Is the iPhone a worthwhile market to develop for or is it all a joke?
A great editorial from John Herrman on Gizmodo about what iPhone app prices are (or could be) doing to the market.
Money quote:
So what does the App Store Effect mean, right now? In the short term, we’ll get lower prices. This is great. But in the long term, it might not be sustainable.
The promise that sales volume will make up for the rock-bottom prices you need to charge just to be seen in your app category seems increasingly hollow, and to put it bluntly, if developers don’t have a chance in hell of recouping their fees, they’ll stop trying. And I’m not talking about 99-cent iFart app spammers here—I’m talking about big players who already make money selling software. If the navigation companies, the big game studios and the premium content providers can’t thrive in the App Store, they’ll have to leave; even playing in Apple’s sandbox threatens and undercut their (sometimes much more crucial) product lines elsewhere. John Herrman (Gizmodo)
I’ve been an iPhone user since almost* the beginning and as a developer I’m very interested in making something on this device I love so much. From a creative and technical standpoint iPhone development seems to offer a rewarding and fun experience. I think it would be great for a weekend project or a personal side project. But as a commercial project? My gut tells me I’d be foolish to spend however many months on a iPhone app that, as trends and anecdotal evidence suggest, will likely be under pressure to sell for pennies and try to “make it up in volume”. In my mind that’s no way to price a product or to make a living.
The current climate of the App Store is such that I feel I’d just be throwing money away if I were to invest my time into making a great app. This really saddens me. I feel like I’m missing out on something worthwhile not doing iPhone development.
There is some incredible craftsmanship on display in some apps (Atebit’s Tweetie and Things Made Out Of Other Thing’s Eucalyptus spring to mind – the latter I spend $10 on, the former only $3 by the bye) and I’m always happy to support great apps with my humble dollars but it seems that it’s only other developers who value the work that goes into a “Tweetie”. The rest (and majority) of App Store patrons wouldn’t think twice about spending $5 on a fancy latte that will last 20 minutes but balk at paying $3 on an app they’d use and enjoy every day. In my opinion that’s a sign the market Apple has created is broken. But the sad thing is, it’s not really Apple’s fault.
Most iPhone apps seem to only exist within the walls of the App Store. In other words, the developers rely on the App Store as their marketing channel and their distribution channel. This I believe is where the damage started. This is what has left app developers unable to resist the slide towards low prices and negative profit margins (otherwise called a loss). Long ago I decided that if I was to release an iPhone app I wouldn’t leave it up to Apple’s App Store to promote and market it – unless it was a novelty app of course.
If the App Store is to survive (and by that I mean developers can make enough money to recoup their development time, make a small profit and therefor continue to make apps to sell in the App Store) I think developers need to start seeing iTunes as a distribution channel and take back control of their own marketing efforts.
If Uh Huh Yeah were to release an iPhone app, even taking my own sage advice into consideration and even if I did a great job marketing it to the right kind of users, I’d be worried that they’d be so pre-conditioned to spending a dollar if anything at all that they wouldn’t buy an app they would have otherwise enjoyed and found useful. Witness the absurd backlash over the pricing for Tweetie 2. If this trend of novelty apps dominating sales and poisoning the market is to stop, developers need to take action now and take back control of their prices, their marketing and their livelihood.
I held out for an entire month before buying the original iPhone.
UPDATE: Newsweek has some researched some (depressing) numbers.
Money quote:
Most apps take at least six months of full-time work and cost between $20,000 and $150,000 to develop, according to Forrester Research, which covers the tech industry. Apple rejects almost 60 percent of submissions at least once, often—according to programmers—with little more than infuriatingly vague or inconsistent explanations. Of the 85,000 that have been accepted, only a few hundred sellers have much chance of supporting full-time work. "It's a lot like the music business," says Barnard, who left a job in record engineering to develop applications full time. "Some indie bands make money, but most don't."
Newsweek
