05:58   on a product before I launched it is probably four weeks

00:06:02   or something along those lines.

00:06:03   And so it's a very different kind of a focus

00:06:06   where I'll put something together,

00:06:07   I'll put it out in the store,

00:06:07   I try and make it like good in quality

00:06:10   but very straightforward and see what happens.

00:06:15   And that approach means that I end up now

00:06:17   with lots of different products,

00:06:19   doing a lot of different things.

00:06:20   And as it's, you know, I have the benefit of diversity

00:06:24   in terms of stability, but the difficulty in terms

00:06:27   of keeping up with things when I have such a wide

00:06:29   sort of portfolio to manage.

00:06:32   - And one thing I like about the way you work as well

00:06:36   is that you challenge assumptions that many of us

00:06:41   in the other half of this community don't challenge.

00:06:45   Like you will, you make your income in part from IAD.

00:06:49   I don't know anybody else.

00:06:51   I don't think I have any other developer friends

00:06:53   who have a meaningful presence using iAds, and you do.

00:06:57   And you will challenge assumptions based on things

00:07:00   like monetization, support, app concepts, design,

00:07:05   all sorts of stuff that you challenge.

00:07:07   And I think you benefit from that,

00:07:09   because while everyone else is locked into this one way

00:07:14   of thinking and trying to shape the app store into,

00:07:19   like trying to educate consumers into the way

00:07:22   they think the App Store should be,

00:07:24   you are out there actually adapting and thriving

00:07:28   in what the App Store actually is.

00:07:30   - Yeah, I mean, I think I try and think of,

00:07:33   when I look at the App Store,

00:07:34   I guess at business in general,

00:07:36   I can't change my customers.

00:07:40   All I can do is react to them, for the most part.

00:07:44   Using things like people who should want to pay for software

00:07:49   as a statement, it doesn't make any sense to me.

00:07:52   People are going to want to do whatever they want to do.

00:07:55   My job as a developer, as a businessman,

00:07:56   is to look at the market that I wanna work in

00:08:00   and find ways to adapt my business to it.

00:08:03   And I don't just use IAD or advertising.

00:08:05   I make the majority of my income from advertising in IAD.

00:08:09   And that's in some ways been far more stable

00:08:13   than any of the more paid or subscription or patronage

00:08:16   or all the other things that I have.

00:08:18   The most stable income I get is from advertising.

00:08:21   And I love it because advertising's great because it aligns developer and customer goals.

00:08:28   My goal is to get them using the app as much as I can because the more they use it, the

00:08:32   more advertising income I make.

00:08:34   And if they're using the app a lot, that means they like it.

00:08:37   And so for me, it was a no-brainer to get started, but it definitely is, I know what

00:08:39   you mean.

00:08:40   It's a bit counter to, I think, a lot of the...

00:08:43   It's not necessarily pretentiousness, but there's definitely that air of you want to

00:08:50   to sell an Apple-like product in the App Store, but that doesn't necessarily work because

00:08:56   Apple doesn't even sell Apple-like products in the App Store.

00:09:00   - Yeah, and I think this was all rooted in the community of nice, craft, Mac-independent

00:09:10   developers that has existed for quite some time on the Mac before iOS and everything

00:09:14   became really so big. People like Panic or Delicious Monster, people like that, Brent

00:09:20   Simmons, Dave Watanabe, there's this crowd of like kind of old school, the old guard

00:09:25   who have been around for a while, you know Omni Group is a big one, who have been very

00:09:28   successful at this and many of them continue to be very successful at this, but there was

00:09:33   this idea for so long that many people still hold that that would translate into iOS and

00:09:39   that also any developer who would be able to program iOS apps would kind of think that

00:09:45   that they deserved that same level of success

00:09:48   if they either just got there at all

00:09:51   or if they put a lot of work into something.

00:09:54   And there's many problems with this

00:09:56   that are way too long to discuss in a 30-minute podcast,

00:09:59   one of which is that the amount of work

00:10:02   you put into something does not correlate

00:10:03   to the value that the market will place on it

00:10:05   or the amount of money you can make from it.

00:10:08   But I think it's productive to challenge this notion

00:10:12   of like, well, you know, is this really the way

00:10:15   the world should work?

00:10:16   And regardless of whether I think it should work this way,

00:10:20   if this is not the way the world works,

00:10:22   like in practice, what can I do as a developer

00:10:26   to succeed in this market?

00:10:29   And sitting around waiting for the market to change

00:10:31   to benefit you is probably not very productive

00:10:34   'cause that's just unlikely to happen.

00:10:36   - Yeah, and the interesting thing,

00:10:38   I was wondering what you think about this

00:10:40   'cause I'm seeing the spread of your app career

00:10:44   in the App Store, like you're starting an Instapaper,

00:10:46   which was paid up front $10, if I remember right?

00:10:49   - Yeah, the whole first year it was 10 bucks,

00:10:50   and I dropped it to five, yeah.

00:10:52   - And then it's like following the progression,

00:10:53   then I think your income started to shift in some ways

00:10:56   more to subscription and in-app purchase,

00:11:00   and then switching entirely to Overcast,

00:11:04   where it became, it was free with in-app purchase

00:11:07   for features, and then now it's entirely free

00:11:10   with like patronage support,

00:11:13   you've essentially followed the trajectory

00:11:17   of the App Store in that way, right?

00:11:19   You're starting with like the old school kind of,

00:11:23   well, it's premium software, I should charge a lot of money,

00:11:26   to it's still good software,

00:11:28   but the way you pay for it is completely different.

00:11:31   - Right, and most of that has again just been because

00:11:34   I am like, I'm not like thinking I'm like,

00:11:37   treading new ground and being an explorer.

00:11:40   no I'm usually coming to these changes late actually.

00:11:43   Like Instapaper, holding the price at $10

00:11:46   for the whole first year was a mistake.

00:11:48   When I dropped it to five, sales went up considerably.

00:11:50   And then later on it dropped to three I think,

00:11:53   I held it for a while, three or four.

00:11:54   And then sales were pretty good then,

00:11:57   I started experimenting and then shifting to subscription,

00:12:00   that ended up making way more money

00:12:03   than I thought it would and doing very well.

00:12:05   And then with Overcast coming out at free

00:12:08   with in-app purchase and now with patronage,

00:12:10   like those have all done better than I expected them to.

00:12:13   And this is all about just adapting to what the market is.

00:12:17   Many people blame the market on Apple

00:12:22   not implementing upgrade pricing

00:12:24   or the App Store not having good enough discovery or search.

00:12:28   And all of those things are valid complaints,

00:12:30   but they're not the biggest problem.

00:12:32   The biggest problem is there's just a huge oversupply

00:12:36   of developers and apps who are all trying to compete

00:12:39   for the same dollars and the same roles

00:12:41   and the same time and attention.

00:12:43   And so, you know, back in the olden days,

00:12:45   when you'd have like Panic and Omni selling Mac apps

00:12:48   for 50 bucks, that worked in part because of what they were

00:12:52   and what people use Macs for and who was buying Macs,

00:12:55   but also that worked in part because there just weren't

00:12:58   that many developers doing it.

00:12:59   If you would have had 10,000 developers trying to make

00:13:02   the same handful of nice consumer high profile Mac apps, you would have had the exact same

00:13:07   problem back then. It isn't that the market has gotten stupider or cheaper or anything

00:13:14   like that, it's that this is now the mass market of what developers do. It wasn't.

00:13:19   Back in 2006, most developers weren't working on Mac apps. Now, most developers are working

00:13:26   on iOS and web apps. I think the shift from web to iOS apps is really pretty significant.

00:13:32   And so if you think about it,

00:13:35   that's what so many developers are working on.

00:13:38   Of course there's gonna be a massive oversupply,

00:13:40   and of course there's gonna be tons of competition,

00:13:42   and a race to the bottom in pricing.

00:13:44   And that's not because Apple is doing something wrong.

00:13:48   Apple is not helping in certain ways,

00:13:50   but they're not the cause of this problem.

00:13:51   And again, pragmatically, it is useful to think of yourself,

00:13:56   not as somebody who all you need to do

00:13:59   is ship a nicely designed polished app

00:14:03   and money will start flowing in.

00:14:05   But as somebody who has to really fight,

00:14:08   like really work hard and fight hard and be lean

00:14:12   to try to attract any kind of attention

00:14:15   and any kind of money from what is a very crowded

00:14:18   hyper-competitive market.

00:14:20   - And I think it's also the biggest trap

00:14:22   that I know I struggled with for years

00:14:24   was this feeling of overvaluing my own work,

00:14:29   that if I spent a long time working on something,

00:14:31   that everybody should then sort of,

00:14:34   somehow intrinsically that makes it more valuable to people.

00:14:39   That they look at something and it's like,

00:14:40   whereas when people are gonna part with money

00:14:44   in whatever form that is,

00:14:46   or I guess part with something,

00:14:47   like their attention, their money,

00:14:49   they're exchanging something for that.

00:14:52   Like they need to feel like

00:14:53   they're getting something in return.

00:14:55   And the funny thing is, I think a lot of people think that software intrinsically should feel

00:15:03   valuable.

00:15:04   Like, as the classic, "Oh, they will spend $5 on a latte, but they won't spend $5 on

00:15:08   my app."

00:15:09   And it's like, well, maybe they actually want the latte more than they want your app.

00:15:13   Like your app may not actually be that valuable to them, and that's why they don't want to

00:15:17   spend that money on it.

00:15:18   Like you have to be able to wrap your arms around what they're actually buying with that.

00:15:23   Is it entertainment?

00:15:24   Is it productivity?

00:15:26   Is it amusement?

00:15:29   Are they exchanging goodwill for money?

00:15:31   I think when you start to get into, like I have an app with a tip jar in it, or you have

00:15:36   patronage in Overcast now, your extents there, you're providing a mechanism for people to

00:15:40   exchange goodwill for money is really what you're doing there.

00:15:44   And unless you're able to really wrap your arms around that, it's hard to really be okay

00:15:48   with saying, "That's okay.

00:15:49   I do advertising because for a lot of my apps, the app itself isn't particularly valuable

00:15:55   to the person.

00:15:56   It's useful, but it's not necessarily valuable in a way that for a lot of people, they would

00:16:01   want to put money into it directly.

00:16:03   Once they use it for a while and like it, they are willing to spend money, but they're

00:16:09   not spending money for the functionality.

00:16:11   They're spending money to be able to express the goodwill they have towards me for the

00:16:14   benefit I've given them, but that's different than it being intrinsically valuable to them.

00:16:20   Because when they started, they didn't see it as valuable.

00:16:22   They wanted it to be free.

00:16:23   And if it wasn't free, I don't think, like, my pedometer app, Pedometer++, wouldn't have

00:16:28   sold at all, or at least not in large quantity that it has to this point.

00:16:32   Yeah, and even as a consumer of apps now, I find myself, even as somebody who has been

00:16:37   a proponent of paid apps for so long and sold one for so long, when I search for something

00:16:42   in the App Store and I see the search results list,

00:16:45   if I needed something that I'm not looking for

00:16:47   a specific name, where I'm just looking for

00:16:49   a specific type of app, so a pedometer,

00:16:51   a step count or whatever, if I searched the App Store

00:16:54   and the first 20 entries in the search are all free,

00:16:58   and entry number 21 is four bucks,

00:17:01   that one doesn't stand a chance.

00:17:03   And that's just the reality of how people

00:17:06   search the App Store, and it's very important,

00:17:09   as you said, to recognize that.

00:17:12   And to recognize that not every app

00:17:16   that every developer makes is going to be worth

00:17:20   a non-trivial number of customers

00:17:22   spending $2 on it or whatever.

00:17:24   I mean, I've seen so many apps that do things

00:17:27   that I don't really need.

00:17:29   So many apps that are things like coffee timers.

00:17:33   Well, if a coffee timer is really good and it's free,

00:17:36   I might use it, or I can just use the built-in timer

00:17:41   on the device that's not as good, but it works.

00:17:44   And I think a lot of people go through

00:17:45   a similar kind of thought process of,

00:17:47   you know, if free is such a different barrier

00:17:50   than any price, and if you're looking at an app,

00:17:54   the alternative isn't just every other app

00:17:56   that's in the store that does that same thing,

00:17:58   the alternative is also just non-consumption,

00:18:01   it's not buying the app at all, not buying any app,

00:18:04   and just going without that role in your life.

00:18:06   And as we get more and more and more apps in the store,

00:18:10   which is only, you know, that's been going on forever now,

00:18:13   as we get more and more apps in the store

00:18:15   and more and more demands for people's attention

00:18:16   and more alternatives that they can do,

00:18:19   like if they don't download your app,

00:18:20   they can go check Twitter for a few minutes or play a game.

00:18:24   And as we get more and more of those things,

00:18:26   more and more competition for everything,

00:18:28   non-consumption is also a big problem.

00:18:30   And so anything you can do to address non-consumption,

00:18:34   to address people just bailing out

00:18:35   and abandoning this search or this idea

00:18:37   they might have had that this thing they wanted to do,

00:18:39   And going free is a huge hit against that.

00:18:43   If you can remove that barrier of price up front,

00:18:46   then it's so much easier for people to say,

00:18:48   "You know what, yeah, I'll give it a try."

00:18:50   - And it's, I guess, and the reality is

00:18:52   that's how I think we've both been able to continue

00:18:56   in the App Store at this point.

00:18:57   I mean, we've been doing it for a long time.

00:18:59   'Cause I, anecdotally, it seems like fewer and fewer

00:19:04   smaller or more independent companies

00:19:07   and where people are able to do it.

00:19:09   And I do think a lot of it is that it's a lack of pragmatism,

00:19:12   that a lack of just like, what is it gonna take

00:19:15   to make a living in this market?

00:19:17   And if you ultimately don't like the answer to that,

00:19:19   if you're in your mind, you only wanna sell software

00:19:22   in like a premium app store, it's like, okay,

00:19:24   well you might need to do something else then,

00:19:26   because that may not exist.

00:19:28   - Yeah, and you need to be in the right place

00:19:29   at the right time.

00:19:30   If you want that, you know, if you will not budge in that,

00:19:32   like so right now, so getting back for a second

00:19:34   to the Apple TV, which just came out now,

00:19:37   the Apple TV app store has almost nothing in it.

00:19:39   it is very, very sparse.

00:19:41   And if you are looking for something,

00:19:44   so I got this Apple TV, I plugged it in, set it up,

00:19:47   and I went right to the App Store to say,

00:19:49   "Hey, what can I get here?"

00:19:50   And I saw a couple of basics, you know,

00:19:52   Netflix, HBO Now, whatever, and then,

00:19:54   "Okay, let me try some games.

00:19:56   "I got this cool thing, I'm in the mood

00:19:57   "of trying new things, let me go to the App Store

00:19:59   "and try some games."

00:20:01   And I went and I spent, I don't know,

00:20:02   10 bucks maybe total on a couple of games,

00:20:05   and I didn't even think about it,

00:20:07   because I'm in this buying mood,

00:20:08   because I just got this new device, it's brand new,

00:20:10   has me excited, and also there's hardly anything

00:20:13   there to buy.

00:20:14   And of the very small number of games that were there to buy

00:20:17   almost all of them I think were paid,

00:20:20   or at least many of them were.

00:20:21   So I had no problem spending that money

00:20:24   because of the context of this isn't a tremendous app store

00:20:28   filled with millions of apps, most of which are free.

00:20:31   This is a very, very small app store that, right now,

00:20:35   that has only very few apps on it.

00:20:37   And that's the reason I was able to charge 10 bucks

00:20:40   for Instapaper in 2008, but then I couldn't in 2009

00:20:43   'cause the App Store was too full.

00:20:44   That's gonna happen with the Apple TV also.

00:20:47   If this thing takes off, if this succeeds,

00:20:49   and it looks like it's probably going to,

00:20:51   I mean it might take a few years before it has like

00:20:53   tons and tons of units out there,

00:20:55   but it's probably going to succeed.

00:20:57   And if that happens, or as that happens,

00:20:59   the App Store is gonna be way more crowded than it is now,

00:21:03   and it is going to get harder and harder to sell games

00:21:06   and apps for the Apple TV for money

00:21:08   once there is competition for that same role

00:21:11   in people's lives.

00:21:13   And so if you were gonna be the kind of person

00:21:15   who wanted to sell a premium app for money,

00:21:18   you just had a window to do that on the Apple TV.

00:21:21   Almost no one has taken up that opportunity.

00:21:23   But you just had that opportunity right now

00:21:26   and it won't come again on the Apple TV probably ever.

00:21:29   Like this product has now done that

00:21:31   and it probably won't come again.

00:21:33   And so you have to wait 'til the next big wave

00:21:35   and you have to be in one of those positions where

00:21:38   if you're not going to be the kind of person

00:21:42   who can thrive in an ultra competitive,

00:21:44   low priced environment like the web has pretty much

00:21:47   always been and like the iOS app store is now,

00:21:50   then you have to follow the trend and be early to things.

00:21:54   Be there on day one when new things happen.

00:21:56   Be able to figure out and guess which new things

00:21:59   will take off which is a hugely risky process

00:22:01   that you will often get wrong and it will often

00:22:03   go completely to waste.

00:22:05   and be there in those less competitive markets.

00:22:08   But then as soon as the market becomes more competitive,

00:22:10   you have to either adapt or leave.

00:22:12   - Yeah, and I think the difficulty honestly with Apple TV

00:22:14   and why I, well I think I agree that like the best time

00:22:16   to have sold big software would have been like

00:22:19   if being there on day one.

00:22:20   My suspicion is the narrowness of the window

00:22:23   where there's gonna have that kind of general rush

00:22:26   in people being okay with buying things

00:22:29   is narrow enough that I'm very skeptical

00:22:32   if it would actually be financially successful

00:22:35   for most people, that if they had spent a lot of time,

00:22:39   made a nice big premium game or something like that,

00:22:42   especially designed specifically for the Apple TV,

00:22:45   the window in which they were gonna be able to sell

00:22:48   into a kind of a premium group of people,

00:22:50   like people who obviously were excited enough

00:22:52   about the product to get it on day one,

00:22:54   they're very, they've just spent, in Apple terms,

00:22:58   a relatively small amount of money for it.

00:23:00   They're not nearly as expensive as a lot

00:23:03   other products that, you know, like an iPhone is $700 or something, whereas this is $100

00:23:07   and something, or $200.

00:23:09   And so that window is going to be very narrow.

00:23:12   And so if your app requires that you then have big sustained sales over the next few

00:23:21   months, my suspicion is that's going to be a losing proposition.

00:23:26   And so that's interesting.

00:23:28   And the Apple TV, I think, will be a nice,

00:23:32   sort of in many ways like the watch.

00:23:34   It's just an add-on to the main product that Apple sells,

00:23:38   like which is the iPhone.

00:23:39   It's like the iPad in many ways, the watch,

00:23:42   now the Apple TV.

00:23:43   These are all just add-ons to the iOS ecosystem

00:23:46   that exists for the iPhone.

00:23:48   - Yeah, and I think the value that you can get

00:23:53   out of being there, I think you make a very good point

00:23:55   about that window being fairly narrow.

00:23:57   I think how narrow it is depends on how easy it is to develop for it and how many people

00:24:03   realize how quickly they need to be developing for it or they want to be developing for it.

00:24:08   So with the iPhone, that was very, very quick, really, because the iPhone already had a massive

00:24:13   installed base.

00:24:14   There was tons of pent-up demand to develop for it and people knocked the doors down to

00:24:17   get there.

00:24:18   Most platforms don't work that way.

00:24:21   The watch, I think, has kind of fizzled out.

00:24:24   The watch, I think, is kind of at a standstill right now.

00:24:25   I don't know of any really interesting stuff

00:24:28   that's happened on the watch in the last month, say.

00:24:30   You know, it seems like not a lot is going on there,

00:24:33   and we'll talk about that in future episodes, I'm sure.

00:24:35   - Yeah.

00:24:36   - And the TV is now out, but it's starting

00:24:38   from an installed base of zero for a product

00:24:41   that people are excited about, but not so excited

00:24:43   that they're gonna go out and like,

00:24:45   raid all the stores and deplete all the stock on day one.

00:24:47   So it's gonna, that's gonna have a slower buildup.

00:24:50   And so if that buildup is slower,

00:24:52   also on the developer supply side,

00:24:53   where fewer developers are jumping in,

00:24:55   so soon, so quickly, then I think you do have

00:24:58   a wider window, like I would say the biggest sales day

00:25:02   for Apple TV apps this year is gonna be

00:25:03   the day after Christmas, and if you are there,

00:25:06   I think you can still sell a nice $10 game

00:25:09   the day after Christmas in big volumes this year,

00:25:12   but probably not next year.

00:25:14   - We'll see, yeah, I would say I'm more

00:25:17   on the skeptical side of that, but I think you're right

00:25:19   insofar as that's a reasonable, it's going to,

00:25:23   this next few months will be interesting for it.

00:25:26   And I think the Apple TV,

00:25:28   I will ultimately develop for it though,

00:25:30   and which is probably a good place to wrap up,

00:25:31   is to say, I expect to make apps for it,

00:25:34   mostly because having a nicely rich,

00:25:38   it's a checkbox that I can check

00:25:41   for some of my applications to say,

00:25:43   make them just that little bit more appealing to somebody.

00:25:46   If someone was on the fence about downloading my app,

00:25:48   and they're like, oh, it'll work for the Apple TV, awesome,

00:25:51   then it's like that little, little thing.

00:25:53   But it's not a priority for me insofar as I don't think

00:25:56   it's gonna ever be a primary driver for my business.

00:25:58   It's like same as the watch.

00:26:00   I make watch apps for a lot of my apps,

00:26:01   mostly just so that it's like,

00:26:02   if someone, for the narrow group of people,

00:26:04   for that's all they needed to go over the edge,

00:26:07   then it was worthwhile for me.

00:26:08   But in and of itself, it's probably not.

00:26:10   - Yeah, and that could be a whole episode right there.

00:26:13   And I totally agree with everything you just said

00:26:15   that I'm also, I expect to launch Xcode for the first time

00:26:19   make an Apple TV app probably this week. I'd like to see how easy it is to get Overcast

00:26:24   to run on it. But again, it's like, it's kind of a value add, to use a business term, I'm

00:26:28   sorry. It's kind of that for Overcast on iOS in general rather than like, I don't expect

00:26:34   to make a lot of money on the Apple TV by itself. But anyway, we are running out of

00:26:37   time this week so we want to keep the show nice and short so people can listen to it

00:26:41   quickly and don't feel overloaded by it. So, let's wrap it up this week. David, thank you

00:26:46   I guess? I don't know. We've never done an ending before. We don't have a song. So what

00:26:50   are we going to do? Just stop?

00:26:52   >>

00:26:53   All right. Thanks for listening, whoever's listening to this. And hopefully we will see

00:26:57   you again for the next episode.

00:26:58   >>

00:26:58   Yep. See you under the radar.

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