Developing Perspective

00:00:00 ◼   ► Hello and welcome to Developing Perspective. Developing Perspective is a podcast discussing

00:00:04 ◼   ► the use of Node in iOS development, Apple, and the like. I'm your host, David Smith. I'm an

00:00:08 ◼   ► independent iOS developer based in Herndon, Virginia. This is show number 206. Today is

00:00:13 ◼   ► Friday, December 12th. Developing Perspective is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.

00:00:19 ◼   ► All right, so if you've been listening to Developing Perspective for some part of the last

00:00:25 ◼   ► about three years, I think that I've been doing it. You're probably listening to it now

00:00:29 ◼   ► in a podcast client.

00:00:31 ◼   ► If my stats are any indication, you're probably listening to it inside of Overcast, which

00:00:35 ◼   ► is the vast majority of my downloads.

00:00:37 ◼   ► But I'm trying something a bit new today.

00:00:39 ◼   ► I'm trying something, if you've been following my work more generally, I'm trying a couple

00:00:44 ◼   ► of different things, just creatively myself.

00:00:48 ◼   ► One of those is that I'm also recording this podcast as a video.

00:00:52 ◼   ► And I'm not really sure necessarily if having it as a video and being able to see my face

00:00:56 ◼   ► my expressions is really helpful or not,

00:01:00 ◼   ► but it's something that I'm trying.

00:01:01 ◼   ► It's something that I thought would be interesting to do

00:01:04 ◼   ► to see, as I'm exploring the media more generally,

00:01:07 ◼   ► it's something that I've started doing tutorial videos

00:01:09 ◼   ► for WatchKit.

00:01:10 ◼   ► I released my second one of those yesterday,

00:01:13 ◼   ► and now I'm also trying it on the podcast,

00:01:14 ◼   ► and just seeing if it does anything

00:01:16 ◼   ► to enhance the experience,

00:01:18 ◼   ► to see if it makes the video more accessible

00:01:21 ◼   ► to a different audience,

00:01:22 ◼   ► people who just would prefer to watch something

00:01:25 ◼   ► or listen to it inside of YouTube, and just as an experiment.

00:01:29 ◼   ► And it's kind of one of the fun things about being independent and being able to kind of

00:01:33 ◼   ► just try things and see what I think is interesting.

00:01:35 ◼   ► And so that's what I'm doing.

00:01:36 ◼   ► All right.

00:01:37 ◼   ► So I'm going to get on and I'll dive into the actual main topic for today's show.

00:01:42 ◼   ► And that is, it's kind of an odd thought.

00:01:46 ◼   ► And the title for today's episode is going to be, "Can the App Store Be Full?"

00:01:51 ◼   ► And by that I mean, obviously not full in so far as it's a digital marketplace.

00:01:55 ◼   ► not that it's actually going to run out of space.

00:01:57 ◼   ► I think Apple is perfectly capable of buying enough hard drives that they'll be able to

00:02:02 ◼   ► store the combined binaries of all apps that ever wanted to be submitted to it.

00:02:06 ◼   ► But if at a certain point we hit a different part in the curve, where rather than the App

00:02:12 ◼   ► Store continuing to grow and expand in ways that are genuinely benefiting users, are genuinely

00:02:20 ◼   ► enhancing the experience for the common customer,

00:02:26 ◼   ► if we hit a certain point where that really stops,

00:02:28 ◼   ► or at least slows to such a point

00:02:31 ◼   ► that it has these tiny little blips of innovation,

00:02:36 ◼   ► of newness, of freshness.

00:02:39 ◼   ► But it's largely overwhelmed by a sea of more of the same.

00:02:43 ◼   ► And in some ways, this has got me thinking about the recent App

00:02:46 ◼   ► store review shenanigans, Tempest, Fiasco, I don't know what you want to call it, where

00:02:53 ◼   ► a bunch of apps from notable developers have been rejected and there's a whole kind of

00:02:57 ◼   ► back, it feels like a, you know, it's another wave of this angst about app review, which

00:03:03 ◼   ► I've been doing this for long enough, I've been making apps for about, almost six years

00:03:07 ◼   ► now, I think, and so I'm fairly used to it, but it's, you know, and so I'm not going to

00:03:14 ◼   ► actually address the details about what's been going on the last couple of weeks directly

00:03:18 ◼   ► on the show.

00:03:19 ◼   ► I thought about it, but I don't think I really have much to add other than this is the way

00:03:22 ◼   ► the store works, and it has been for a while.

00:03:25 ◼   ► I like overall app review, so I'm glad that it's there.

00:03:29 ◼   ► And you just sort of keep calm and carry on and just keep coding and do the best you can,

00:03:34 ◼   ► and that's ultimately the best way to make a living, to enjoy building apps for the store.

00:03:39 ◼   ► What I want to focus on, though, is something somewhat similar to this.

00:03:44 ◼   ► I'm increasingly starting to wonder if the App Store is kind of full and that isn't a

00:03:50 ◼   ► result of Apple's policies, isn't a result of lack of new APIs or anything like that,

00:03:57 ◼   ► but at a certain point, the App Store is coming close to one and a half million applications.

00:04:04 ◼   ► If you take a step and think about that, obviously a lot of those are junk.

00:04:08 ◼   ► Obviously a lot of those are duplicates.

00:04:10 ◼   ► Obviously a lot of those are kind of things

00:04:13 ◼   ► that aren't actually useful necessarily.

00:04:16 ◼   ► But even if you assume that maybe half of them are useful,

00:04:19 ◼   ► a third of them are useful,

00:04:20 ◼   ► it's still an insane volume of applications.

00:04:23 ◼   ► And so it starts to make me think,

00:04:25 ◼   ► at a certain point it's unrealistic to expect

00:04:27 ◼   ► that we will continue to find,

00:04:29 ◼   ► developers will find ways to build new and useful

00:04:33 ◼   ► applications for customers.

00:04:35 ◼   ► And they're obviously, the more niche you go,

00:04:38 ◼   ► the more specialized capability that you want from your application.

00:04:43 ◼   ► The more possible it is that you can still make an application.

00:04:46 ◼   ► Yesterday, I think it was Workflow, which is an application for building these really crazy actions,

00:04:52 ◼   ► this crazy action composer for iOS was released.

00:04:56 ◼   ► And it does some pretty awesome things.

00:04:58 ◼   ► I mean, it's not an app that I think I would use, but it's kind of cool to look at.

00:05:01 ◼   ► But functionally, I think it will probably only be useful for a vanishingly small percentage

00:05:07 ◼   ► the users on the App Store.

00:05:08 ◼   ► I spent this last week.

00:05:10 ◼   ► Apple released their yearly top app lists.

00:05:15 ◼   ► So they have the best apps, and they have the most popular apps

00:05:19 ◼   ► downloaded for the top free, top paid, top grossing.

00:05:22 ◼   ► And they do this every year.

00:05:23 ◼   ► And one of the things I like to do

00:05:24 ◼   ► is I sit down and look at the free, paid, and grossing,

00:05:27 ◼   ► and just get a sense of what the store is like.

00:05:30 ◼   ► And especially if you spend time looking at the top free list,

00:05:34 ◼   ► you get a pretty, you know, a fairly particular view

00:05:37 ◼   ► of what the App Store is these days,

00:05:39 ◼   ► 'cause that's probably the most representative view

00:05:41 ◼   ► on what a typical user's experience on the App Store is like

00:05:45 ◼   ► 'cause the free apps are by far the most heavily downloaded.

00:05:48 ◼   ► And, you know, App Store is basically

00:05:50 ◼   ► it's fairly simple games, mostly free to play,

00:05:53 ◼   ► or, you know, free with advertising, that kind of thing,

00:05:56 ◼   ► or it's a social network or things like Facebook

00:05:58 ◼   ► or Snapchat or those types of messaging application,

00:06:02 ◼   ► Instagram, things that are about connecting with people.

00:06:05 ◼   ► That is, I think, by and large what most people use their phones for.

00:06:09 ◼   ► I'm not sure if that's the case.

00:06:12 ◼   ► At a certain point, does the continuing to expect the App Store to be able to grow and

00:06:18 ◼   ► expand in the way that it had for a while, is that realistic?

00:06:22 ◼   ► I know for myself, while I continue to make new applications, the rate at which I am making

00:06:30 ◼   ► things and the rate at which I'm making things fresh and new is certainly slowing down.

00:06:35 ◼   ► And some of that is just my interest and some of that is just it's hard to keep up with

00:06:39 ◼   ► never expanding universe of applications.

00:06:41 ◼   ► I've kind of learned my lesson, I suppose you could say.

00:06:44 ◼   ► But I still wonder about this.

00:06:46 ◼   ► And I wonder if it's a better explanation for some of the angst that I kind of in general

00:06:52 ◼   ► kind of been feeling in the app developer community recently.

00:06:56 ◼   ► But there's kind of a lot more of this kind of boo hooing about, oh no, it's so hard to

00:07:00 ◼   ► make a living in the app store.

00:07:02 ◼   ► Oh, maybe I should make Android.

00:07:03 ◼   ► They don't have app review.

00:07:05 ◼   ► Whatever it is, there's another round of latent anxiety about it.

00:07:09 ◼   ► And these have happened many times before.

00:07:11 ◼   ► It's not something that is particularly surprising to me.

00:07:15 ◼   ► I've gone through this many times with many different times.

00:07:19 ◼   ► But at the end, I keep coming back to, maybe it's just the app store is full.

00:07:24 ◼   ► Maybe it's just so hyper-competitive that if anything you could imagine could exist

00:07:29 ◼   ► already does exist at this point.

00:07:32 ◼   ► At its core, there are probably only a few dozen types of applications that exist in

00:07:37 ◼   ► the App Store.

00:07:39 ◼   ► Now we have most of them, now that we have most of them already built.

00:07:41 ◼   ► What does that mean?

00:07:43 ◼   ► What do we do with that?

00:07:46 ◼   ► I'm not really sure.

00:07:47 ◼   ► What I'm doing with myself is, A, it's helping me to feel better about focusing on just doubling

00:07:53 ◼   ► down on some of the existing applications I have.

00:07:56 ◼   ► So as I'm looking forward towards WatchKit,

00:07:58 ◼   ► I'm focusing more on making sure that the things that I have

00:08:01 ◼   ► that have had some traction are things that I will continue

00:08:04 ◼   ► to invest in, things that I will continue to improve and make

00:08:07 ◼   ► better and better.

00:08:09 ◼   ► Because that's by far the most likely path

00:08:11 ◼   ► that I have for continuing to be relevant in the store.

00:08:15 ◼   ► Because I already have some sort of leverage

00:08:17 ◼   ► there that if someone new came to the App Store

00:08:20 ◼   ► and worked with, they wouldn't have.

00:08:22 ◼   ► And so it makes sense to try and leverage that and take advantage of it as much as I

00:08:28 ◼   ► can.

00:08:29 ◼   ► And then also when I think about things that I want to do that are new, it changes a little

00:08:34 ◼   ► bit your perspective when you start to think about, it's like if you take as a given that

00:08:38 ◼   ► there aren't any new great ideas.

00:08:42 ◼   ► And obviously that's a patently incorrect statement.

00:08:47 ◼   ► Obviously there are things that haven't been invented yet that will be invented.

00:08:51 ◼   ► That's just necessarily true.

00:08:54 ◼   ► But the point is not necessarily that things haven't been invented, but that is the extreme

00:09:00 ◼   ► outlier that having success by being truly novel rather than just success by being somewhat

00:09:07 ◼   ► boring and by just building something that is just a good take on a well-defined problem.

00:09:17 ◼   ► And that is interesting.

00:09:18 ◼   ► I don't know exactly what that means.

00:09:20 ◼   ► I get a lot of people who reach out to me and talk to me about they want to make their

00:09:24 ◼   ► -- they'd love to be an indie in the app store.

00:09:26 ◼   ► That's kind of the dream they have.

00:09:27 ◼   ► Or they see what I do and they talk to me and they'll say, "Oh, man, what you're doing

00:09:31 ◼   ► is living the dream.

00:09:32 ◼   ► What you're doing is what I want to do."

00:09:36 ◼   ► It's hard to talk to those people sometimes because I have the understanding that it's

00:09:41 ◼   ► very unlikely that you're going to come up with something that is truly new or something

00:09:44 ◼   ► that will be adopted just on its own merits,

00:09:47 ◼   ► on it being novel and it being interesting.

00:09:50 ◼   ► And if you do, it'll likely be copied very quickly,

00:09:53 ◼   ► just the nature of the store.

00:09:55 ◼   ► And so if you want to make it in the App Store,

00:09:59 ◼   ► it's much more a question of patience,

00:10:01 ◼   ► a question of savvy, maybe, too,

00:10:06 ◼   ► of being really thoughtful about how you're doing things

00:10:08 ◼   ► from a business perspective,

00:10:09 ◼   ► on keeping your expenses and your costs really, really low.

00:10:12 ◼   ► That's one way that I know I've been

00:10:14 ◼   ► able to make a living out of this,

00:10:16 ◼   ► is that I keep my expenses very low on the development side.

00:10:20 ◼   ► I'm a one man shop.

00:10:20 ◼   ► It's just me in a-- the most expensive thing

00:10:23 ◼   ► for the most part that goes into developing an application

00:10:26 ◼   ► is that every two or three years I buy a new computer.

00:10:29 ◼   ► Beyond that, it's just my time.

00:10:31 ◼   ► And obviously my time is valuable,

00:10:32 ◼   ► but my time is not an out of pocket expense.

00:10:35 ◼   ► And so that helps me keep my expenses really low,

00:10:37 ◼   ► which means that even if I don't have huge amounts of income,

00:10:40 ◼   ► which I certainly don't, but I have

00:10:42 ◼   ► a nice comfortable living that I can make from the App Store.

00:10:45 ◼   ► So that's kind of where I am, and that's what I've been thinking about a lot.

00:10:50 ◼   ► And I think, I'm not really sure what the conclusion of this is, it was like I said,

00:10:53 ◼   ► it's kind of more of a random musing.

00:10:55 ◼   ► But it's made me think that in some ways the App Store might just be full, that the App

00:10:58 ◼   ► Store might just be something that is ever more, it's going to be increasingly harder

00:11:08 ◼   ► and harder and harder to make it just on something being fresh.

00:11:12 ◼   ► You have to take as an assumption that anything you build will immediately be copied or already

00:11:16 ◼   ► exists in the app store.

00:11:18 ◼   ► And so your success can't be predicated on those things.

00:11:20 ◼   ► Your success can't be predicated on something like that.

00:11:24 ◼   ► And bringing this back into the app review thing and some of the ways that, you know,

00:11:28 ◼   ► like the drama we've had with today view widgets or with document pickers or all these kinds

00:11:33 ◼   ► of applications is increasingly, Apple in their API design

00:11:39 ◼   ► and in their SDK design are necessarily-- especially

00:11:42 ◼   ► on iOS.

00:11:44 ◼   ► The watch kit is a separate discussion that if I have time,

00:11:47 ◼   ► I'll squeeze in at the end.

00:11:48 ◼   ► But on iOS, they're increasingly making

00:11:50 ◼   ► operations whose value is less and less mainstream.

00:11:55 ◼   ► And maybe that's a bit controversial to say,

00:11:58 ◼   ► but a lot of these things, a lot of extensions, today extensions,

00:12:01 ◼   ► sharing extensions, document pickers especially,

00:12:03 ◼   ► are things designed for, you could call them power users

00:12:08 ◼   ► or whatever, like they're much more niche and specialized.

00:12:12 ◼   ► If you look at the top free list

00:12:14 ◼   ► and what the average user's experience on iOS is,

00:12:16 ◼   ► they're probably not dealing with a lot of extensions.

00:12:19 ◼   ► They're using their phone to text people and take pictures.

00:12:22 ◼   ► And so as they push those things more and more niche,

00:12:26 ◼   ► it is in some ways also, it shouldn't surprise us

00:12:31 ◼   ► that it becomes harder and harder on an app review side

00:12:34 ◼   ► for Apple to determine what the right lines are, to determine

00:12:36 ◼   ► what the right things that developers should be doing are.

00:12:40 ◼   ► And so we just need to calm down and keep moving, I suppose.

00:12:45 ◼   ► I don't know-- this is one of those developing perspectives

00:12:47 ◼   ► that doesn't have a great point necessarily,

00:12:49 ◼   ► but it's more just some thoughts that I've been having.

00:12:51 ◼   ► That this is the store that we live in now.

00:12:53 ◼   ► This is the store that we have.

00:12:55 ◼   ► That it's 1 and 1/2 million applications on our end

00:13:00 ◼   ► with hundreds of millions of customers on the other end,

00:13:04 ◼   ► and we're just trying to find a way

00:13:05 ◼   ► to grab our tiny little niche.

00:13:09 ◼   ► I think it means that we need to be realistic about business

00:13:11 ◼   ► models, that things like paid apps and those types of things

00:13:14 ◼   ► in a hyper-competitive market aren't necessarily

00:13:16 ◼   ► going to be realistic, understanding that the App

00:13:19 ◼   ► Store is full of free apps.

00:13:20 ◼   ► And so you having a paid app is unlikely to be

00:13:24 ◼   ► able to stand out in that context,

00:13:25 ◼   ► that whatever it is that you've built,

00:13:27 ◼   ► someone else has probably built it

00:13:28 ◼   ► and is able to, for whatever reason, to make it free.

00:13:31 ◼   ► Whether that's because they have a different monetization

00:13:34 ◼   ► strategy with ads or an in-app purchase or whatever.

00:13:38 ◼   ► But either way, if they have an app that's free

00:13:40 ◼   ► and I've got my customer looking at it,

00:13:42 ◼   ► I'm going to be thinking about that.

00:13:43 ◼   ► And so if you're working in a full store,

00:13:45 ◼   ► you have to respond to that and be thoughtful.

00:13:47 ◼   ► Making sure that you're thinking about it in those terms.

00:13:50 ◼   ► And it's a little depressing.

00:13:51 ◼   ► It's not quite as fun as when the app store was empty.

00:13:55 ◼   ► But this is the world we live in.

00:13:56 ◼   ► and we just need to be realistic about it.

00:13:59 ◼   ► All right, that's it for today's show.

00:14:00 ◼   ► As always, if you have questions, comments,

00:14:01 ◼   ► concerns, complaints, you can find me on Twitter,

00:14:03 ◼   ► I'm @_javidsmith there.

00:14:05 ◼   ► I hope you're enjoying the new formats.

00:14:06 ◼   ► If you have any comments on the new formats

00:14:08 ◼   ► and the experiments that I'm doing,

00:14:09 ◼   ► I'd always appreciate it.

00:14:10 ◼   ► Otherwise, thanks, have a great weekend,

00:14:12 ◼   ► happy coding, bye.