App Consoles, Appliances & Apple
Great piece by Martin Watts (although the car analogy at the end invariably falls flat for me, as they always do; modern cars are not a great example of things you can tinker with these days):
Historically, most geeks—including me—have thought that people who use computers should learn enough to be their own tech support. We did, and it doesn’t seem that difficult to us, and it’s kind of infuriating that so many of the questions we’re badgered with sound fundamentally ignorant: people who don’t understand what the difference between memory and hard drives, can’t figure out how to launch an application if it doesn’t have a dock icon or a desktop shortcut, and can never find the document they saved last week because they don’t have the faintest clue what a directory is.
The model we’re moving toward, though, is premised on the idea that computersshouldn’t require routine tech support. Again, look back at game consoles: an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 is a fully programmable computer with networking capability, offline storage, removable media, the whole shebang, yet all of that is invisible to the user. What file system does a Playstation use and what directories does it put your downloaded games in? The correct answer is: “Who gives a shit?”
Android Market Is Attracting More App Developers
The New York Times on developer interest in the Android Market and remaining challenges:
“Google is not associated with things you pay for, and Android is an extension of that,” said Mr. Hall of Larva Labs. “You don’t pay for Google apps, so it bleeds into the expectations for the third-party apps, too.”
Wii are selective in our outrage
We might also do well to note how closed mobile development was before the iPhone. I know I’ve told this story before, but in a JavaOne conversation with O’Reilly people about how to get Java ME books moving, I said that everyone with an interest in ME (myself included) had figured out that getting your apps to end users was effectively impossible, and that with the network API often disabled for third-party apps, there wasn’t much point in writing ME apps anyways. My suggestion for an ME book that would move copies would be one which provided “the names, e-mails, and phone numbers of all the carrier and handset executives you’d have to go down on in order to get your apps on their phones.”
Wii are selective in our outrage
Open Source on the App Store
I was going to write a short piece on how the App Store opened up interesting new opportunities for developers to sell open source software because of the relative difficulty in sideloading applications on an iOS device, but then the draft lingered in my WordPress backend for more than two months. Since then Rob Rhyne, whose Briefs prototyping framework served as an inspiration for my unwritten piece, has beaten me to the punch and written about the topic of selling open source on the app store much more conclusively than i would have:
A lot has been said about Apple’s walled garden but since they control distribution, a majority of the market can’t install an app from source. That sucks if you’re a user, but fortunate if you’re a developer that wants to open-source your application.
Most assume you can’t sell open-source software because no one would pay money for something they can install for free. Free software is practically synonymous with liberty and no cost. When the App store, the equation changed. Interested parties now have the liberty to examine or modify (and re-install if you pay Apple) an application while developers charge a fair price for their applications. Freedom for users, beer money for developers.
Needless to say, I’m excited about the prospect of the new model. Imagine how powerful this would be for budding developers? What if you could look under the covers of your favorite apps? What could you learn?
I don’t really have much to add, except for two more examples where developers are taking this new distribution approach:
First there’s Battle for Wesnoth, a popular multi-platform open source strategy game. Before the iPhone port, it was already quite successful on other platforms where it is free. The developer community ported the game to iOS to make a little extra money for funding further development (and from what i’ve read it’s doing very well), but the source code is also publicly available.
The other example is Noticings. Its developer, Tom Taylor, recently shared some interesting information on how his app, a rather niche app priced at £1.79, is doing on the app store and he open sourced the code and put it on GitHub, for anyone to learn and build themselves.
If you know any other examples for this open source software distribution approach i would be thankful for any pointers: @chriwim on Twitter.
New App Store Review Guidelines
Statement by Apple on App Store Review Guidelines:
In particular, we are relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps, as long as the resulting apps do not download any code. This should give developers the flexibility they want, while preserving the security we need.
Just recently i was wondering if any app had ever been rejected from the App Store because of section 3.3.1, because i’ve never heard of any.
The new guidelines appear to be available only for registered iOS developers, but Engadget has them mirrored. They are surprisingly colloquial. This being a “living document” with provisions such as “new apps presenting new questions may result in new rules at any time” don’t really improve the overall situation for app developers, though – it’s still pretty much impossible to tell whether your app will be approved or not. I think Apple should really consider a concept approval process as a second alternative to the current process.
Art Wants to be Ninety-Nine Cents
Scott Sona Snibbe discusses the App Store as a new distribution platform for interactive art:
Over the past few days my first three apps became available on the iTunes store: Gravilux, Bubble Harp, and Antograph. I’ve been dreaming of this day for twenty years: a day when, for the first time, we can enjoy interactive art as a media commodity no different from books, music, and movies. But is there a market for this new medium?
To my understanding, interactive media art has traditionally been difficult to distribute as well as acquire, so this opens up interesting new possibilities for artists. It’s also interesting how this distribution channel runs contrary to established principles like exclusivity and limited availability in the art market, as touched upon in the article:
Galleries asked to sell these works and I labored for several years to “box” the experiences into objects that could sell to collectors. But my heart wasn’t in it. I grew up with the Free Software Foundation’s maxim Information wants to be free, and it didn’t seem right to make an arbitrary decision to make an edition of three, five, or seven, of something that could be copied more easily than music or movies.
