Developing Perspective

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

00:00:04 ◼   ► news of note, iOS development, Apple, and the like. I'm your host, David Smith. I'm

00:00:09 ◼   ► an independent iOS developer based in Herne, Virginia. This is show number 184, and today

00:00:14 ◼   ► is Friday, May 16th. Developing Perspective is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's

00:00:19 ◼   ► get started.

00:00:20 ◼   ► Okay, so we're going to have a bit more of a conversational ranty type of an episode

00:00:25 ◼   ► today. It's almost didn't actually happen in some ways. I've been really, really busy.

00:00:31 ◼   ► And you may have noticed I didn't even have an episode last week, mostly due to being

00:00:35 ◼   ► in Canada for NS North, which was excellent. And if you were someone I met there, it was

00:00:40 ◼   ► great to meet you. So this, I said, I've been really busy this last week. And it's been

00:00:46 ◼   ► something that a lot of a lot of things sort of swimming around in my head. And it's this

00:00:51 ◼   ► time, but this time of year, I think just tends to always do that. It's, you know, it's

00:00:56 ◼   ► a couple of weeks before WWDC. As I'm recording, it's basically two weeks out from when I'll

00:01:01 ◼   ► be traveling to go to San Francisco. And it's, so there's a lot of kind of just rumbles around

00:01:07 ◼   ► around the industry. And I think it's also, it's interesting as a developer, because it's

00:01:11 ◼   ► the time that you think I start to think about new opportunities, about the future about

00:01:16 ◼   ► what's going to happen because and this isn't really one of those like rumors or what I

00:01:20 ◼   ► I hope for shows, I'll probably have one of those next week or the week after.

00:01:23 ◼   ► But this is, it's a time of year that I tend to be thinking about what comes next.

00:01:29 ◼   ► And probably about, because it's a little bit of old news now, but about two weeks ago

00:01:34 ◼   ► there were two things that happened in one week that really got me thinking.

00:01:39 ◼   ► And I figured I'd kind of expand upon those today and maybe help you think about some

00:01:45 ◼   ► things that are kind of interesting.

00:01:47 ◼   ► So a couple weeks ago, app.net announced that it was essentially shutting down.

00:01:53 ◼   ► It wasn't really shutting down.

00:01:55 ◼   ► It's just firing everybody and leaving the lights on as long as the electric bill is

00:01:59 ◼   ► paid essentially.

00:02:01 ◼   ► And that's great.

00:02:02 ◼   ► I suppose I never really used the service after it launched, but it got me thinking.

00:02:10 ◼   ► You know, like, okay, so that's one path, right?

00:02:13 ◼   ► Like you start the service, you put something out there, you build it, you put it out, it

00:02:19 ◼   ► gets a little bit of traction, it kind of gets going, and then it kind of peters out,

00:02:23 ◼   ► right?

00:02:24 ◼   ► And that's one path.

00:02:28 ◼   ► The same roughly the same time, you may have heard there was an app called Moves, which

00:02:32 ◼   ► was acquired by Facebook.

00:02:34 ◼   ► Moves is an app that is essentially some activity motion tracking software.

00:02:40 ◼   ► It's a bit more complicated than my Appidometer++ in the sense

00:02:44 ◼   ► that it tries to track everything about you

00:02:46 ◼   ► and what you're doing, which is perhaps why it was so valuable

00:02:49 ◼   ► to a company like Facebook, who loves knowing everything they

00:02:52 ◼   ► can about you.

00:02:54 ◼   ► So it was acquired by Facebook for presumably

00:02:58 ◼   ► a sizable, principally some.

00:03:00 ◼   ► And so that's another path.

00:03:03 ◼   ► So here we have two services, two products,

00:03:05 ◼   ► two whatever you want to call them.

00:03:07 ◼   ► And one of them ultimately ended with a fairly

00:03:10 ◼   ► short-lived life's lifespan and then you know met its demise and the other one

00:03:15 ◼   ► had you know sort of was going well and got to a point that it was ultimately

00:03:19 ◼   ► acquired it was ultimately kind of bought by somewhere else and that that's

00:03:22 ◼   ► another path I've been thinking about a lot more recently is is that is there a

00:03:29 ◼   ► middle path and what does that look like and by that I mean you know so all these

00:03:34 ◼   ► products that I've been building I'm doing this for five and a half years now

00:03:37 ◼   ► whatever. And I start to think, what, what is the end game that I'm doing? Because at some level,

00:03:45 ◼   ► I'm just kind of doing this because this is what I do. You know, I, this is what I know best. This

00:03:51 ◼   ► is the thing that I'm most qualified to do. So I just kind of make iOS apps, and I launch products,

00:03:55 ◼   ► and I put them in the App Store. That's just kind of what I do. But at the same time, that also seems

00:04:02 ◼   ► a little bit silly if I'm just doing it, you know, without some sort of end in mind, I want to be

00:04:07 ◼   ► doing this for a reason or for a purpose beyond just like, it's a nice way to make a living

00:04:11 ◼   ► that I kind of enjoy. And that's probably enough in some ways, but it felt a little

00:04:16 ◼   ► simplistic. And so I was trying to think, which path do I expect myself and my products

00:04:22 ◼   ► and my services to walk down? And it obviously depends from product to product. On the one

00:04:28 ◼   ► hand, I look at a service like Feed Wrangler, so my RSS syncing platform and Pod Wrangler,

00:04:33 ◼   ► associated podcast client. And in many ways, there are aspects of it that are similar to

00:04:39 ◼   ► App.net. I think we have much better financials, apparently. But there's this, you know, it's

00:04:44 ◼   ► a service which requires a sustained commitment bought from its customer base in order to

00:04:49 ◼   ► really continue to be a business. You know, it has that type of a model where it has a

00:04:53 ◼   ► relatively high set of fixed costs. And it just needs a certain number of people to be

00:04:58 ◼   ► continuing on using the service in order for it to be sustainable. And, you know, at this

00:05:04 ◼   ► point it's fine and that's where it is. But it makes me wonder, in five years will that

00:05:11 ◼   ► still be a thing? In ten years will that still be a thing? Will I still have the user base

00:05:15 ◼   ► sufficient to support it? Will RSS even be a thing? Will it have ultimately kind of been

00:05:20 ◼   ► merged or sucked into or acquired by something else? In some ways that seems to be a bit

00:05:25 ◼   ► more likely, sort of a consolidation phase after the explosion of RSS platforms. Maybe

00:05:31 ◼   ► that will happen down there. Or with any of my apps. I have a recipe app, or an audiobook

00:05:36 ◼   ► app, or a podcast client, a fitness tracker. I mean, all these kind of things. On the one

00:05:41 ◼   ► hand, the App Store seems to lend itself to a very slow death in the sense that, like

00:05:48 ◼   ► I think I mentioned, what was it, two episodes ago or last episode? I can't quite remember.

00:05:53 ◼   ► But I was talking about how things tend to diminish very slowly over time.

00:05:58 ◼   ► It's rare that you have kind of very abrupt fall-offs in things like the App Store because

00:06:04 ◼   ► your sales just kind of peter out very gradually over a long period.

00:06:08 ◼   ► And so for a lot of my apps, it's like on the one hand, if they go down the, I guess,

00:06:13 ◼   ► the -- I mean, their own demise, maybe is the right way to think about it.

00:06:18 ◼   ► It'll have this very long runway, a very gradual falloff.

00:06:23 ◼   ► It could be acquired, I suppose.

00:06:24 ◼   ► I mean, if Mark Zuckerberg gave me a call and said,

00:06:29 ◼   ► hey, I'd like to come after some of your software,

00:06:33 ◼   ► I would have to give it some pretty serious thought,

00:06:39 ◼   ► for obvious reasons.

00:06:40 ◼   ► But is there a middle path?

00:06:43 ◼   ► Is this something that I could be doing forever, essentially?

00:06:46 ◼   ► I mean, and I'm reminded of a couple of months ago, I had the pleasure of spending some time

00:06:51 ◼   ► with Rich Segal, who, if you're not familiar, is one of the, I think, the founder, if not

00:06:55 ◼   ► one of the founders of barebone software.

00:06:57 ◼   ► He's been making BB edit forever.

00:07:01 ◼   ► And I mean, in some ways, it's even more remarkable for a company like that who have been doing

00:07:07 ◼   ► the core business, I think, is built around a single product.

00:07:10 ◼   ► And it's been built around that single product for years, for a decade, if not more.

00:07:16 ◼   ► And so it's certainly possible, right?

00:07:19 ◼   ► And if there's a certain amount of reassurance in that,

00:07:25 ◼   ► as I've been thinking about this,

00:07:26 ◼   ► as I've been thinking about what's happening next

00:07:28 ◼   ► in the App Store, this time of year,

00:07:31 ◼   ► we always start to think about what Apple is going to do,

00:07:33 ◼   ► what they're going to change.

00:07:35 ◼   ► Are they going to make functional changes

00:07:36 ◼   ► to the store itself?

00:07:37 ◼   ► Are they going to change the terms of the deal?

00:07:39 ◼   ► And we hope they do not change them any further.

00:07:43 ◼   ► There's lots of things that could be happening.

00:07:46 ◼   ► And it's funny, I'm coming into this year,

00:07:49 ◼   ► and with all honesty, I usually try and put on a good face

00:07:52 ◼   ► for the show, but in all honesty, this year,

00:07:55 ◼   ► I feel like there's more, just more pessimism in general,

00:08:00 ◼   ► generally in our community than I've seen in previous years.

00:08:05 ◼   ► And that's very anecdotal, and it's just kind of like

00:08:07 ◼   ► from talking to people generally.

00:08:09 ◼   ► But I hear a lot more of,

00:08:10 ◼   ► I really hope they fix such and such.

00:08:14 ◼   ► I really hope this gets fixed.

00:08:16 ◼   ► There's a lot more of that than, well, hey, man,

00:08:19 ◼   ► I really can't wait to see what they're

00:08:21 ◼   ► going to wow me with at WWDC.

00:08:24 ◼   ► And some of that's just a question of maturity

00:08:26 ◼   ► in the platform.

00:08:27 ◼   ► A lot of the low-hanging fruit's already been done.

00:08:30 ◼   ► And a lot of things at this point,

00:08:32 ◼   ► the value is, in some ways, the stability.

00:08:34 ◼   ► If Apple radically rewrote everything every year,

00:08:37 ◼   ► that'd be really frustrating.

00:08:38 ◼   ► So that's sort of to be expected in some ways.

00:08:42 ◼   ► But it's something that I've been thinking about.

00:08:44 ◼   ► And it's something I've been wondering,

00:08:46 ◼   ► if there is going to be something next, what that would be.

00:08:50 ◼   ► If Apple came out, for example, with a new device category

00:08:54 ◼   ► or whatever Tim Cook's been talking about for the last couple of years,

00:08:57 ◼   ► was like, oh, we're going to get into new market categories

00:08:59 ◼   ► or something like that.

00:09:01 ◼   ► If, say, it's a new fitness widget or something,

00:09:04 ◼   ► is there going to be a developer side to that?

00:09:08 ◼   ► I expect there'll be something there.

00:09:10 ◼   ► But I'm not sure how much, especially when

00:09:14 ◼   ► I've been thinking recently about things like CarPlay.

00:09:16 ◼   ► So this is a whole new hardware platform, essentially,

00:09:18 ◼   ► that they're getting into, a way of presenting information

00:09:22 ◼   ► from your phone onto a car.

00:09:24 ◼   ► And at least initially, it's fairly limited

00:09:26 ◼   ► in terms of what developers can do with that.

00:09:28 ◼   ► And so I wonder if in some ways that's

00:09:30 ◼   ► what we might end up happening with the app.

00:09:32 ◼   ► They go down the fitness path.

00:09:33 ◼   ► There'll be some things you can do as a developer,

00:09:36 ◼   ► but it's not really a whole new app store.

00:09:39 ◼   ► And perhaps neither, nor should it be.

00:09:41 ◼   ► In some ways, the App Store was to the last five years,

00:09:47 ◼   ► what the .com bubble was to the decade before.

00:09:52 ◼   ► There's these periods of time when

00:09:54 ◼   ► you have this tremendous opportunity

00:09:56 ◼   ► and tremendous growth, and then things settle down.

00:09:59 ◼   ► And then things kind of are normal,

00:10:01 ◼   ► in a much more plain vanilla, but yet perhaps more enjoyable

00:10:08 ◼   ► way.

00:10:08 ◼   ► I knew a lot of people who rode the craziness that was the dot com bubble.

00:10:14 ◼   ► And it can be exciting if you came out on the good side of that, but more often than

00:10:18 ◼   ► not, not a lot of people did.

00:10:20 ◼   ► A lot of people, it was just this crazy ride and this roller coaster that you got off with

00:10:24 ◼   ► and you ended up just kind of feeling a little queasy.

00:10:28 ◼   ► And I'm not saying that's necessarily the same thing with the App Store, but there are

00:10:31 ◼   ► certainly parts of it that I think about and that I wonder if that's sort of where we are

00:10:36 ◼   ► now, the roller coaster's over and now things are settling down. And that's different. That's

00:10:45 ◼   ► changed. And change is always worrying. You know, some of the things that I used to be

00:10:50 ◼   ► able to do in the App Store just don't really work anymore. You know, marketing tactics

00:10:55 ◼   ► or ways to get noticed or the size and the impact of particular things, of being featured,

00:11:01 ◼   ► of being written up on key blogs and these types of things. You know, the effect is much

00:11:06 ◼   ► much more muted than it was before. And so it gets harder. And that's not to say that

00:11:12 ◼   ► I'm lazy in the sense that, oh, I don't want to do things that are hard now. But it makes

00:11:17 ◼   ► me wonder, you know, if it took all of the sum total of all the tips and tricks that

00:11:22 ◼   ► I used to learn, and I've learned and done to, you know, to make a good business of it,

00:11:27 ◼   ► there a point at which that won't be the case? Well, ultimately, you know, any developers

00:11:34 ◼   ► have to start kind of banding together and making sort of more conglomerated companies

00:11:37 ◼   ► in order to kind of pool resources and cross-promote and these types of things to be sustainable.

00:11:44 ◼   ► Maybe. One thing that I do think about is that the advantage of the App Store, as it

00:11:51 ◼   ► it always has been in many ways, that the expenses associated with it are very low.

00:11:57 ◼   ► And so when I think about the future, when I think about a period of stability in the

00:12:02 ◼   ► App Store in terms of revenue, not really growing in a way that it had been, I start

00:12:07 ◼   ► to think about maybe that's not such a bad thing.

00:12:09 ◼   ► If you can keep your expenses down and you can just sort of keep cruising along as you

00:12:13 ◼   ► have been.

00:12:14 ◼   ► But I don't know.

00:12:15 ◼   ► It's been a bit of a rant and I apologize for the rantiness of it, but at the same time,

00:12:21 ◼   ► I said, it's just what I've been thinking about.

00:12:23 ◼   ► And it's something that I just wanted to share.

00:12:26 ◼   ► These are the challenges of being an independent developer.

00:12:29 ◼   ► And I know, in some ways, there are

00:12:32 ◼   ► times I do episodes of developing perspectives that

00:12:35 ◼   ► aren't perhaps completely honest, in the sense of I'm

00:12:39 ◼   ► talking about things in the way that I hope

00:12:41 ◼   ► and the way that I wish they were,

00:12:44 ◼   ► to try and be encouraging or to talk about things in a way that

00:12:49 ◼   ► It has some appearance of certainty.

00:12:52 ◼   ► That there's-- it's like, oh, here's what happened,

00:12:54 ◼   ► and here's why it happened.

00:12:56 ◼   ► And you have a bit of a--

00:12:57 ◼   ► it's a logical progression.

00:12:59 ◼   ► You have if A, then B. But more often than not,

00:13:03 ◼   ► I find that this industry has a lot of uncertainty around it.

00:13:07 ◼   ► And for a long--

00:13:09 ◼   ► I guess rather than just kind of ignoring it or glossing

00:13:12 ◼   ► over it, it seemed like it might be constructive to just kind

00:13:14 ◼   ► of meander through a little bit of all

00:13:17 ◼   ► that different uncertainty and all the things

00:13:19 ◼   ► it can make you think about.

00:13:20 ◼   ► Because if you're someone who is starting out or young--

00:13:24 ◼   ► and I hear from so many people who are in this position, who

00:13:27 ◼   ► listen to this show, who are thinking about being

00:13:30 ◼   ► an independent developer, who have heard all about it

00:13:34 ◼   ► and think it would be awesome-- it's, I think, important

00:13:37 ◼   ► and perhaps an appropriate thing and have some responsibility

00:13:40 ◼   ► to make sure that it also show and talk about a little bit

00:13:44 ◼   ► the ambiguities that can come with it and the challenges

00:13:46 ◼   ► and the things that can kind of keep you up at night,

00:13:49 ◼   ► they go along with it.

00:13:50 ◼   ► So that's kind of where I am.

00:13:52 ◼   ► That's where I am right now, you know?

00:13:53 ◼   ► Like I said, it's still in some ways kind of beside the point,

00:13:57 ◼   ► because obviously I'm still full steam ahead on my apps.

00:14:00 ◼   ► I'm working on a big update to audiobooks

00:14:01 ◼   ► to celebrate its fifth year-- its fifth anniversary, which

00:14:05 ◼   ► is quite something.

00:14:06 ◼   ► It's been around for about five years now,

00:14:08 ◼   ► and I'm doing this big update to just kind of celebrate that.

00:14:12 ◼   ► that's been keeping me busy to quite a high degree.

00:14:19 ◼   ► But you just kind of keep going full steam ahead, but in the back of your mind you're

00:14:23 ◼   ► thinking "huh, which road am I on?

00:14:27 ◼   ► Am I on App.net?

00:14:28 ◼   ► Am I on moves?

00:14:30 ◼   ► Or maybe is there a middle road?

00:14:32 ◼   ► I guess I'll see."

00:14:33 ◼   ► Alright, that's it for today's show.

00:14:36 ◼   ► And as always, if you have questions, comments, concerns, or complaints, I'm on Twitter

00:14:39 ◼   ► @_davidsmith.

00:14:41 ◼   ► You can email me, david@developingperspective.com.

00:14:43 ◼   ► And otherwise, I hope you have a great week, weekend.

00:14:46 ◼   ► Happy coding, and I will talk to you soon.

00:14:49 ◼   ► Bye.

00:14:50 ◼   ► [