Developing Perspective

00:00:00 ◼   ► Hello and welcome to Developing Perspective.

00:00:02 ◼   ► Developing Perspective is a podcast discussing news of note in iOS development, Apple and

00:00:06 ◼   ► the like.

00:00:07 ◼   ► I am your host, David Smith.

00:00:08 ◼   ► I am an independent iOS developer based in Herne, Virginia, and this is show number 214.

00:00:13 ◼   ► Today is Thursday, April 9th.

00:00:16 ◼   ► Developing Perspective is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.

00:00:20 ◼   ► All right.

00:00:21 ◼   ► So I am recording this right before we enter

00:00:27 ◼   ► into the next phase of the Apple Watch rollout.

00:00:30 ◼   ► Tonight at 3.01 AM, or I guess tomorrow morning at 3.01 AM,

00:00:36 ◼   ► at some very, very early hour, I will be pre-ordering my Apple

00:00:41 ◼   ► Watch to get started with.

00:00:43 ◼   ► I'm going to sort of pre-ordering it right

00:00:46 ◼   ► off the bat, just because I want to have one as soon as I can

00:00:49 ◼   ► to be working with real hardware.

00:00:51 ◼   ► And so I'm just going to go ahead and order

00:00:53 ◼   ► as soon as I can, hopefully get it on day one on April 24,

00:00:57 ◼   ► and hope for the best.

00:00:59 ◼   ► But that's not really what I'm going to be talking about today.

00:01:01 ◼   ► Today I'm going to be talking about being a special snowflake,

00:01:05 ◼   ► or at least feeling like a special snowflake.

00:01:08 ◼   ► And that's a bit of nothing to say,

00:01:10 ◼   ► but this is just a story that happened to me

00:01:13 ◼   ► over the last couple weeks that I think

00:01:17 ◼   ► an interesting point. So about two months ago or so, I was, you know, once I had gotten

00:01:25 ◼   ► a pretty good handle on WatchKit, I'd been developing it for with it for a while, I thought

00:01:29 ◼   ► it would be one of the things that I kept thinking about is what could I make for the

00:01:35 ◼   ► watch that was a game or something like a game, you know, I try I'm trying to not go

00:01:39 ◼   ► too crazy in terms of making lots and lots of new apps, have a lot of updates to existing

00:01:43 ◼   ► apps, things that I think can make them better.

00:01:46 ◼   ► And so far, I think that process has worked out.

00:01:48 ◼   ► But I want to make a few things new.

00:01:50 ◼   ► And I kept thinking, you know what I should do?

00:01:52 ◼   ► I should make a game, because I've never made a game on iOS.

00:01:57 ◼   ► I've made an app to do almost everything,

00:02:00 ◼   ► but I've never made a game.

00:02:01 ◼   ► And mostly because I'm not an artist.

00:02:04 ◼   ► Graphically, I'm not the most experienced

00:02:07 ◼   ► or the most qualified person.

00:02:09 ◼   ► And so it's always been a bit intimidating on iOS,

00:02:12 ◼   ► because I think users have a reasonable expectation

00:02:14 ◼   ► for a fairly complicated, or at least visually pleasing

00:02:19 ◼   ► experience on an iPhone for a game,

00:02:21 ◼   ► even if you think of something like Flappy Bird

00:02:23 ◼   ► or something like-- very simple.

00:02:24 ◼   ► But still, I would struggle, I think,

00:02:26 ◼   ► to graphically make something like that.

00:02:28 ◼   ► That's just not my forte.

00:02:29 ◼   ► That's fine.

00:02:30 ◼   ► But on WatchKit, there's not that much

00:02:32 ◼   ► you can do graphically.

00:02:34 ◼   ► You're very limited in your interaction

00:02:36 ◼   ► and what you can do.

00:02:38 ◼   ► And so I was like, you know, I wonder what I could make.

00:02:40 ◼   ► That would be a game.

00:02:41 ◼   ► And I thought, and I thought, you know, I struggled for a while and I came up with a few ideas and in the end I built two games.

00:02:47 ◼   ► But for the purposes of today's story, I'm just going to focus on one of them.

00:02:51 ◼   ► And this was an app that I, as, you know, it's a bit of a cliche, but it is actually how it happened.

00:02:58 ◼   ► I was taking a shower, and while I was in the shower thinking about Watch Kid apps, I was thinking, I came, thought came to me, I was like,

00:03:05 ◼   ► what, you could very easily make a pattern remembering game, sort of like Simon, if you

00:03:13 ◼   ► ever played with one of those, the game where it shows you a pattern, you hit buttons in

00:03:18 ◼   ► sequence and you have to remember and do a longer and longer sequence.

00:03:21 ◼   ► I was like, "I could do that.

00:03:23 ◼   ► That's just four buttons and you can do basic animations on the watch, so you could do this."

00:03:29 ◼   ► And I got all excited.

00:03:30 ◼   ► I was like, "Yeah, that'll be great.

00:03:32 ◼   ► Man, what a great idea for a watch app."

00:03:35 ◼   ► go downstairs and start working.

00:03:39 ◼   ► After a couple days, I had something working

00:03:40 ◼   ► that I thought was pretty good.

00:03:42 ◼   ► I had built a game on the Apple Watch.

00:03:44 ◼   ► And I'm super excited.

00:03:46 ◼   ► And I'm like, yeah, that's a great idea.

00:03:49 ◼   ► And all of this while, certainly in the back of my head,

00:03:51 ◼   ► I'm like, wow, how creative is that?

00:03:53 ◼   ► What a cool, unique, novel way to invent an app.

00:03:59 ◼   ► I'm all excited.

00:04:00 ◼   ► I come up with an icon, come up with a name,

00:04:03 ◼   ► And get the app ready to go to the store.

00:04:07 ◼   ► Show it to a few friends.

00:04:08 ◼   ► Show it to my wife.

00:04:10 ◼   ► A few people see me.

00:04:11 ◼   ► It's like, oh, yeah, it's a good idea.

00:04:12 ◼   ► Great.

00:04:13 ◼   ► So good confirmation.

00:04:15 ◼   ► Put it in the store.

00:04:17 ◼   ► Now, I think as I mentioned in my last episode,

00:04:21 ◼   ► I have been spending a lot of time in the developer forums

00:04:23 ◼   ► recently, because there's a lot of people just talking

00:04:26 ◼   ► about their experiences, things they're getting rejected for,

00:04:29 ◼   ► the review process, weird problems they're running into.

00:04:31 ◼   ► And it's helping me to make sure that I'm

00:04:33 ◼   ► aware of what's going on and reasonably comfortable

00:04:37 ◼   ► with what I'm going to encounter potentially

00:04:40 ◼   ► in the next couple of weeks with App Review, which I think

00:04:43 ◼   ► is an important thing to do.

00:04:44 ◼   ► But I'm in the developer forums.

00:04:46 ◼   ► And I see somebody who's talking about-- people

00:04:50 ◼   ► were having a discussion about the performance of loading

00:04:54 ◼   ► lots of animated images.

00:04:56 ◼   ► I think it was something like that.

00:04:57 ◼   ► But that's not particularly relevant.

00:04:58 ◼   ► What was relevant is someone had a link

00:05:00 ◼   ► promotional video for his application.

00:05:04 ◼   ► That he was like, do you think this works?

00:05:06 ◼   ► This is what it looks like in the simulator.

00:05:08 ◼   ► But what about-- what do you think

00:05:11 ◼   ► is how this would work in the store?

00:05:13 ◼   ► Do you think it would get approved?

00:05:13 ◼   ► I think it was this question.

00:05:15 ◼   ► And I clicked through, and my heart dropped a little.

00:05:19 ◼   ► Because he had built essentially the exact same app

00:05:24 ◼   ► that I had built. And fair enough,

00:05:27 ◼   ► The concept of having four colored buttons that you

00:05:32 ◼   ► have to remember the sequence for and punch the button back

00:05:36 ◼   ► as a game is not novel.

00:05:38 ◼   ► Like there's a company that makes a physical product

00:05:43 ◼   ► and has been doing it for years and has TV advertising for it

00:05:47 ◼   ► and all that.

00:05:47 ◼   ► And so it's not particularly new.

00:05:49 ◼   ► So in that sense, it doesn't sound

00:05:51 ◼   ► like I was ripped off.

00:05:53 ◼   ► But I was kind of sad because I, you know, all this time, all the time when I was working

00:05:58 ◼   ► and developing this thing, I'd been thinking to myself, wow, yeah, this is so cool.

00:06:03 ◼   ► You know, I'm a special snowflake.

00:06:04 ◼   ► I came up with this great idea.

00:06:06 ◼   ► And that's just the way that I think human nature is, that we tend to think and focus

00:06:10 ◼   ► on those kinds of things.

00:06:11 ◼   ► We tend to think what we're working on is new and novel without probably being realistic.

00:06:19 ◼   ► And so when I see someone else has built exactly the same thing that I had built, it was a

00:06:24 ◼   ► bit discouraging.

00:06:25 ◼   ► It was a bit sad.

00:06:28 ◼   ► Not surprising necessarily, but I think I had somewhat deluded myself into thinking

00:06:36 ◼   ► that this was going to be, "Hey, this could be really cool.

00:06:40 ◼   ► I've come up with this great idea."

00:06:42 ◼   ► And then it turns out simultaneous invention is a real thing.

00:06:46 ◼   ► is something that happens, honestly, probably quite a lot.

00:06:50 ◼   ► There's a lot of people thinking about the same ideas

00:06:53 ◼   ► and the same problems from the same direction that I am.

00:06:56 ◼   ► And so it's probably inevitable that we

00:06:57 ◼   ► are going to come to the same conclusion at the end.

00:07:02 ◼   ► And then this actually got even crazier

00:07:04 ◼   ► when a few days after that, some summer I

00:07:08 ◼   ► saw a link to a new set of WatchKit tutorials

00:07:11 ◼   ► that someone had submitted and published.

00:07:13 ◼   ► And I go look at the tutorial.

00:07:15 ◼   ► And the example app that the tutorial is walking through--

00:07:19 ◼   ► this is their example for how to build a WatchKit app--

00:07:23 ◼   ► was the exact same game again.

00:07:25 ◼   ► And so now if you're anybody who wants

00:07:27 ◼   ► to build an app exactly like this, here's a template.

00:07:30 ◼   ► Here's probably example code if you buy the tutorial

00:07:34 ◼   ► series for building an app.

00:07:37 ◼   ► And so suffice it to say, my expectations

00:07:39 ◼   ► for this application and its financial performance

00:07:43 ◼   ► the App Store have dropped rather substantially as a result of this experience.

00:07:48 ◼   ► And that's why I thought it would be interesting to talk about.

00:07:51 ◼   ► I think it is easy to get wrapped up in when you're working on something.

00:07:58 ◼   ► One of the things that can so easily motivate you is that feeling of that you're doing something

00:08:03 ◼   ► amazing and new and fresh that no one's ever done before.

00:08:08 ◼   ► And there are certainly instances where that is the case, where somebody is doing something

00:08:13 ◼   ► that is genuinely novel, genuinely unique, genuinely amazing.

00:08:19 ◼   ► But more often than not, that's not the case.

00:08:22 ◼   ► More often than not, what you're doing is in some ways derivative, in some ways a combination

00:08:27 ◼   ► potentially of other things that have already existed.

00:08:31 ◼   ► There's the old phrase, "everything is a remix," and there's a lot to that.

00:08:36 ◼   ► And it's probably I mentioned it on the show just as a reality check.

00:08:41 ◼   ► Because if you're making something that is primarily focused on, if the thing that makes

00:08:50 ◼   ► your app gives it a market, if the thing that makes it useful or viable is its uniqueness,

00:08:59 ◼   ► that is almost certainly not going to work in the App Store in any kind of hyper competitive

00:09:04 ◼   ► environment.

00:09:06 ◼   ► I think the app store is going to be, even for WatchKit apps,

00:09:09 ◼   ► is going to be hyper-competitive from day one.

00:09:13 ◼   ► From April 24, I think there are going

00:09:16 ◼   ► to be many, many thousands of apps probably covering almost

00:09:21 ◼   ► all of the things that are possible,

00:09:23 ◼   ► given the constrained nature of WatchKit,

00:09:26 ◼   ► that there's only so many things you can do,

00:09:28 ◼   ► and there's enough people trying to do all those things.

00:09:31 ◼   ► There are probably going to be very few truly

00:09:34 ◼   ► unique, interesting things.

00:09:35 ◼   ► And I'm sure they exist.

00:09:36 ◼   ► I'm sure there is somebody who's going

00:09:37 ◼   ► to come up with a WatchKit app that just blows us all away.

00:09:40 ◼   ► And I hope they do well.

00:09:42 ◼   ► I don't think that's going to be me, in terms of the experience

00:09:45 ◼   ► that I've had.

00:09:46 ◼   ► But I'm sure that person exists.

00:09:49 ◼   ► But it was definitely a wake-up call

00:09:51 ◼   ► insofar as when I was thinking about this app

00:09:53 ◼   ► and whether it was worth doing.

00:09:55 ◼   ► There is this part of me that's like, yeah,

00:09:57 ◼   ► this will be great because it's such a unique idea.

00:10:02 ◼   ► This is the lie I was telling myself, baby.

00:10:04 ◼   ► This is going to be so unique and special.

00:10:09 ◼   ► And the reality is, it isn't.

00:10:13 ◼   ► And I have clear empirical evidence

00:10:14 ◼   ► that many other people have had the exact same idea

00:10:17 ◼   ► that I've had.

00:10:18 ◼   ► And that's OK.

00:10:19 ◼   ► I mean, that's fine.

00:10:20 ◼   ► And it's a good learning experience for me.

00:10:23 ◼   ► But I think it emphasizes the importance of the thing

00:10:28 ◼   ► that you can't compete on just being unique.

00:10:32 ◼   ► It's like, if you're a special snowflake,

00:10:34 ◼   ► The problem is you're actually a snowflake in the middle of a--

00:10:37 ◼   ► the App Store is a snowstorm.

00:10:40 ◼   ► There are millions of special snowflakes just like you,

00:10:43 ◼   ► all doing the same things in some ways.

00:10:46 ◼   ► And so you just kind of have to have

00:10:48 ◼   ► that in the back of your mind.

00:10:49 ◼   ► And I don't know exactly what the final conclusion on it is.

00:10:53 ◼   ► I thought it was an interesting story.

00:10:55 ◼   ► But it's just something important to understand

00:10:58 ◼   ► that ultimately, building a business

00:10:59 ◼   ► is not about being unique.

00:11:01 ◼   ► It is about having good fundamentals,

00:11:03 ◼   ► Like having something that is useful,

00:11:04 ◼   ► having something that is built in a quality way,

00:11:07 ◼   ► finding a market for it, marketing it into that market,

00:11:11 ◼   ► and then not expecting there to be shortcuts.

00:11:14 ◼   ► Not expecting that you can somehow

00:11:16 ◼   ► short circuit all of the hard work that is usually required.

00:11:19 ◼   ► And maybe it will work for somebody.

00:11:21 ◼   ► Maybe you will have that amazing, unique idea.

00:11:23 ◼   ► But if your whole thing is predicated on that,

00:11:26 ◼   ► if that's what you think is going

00:11:27 ◼   ► to make your app a success, then there

00:11:32 ◼   ► there may be some harsh realizations.

00:11:34 ◼   ► And maybe even if it was truly unique and truly amazing,

00:11:37 ◼   ► and someone does come up with a truly amazing concept

00:11:40 ◼   ► for a watch app, the reality is it'll almost certainly

00:11:44 ◼   ► be copied immediately.

00:11:46 ◼   ► That's just the nature of the App Store.

00:11:47 ◼   ► There are enough people who are looking

00:11:49 ◼   ► to make a quick buck in the store

00:11:54 ◼   ► that if you come up with something that's truly unique

00:11:56 ◼   ► and truly cool, a couple days later,

00:11:58 ◼   ► someone's going to have submitted

00:11:59 ◼   ► a copy of it to the store.

00:12:01 ◼   ► So if that's all you have, if the only thing that

00:12:05 ◼   ► was driving it was your uniqueness,

00:12:08 ◼   ► you may have trouble.

00:12:10 ◼   ► But that's where we are.

00:12:11 ◼   ► And I'll still-- hopefully the app's currently

00:12:13 ◼   ► in review with Apple.

00:12:14 ◼   ► So we'll see if my game gets approved or not.

00:12:20 ◼   ► But if it does and it goes into the store, it's fun.

00:12:22 ◼   ► I'll be glad that I will have shipped a game.

00:12:24 ◼   ► And I actually have another one that wasn't this game.

00:12:27 ◼   ► So I have two games that I'm submitting.

00:12:28 ◼   ► And maybe it'll be fun to have a couple of games in the app

00:12:30 ◼   ► store.

00:12:31 ◼   ► I've never done that before.

00:12:32 ◼   ► But now we'll just wait and see.

00:12:37 ◼   ► And just as a side note, it's interesting to see.

00:12:39 ◼   ► It looks like the review process for watch apps

00:12:42 ◼   ► is working itself through.

00:12:44 ◼   ► The process seems to be sorting itself out.

00:12:47 ◼   ► Apple seems to be giving watch apps a lot of attention

00:12:49 ◼   ► and getting pretty quick turnarounds in terms

00:12:52 ◼   ► of if they find problems letting people know and letting

00:12:54 ◼   ► you resubmit with a fix in time.

00:12:57 ◼   ► I haven't heard too many stories so far as of-- this is Thursday,

00:13:00 ◼   ► April 9th, so we're still about two weeks away from the Apple

00:13:04 ◼   ► Watch launch.

00:13:04 ◼   ► I haven't heard too many stories of people's apps

00:13:07 ◼   ► actually getting approved yet.

00:13:09 ◼   ► I've had a few, but generally speaking,

00:13:11 ◼   ► I think we've got a little bit of waves

00:13:13 ◼   ► before we'll actually be sort of locked and loaded

00:13:15 ◼   ► for launch day.

00:13:16 ◼   ► But that process seems to be going pretty well.

00:13:19 ◼   ► And I think that's what I'll wrap up for today's show.

00:13:21 ◼   ► And as always, if you have questions, comments, concerns,

00:13:23 ◼   ► or complaints, you can find me on Twitter.

00:13:25 ◼   ► I'm _DavidSmith there.

00:13:27 ◼   ► Or you can email me, david@developingperspective.com.

00:13:30 ◼   ► Thanks, have a great week. Enjoy getting up super early in the morning to order your Apple Watch if that's your thing, and otherwise I'll talk to you next week. Bye.