John Gruber linked to an article yesterday, and his commentary made me cringe.
We mentioned yesterday a rumor that Apple won’t cut a check for iPhone application developers until the dev’s share of the sales tops $250. A lot of commenters were upset about this, if it’s true: TomWBrowning said “So if you make an app that costs $1 you won’t see a penny even if 359 people buy it?”
From the (indie) developer’s perspective, this stinks.
If you’re thinking in terms of a couple hundred dollars, your app probably isn’t even going to get listed in the App Store. The App Store isn’t going to be like VersionTracker or MacUpdate, where every piece of junk gets listed as it’s submitted.
Wonderful. Thank you. I might happen to agree that there’s a lot of crap for any given platform, but the correct way to solve this is to make it easier to not build crap. Apple has largely succeeded before by making their entire development stack publicly available at no extra charge as opposed to Microsoft. (Yes, sure, now we have Visual C# Express. Whoop-de-fricking-doo. Wanting to debug anything inside this environment in ways that involves attaching to a process takes their for-pay version, and let’s just hope I wouldn’t want their profiler.)
App Store is still undemocratizing software development. Anyone with a device should at least be able to write software to it. Some people are flying more militant flags here, but I am personally fine with decreased freedom to tear at every bit inside if it helps expedience in developing the device itself. Ad-Hoc distribution means — and I am making guesses here, although they don’t seem very far-fetched or out-of-line — that some practical issues with taking such a centralized approach will in theory be resolved with some added footwork. Read: people will be able to distribute fucking beta versions to their fucking beta testers, but only after collecting fucking hardware-specific keys in what must be appointed the biggest fucking waste of time ever introduced in the history of software development. This shit used to work by default, and now it doesn’t because you broke it.
App Store is about DRM for DRM’s sake. If you follow the lineage of Apple’s previous uses of DRM, their arms can be argued to have been forced by various scumbag industries (record labels, Hollywood) along the line, but there’s precisely one such application here — the carriers may not want IP telephony. Apple works around this by not allowing such apps to work when on a cellular network and out of 802.11 range, but on the iPod touch, where this one legitimate “worry” is null and void (no cellular network), there’s still plenty of DRM and plenty of arbitrary restrictions. In fact, they’re exactly the same.
Pay attention: for the first time, Apple’s using DRM for themselves, to help stop development of apps for their own new platform. From the people who don’t require activation or even “CD keys” for their client OS, and from the people who are at least bright enough to port and design an application around dtrace, this is pretty hard to take.
I seriously hope Gruber did not mean what he said, or that I am reading meaning into it where there is none. My app ThisService, which I wrote principally for him by request, has to date made less than $100 through donations. Is John suggesting that it is junk, or that junk that is free should be accepted? My gut feeling is: of course not, which is what makes this so incredulous. John of all people should know that junk, as well as gems, come in all price ranges, and that that’s why being able to put any application on the cell phone that you just bought that’s now also a great platform should be a big deal.
To Apple I can only say: DRM is costing you a lot of money and bad clout, it won’t be winning you any customers and it won’t actually be effective. You’ve made these arguments yourselves, to others; now it’s time to come to terms with it as applied to the App Store scheme.
Just can it.