May 29, 2010

Indie Developers and Crossing the App Store Chasm

When I was a kid, my first exposure to a lot of software was from the floppies and CDs that were sent with magazines. I loved the idea that there were people out there whose job it was to make this stuff outside of major companies. And ever since I used the Mac LC II my family got when I was four years old, I aspired to be one. Some kids want to be football players or singers, but I was kind of screwed up, for better or worse.

The Mac indie development situation was weird, because for about 10 years, it was dying. After the Great Mac OS Pleistocene of the late 90's, only the strong and truly devoted stayed on. As a result, there's a strong culture and community and some very strong and oft-cited role models to follow if you want to make it as an indie developer. The Panics, Flying Meats, Red Sweaters, and Delicious Monsters of the world. Windows has "MicroISVs", but the Mac has indies, and it means something. And there's lots of support available to those trying to make the jump. It's a pretty happy family.

Many indie Mac software companies were built not on careful, deliberate business sense but on strong examples of people who built great software and forged healthy relationships with the community and their customers. I know that's how I approached it. It took me a few years to be able to support myself off of my software, but it worked. I knew I had no idea what I was doing on a fundamental level, but I couldn't argue with the results. But this started making me worry as the industry began a shift.

I used to hang out a lot with some guys in Boston who met up at MIT to talk about Cocoa stuff (the main API on the Mac and later the iPhone).

After the iPhone SDK announcement, new people started showing up to our meetings. And I started seeing some of the same people at startup events and Cocoa events. It was weird. I'd worked at PHP and ASP.NET shops before and marketed myself as a web developer, just because people had looked at me funny when I said I learned Objective-C to make Mac apps. And now everybody wanted to know it!

As the iPhone software market emerged, there were a few reactions from Mac developers. Some of them ignored it and kept working on their Mac software. Plenty of others jumped at the opportunity, with varying degrees of success.

Like many making the leap, I assumed it wouldn't be so different from selling shareware.

HOW THE APP STORE ACTUALLY IS LIKE SELLING SHAREWARE

In some ways, that wasn't so myopic a perspective.

There are plenty of technical people I've met who have never run a software business who are, for the first time, contemplating starting one because of the iPhone. To them, the App Store is particularly attractive because it does away with a lot of the drudgerous tasks involved in starting an ISV: figuring out a license scheme, hosting downloads, processing payments, dealing with customer support issues related to ordering. And so, they reason, it's just a matter of writing the code, uploading to the store, and cashing in!

This is, of course, silly. The App Store does streamline many things, but not the fundamental tasks of building a successful business: finding a need, fulfilling it, and reaching customers who want to buy the product. It is not a silver bullet.

So, by that count, some established developers who had more holistic experience were at an advantage. They knew the real work required to grow a product business and were ready to apply it to a new market. They had realistic expectations and were willing to make a measured investment in the new platform. They budgeted their resources to secure a return on that investment without wagering it on the app being an overnight hit because of some unexplained magic App Store juju, as so many mistaken startups do.

HOW THE APP STORE ISN'T AT ALL LIKE SELLING SHAREWARE

For indie Mac developers like me, it can be a pretty big deal to get in Macworld magazine or have Daring Fireball mention the app or win an Apple Design Award.

But compared to most people, the customers who would actually be reached by any of these things are, well, a little geeky. I mean, even the people who would be reached by the second-order effects of such exposure are still up there on the geek scale.

By analogy, I like coffee and probably spend more than average on it, but I don't subscribe to any magazines solely about coffee.

Similarly, there are plenty of people with money to spend on Mac software who just aren't into it enough to seek out and read publications and sites about Mac software. And even the people who would be reached by the second-order effects of getting in a geeky publication are pretty darn geeky too.

So it's a niche within a niche within a niche. That doesn't mean it's not worth competing in, of course -- very few indie developers have even remotely saturated the market available to them -- and not for lack of trying.

But when you really think about it, many indie Mac developers are stuck in a 1980's mentality towards customers. A good chunk of the people they sell to, outside of people in the tech industry, are more-or-less hobbyists. We're practically one step removed from sending out floppies in the mail.

It's pretty crazy, and it's easy to overlook when you're making a reasonable living off it. Companies like MacHeist have been able to clean up because of how unoptimized distribution is for Mac software and how little effort many developers put into marketing.

There's nothing wrong with that, but it's far different from the ecosystem that's unfolded on the iPhone, and that which will exist on every platform soon.

THE APP STORE RED HERRING

Today, every platform, mobile or otherwise, seems to come with some sort of lame App Store. Apple's competitors have tried to dissect and emulate the idea, but usually without understanding the reason for its success.

The greatest hallmark of that success is not to be found on any balance sheet, but rather on a typical subway ride, where you'll see at least a few people whip out their phones and use third party apps that they downloaded.

I'll repeat that: Regular people. Using third-party apps. Not shrinkwrapped software packages from major publishers. Just apps from indie developers. That they downloaded. And paid for. And sometimes even keep up with.

If this doesn't shock you every time you see it, you haven't been paying attention. Average people are, with absolute confidence, doing something that only dorks like me did five years ago.

So how did this happen? When people analyze it, they tend to conflate a lot of things together and come through with no good answer.

It's not just because the App Store comes right on the device. Lots of phones had that before. It's not because of the cool apps themselves. It's not because of those slick "there's an app for that" TV spots.

It's because, somehow, the iPhone is the first computer in a long time that doesn't make people afraid.

It affords regular people the same sense of control and deep-seated psychological satisfaction that, on past platforms (even the Mac), required years of learning and acclimation to acquire.

It's not about using nice icons or having good user interface guidelines — it goes much deeper. At its core, every aspect of the iPhone user experience is carefully crafted around the way we develop emotional relationships with inanimate objects.

It sounds silly and pretentious, but it's a real factor! Donald Norman has talked a lot about this. Humans are emotional beings, and good human-computer interfaces take this into account.

The iPhone just works. Pages scroll as you touch them, not 1/10th a second later. Apps quit the instant you press the home button, not when you force quit them after realizing they've been sucking down battery all day in the background. It even feels good in your hand. And though on-screen keyboards stink and always will, Apple invested significant design and engineering resources towards making theirs the best possible. As a result of all this, when you touch the phone, you're not touching the computer, you're touching the software.

This means regular folks are comfortable exploring the device to see what it can do, which often means buying lots of apps. And this isn't because of how easy it is to install apps, but how easy it is to remove them.

Somehow, the iPhone is discoverable, knowable, and manageable, in a way that desktop computers (or even other smartphones) never were. The end result is that when people are no longer afraid of their tools, they can finally really use them. They can experiment and test the limits. You know, without being the sort of dorks who read Macworld.

HOPE SPRINGS ETERNAL

But the phone is just the beginning. There's a new kind of computing on the rise, and it only happened by accident on smartphones. In ten years, we may not be talking about phones, we may not be talking about Apple, and we may not even be talking about app stores. But, more than ever, we'll be talking about apps.

This isn't about technology or business; it's about cultural progress. After decades, the term has actually entered the popular lexicon. Finally, I can mention what I do at a party, and the other person will actually have an inkling of what that is.

Developers may lament the "hit based" nature of App Store apps, comparing it to a Top 40 chart (I'm pretty sure I've gotten reports from Apple that referred to my apps as "albums"). But it's apt. Just look in your iTunes sidebar. It's almost like apps are right there with music and movies as one of the primary types of media!

But this much is clear: regular people actually get the concept of apps, and they're willing to pay for them. For this reason alone, it's a great time to be a developer.

APPS? REALLY?

I made this crazy argument to a friend over beer and he countered "but don't people know what websites are?" It made me think.

Well, no, as a matter of fact, not really. The web is messy. Webpages link around to each other and, if you're not tech savvy, you can't quite keep track of which one you're on or if it's safe to put your bank password into it. Most people don't know if they should search for them or type them into the URL bar.

When I speak of the triumph of the app, I don't mean it as a synonym for "program." That definition has become archaic.

I'm talking about "the app" as the unit of software in popular perception. It is the monad. It is the atom. It is the cell. It is the brick.

Software is abstract. An app is concrete.

Apps obey basic laws. You can install or uninstall their functionality completely. Apps are indivisible. Apps do not come with other apps, they stand alone. Apps do not touch other apps' data without being allowed.

In short, the term "app" could best be defined, more broadly, as the finest, most granular level of control over the computing experience that most users can consistently and comfortably exercise.

This is why sites like Facebook have "apps", even though their apps are just webpages — and crummy, restricted, spam-filled webpages at that. It's only because the concept has started to resonate so well that companies (and governments) are shoehorning things that couldn't really be thought of as apps into things that could.

ON CLOSED SYSTEMS

Some may see this optimism as misplaced, given that at first blush, this "progress" seems to bring along with it the unstoppable creep of proprietary software and iron-fisted control over platforms.

But it seems to always be the case that once a piece of proprietary software really matters in the world, one of three things happens:

1. There is more more incentive to create other proprietary systems as alternatives, creating competition and thus improving the software.

2. There is more pressure for open systems to exist, particularly on those with a economic interest in the closed system's demise (read: Android), thus freeing users from it.

3. Something comes along that makes the whole category matter a whole lot less.

I prefer good software over open software any day, and I'm of the opinion that social good is maximized by the ebb and flow of free and proprietary systems. And that every piece of software has a tipping point at which it is best made open.

But even if you disagree, the struggle that the free software movement is fighting isn't made harder because people don't understand software freedoms. It's because people don't understand software. Period.

Now that people grok apps, they will grok software. And why it's important stuff. People will start thinking more about how that software is made and what they're restricted from doing with it. It's only a matter of time.

THE WAY FORWARD

I used to chuckle at the folks I met at user groups who told me how cool the latest revision to C# was or how Vista is going to be awesome. They seemed like tools. But lately, I'm starting to feel like a tool myself.

I'm still trying to figure how to be successful in general, but it's starting to seem like the companies that really know what they're doing don't form their identity around being a "Mac company" or a "Android shop." They take advantage of the business situation on a platform or several, but they define themselves through the interactions people have with their software and the function it has in society. Such companies' apps outlast the platforms they're built on.

If this post has any crux, it would be this: build apps for people, not for platforms.

PLUG

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