Should Apple Care that Facebook’s iPhone App Developer Quit?

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[I originally wrote this article for ReadWrite Web.]

News reverberated through the developer community that long-time and highly prominent community contributor Joe Hewitt has quit developing the iPhone Facebook application. While Joe said that Apple has the right to do what it wants, he does not agree with its policies and has chosen to move on. Joe posted this tweet in the afternoon of November 11th:

“Time for me to try something new. I’ve handed the Facebook iPhone app off to another engineer, and I’m onto a new project.”

The Problem

Apple’s App Store is a mess for small and independent developers. Very few developers are making even a livable wage, and the approval process is a black box.

Let’s start with making money. Pinch Media reports that the average iPhone application has netted (for the developer) a grand total of $8,500, and 80% of developers have made less than that. That’s not per month – which would be a starting point for a two-person team – but rather total revenue earned.

And as reported a few thousand times, the approval process is a black box. For the most part, developers don’t know whether their app will be approved or in what timeframe, making the entire experience a nail-biter.

Should Apple Care?

Well, of course, Apple should care. Apple should be inclusive of its community and encourage small developers to grow and make a living from developing for the iPhone. Apple rightly views the App Store as a competitive advantage and should continue striving to keep its developers in-house.

On the other hand, Apple is not responsible for marketing and selling for its developers. The App Store is a distribution medium, not a marketing and sales platform. Apple has a system in place for enabling customers to quickly and easily purchase and download software for their devices. And it has been a massive success, with over two billion downloads.

The difference, though, is that the apps that Apple needs in the App Store most – gaming and entertainment titles – are getting in. And they are being developed by some of the biggest brands in the world. After all, the iPhone and iPod Touch are, first and foremost, entertainment devices.

Note that these big brands do not face the same problems as the rest of the developer community. Many have contacts deep in Apple, are magically ushered through the review process in a few days and get great placement on Apple’s virtual store shelves. Electronic Arts, for example, has no public rejection stories and currently has titles throughout the list of top grossing apps, suggesting that it is in the top 10% for App Store revenue generation.

And so, Joe Hewitt has quit the App Store. It’s a great show of unity for small developers, but Apple has clearly linked successful applications to big brands, and those brands continue to clamor for iPhone presence.

In Search of the Holy Grail

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(I originally wrote and published this article for ReadWrite Web.)

Finally, it feels like the holy grail of mobile development is at hand. This problem has persisted since Microsoft released Palm-sized PC operating system to compete with the Palm OS a decade ago: as a mobile developer, the cost of supporting multiple mobile platforms, each with a relatively small user base and massive development learning curve, is huge. That finally seems to be changing.

In the Beginning

When handheld computers went mainstream, developers really had only one choice: Palm Pilot. Within five years, they had Symbian and Pocket PC (later Windows Mobile) to consider also. By 2009, there were no less than eight major operating systems for smartphones: two versions of Windows Mobile, two versions for Blackberry, iPhone, Android, Symbian, and webOS, not to mention traditional feature phones running various flavors of Java.

The Impact

Developers were forced to make the tough choice of which operating system to develop for. Making it harder, customers were scattered and were requesting versions of a variety of platforms, with no one platform controlling the market as was the case in the desktop world. Until a few months ago, they had only one choice: develop for each platform independently, picking and choosing which to support, each with huge costs and unknown payback.

That, however, is changing. Developers now have three ways to develop cross-platform. And while these technologies are still in their early days, they will evolve rapidly.

HTML 5 and the Mobile Web

One option is to forgo installed applications altogether and develop mobile Web applications. HTML 5, with its access to local databases, makes this possible. There are two major obstacles to this strategy right now: first, ubiquity of HTML 5-enabled browsers and, second, the willingness of customers to accept it as a standard.

While the first will be solved with time and pressure from other OS platforms, the second is a bigger problem. The customer’s willingness to accept Web-based applications is a psychological change that takes years to evolve. Device owners have been trained that cell phone connections are inherently unstable. In many places the connection disappears, and until that is resolved this mental adjustment cannot even begin to take hold.

Flash

Adobe recently announced its push into the mobile space, with Flash-enabled browsers for most platforms and a Flash-to-iPhone-app compiler for Apple’s smartphones and handhelds. This would allow developers to write all of their apps in Flash and then deploy on multiple mobile browsers and the iPhone via a compiled application.

This still suffers from many of the same disadvantages as HTML 5, because it requires a psychological change in customers to accept running apps in the browser. In addition, Apple’s hard-nosed stance against Flash in the browser will impede this movement because it will require two completely separate creation processes.

Finally, for Flash to take hold, operating system manufacturers will have to start treating Web-enabled applications the same as non-Web-enabled ones. For example, launching Web apps from the home page must become standard.

JavaScript Native Apps
A new class of applications has arisen. These are native applications that are compiled for a specific platform but that use Web technologies for the user interface. This has the most potential. The most prominent one currently is PhoneGap. Other solutions include Appcelerator, which uses PhoneGap technology under the hood, and Rhomobile, which uses the Ruby on Rails Web development language.

These technologies, all open sourced, enable developers to write back-end processes in the native code and all of the user interfaces in HTML, CSS and JavaScript. This application is then compiled into a native application. It can be uploaded to app stores, distributed via downloading and installed directly to the device.

The fundamental problem with mobile development isn’t the back end, though. The backbone of all of these platforms is C or Java, which is generally portable if written with that intention. The problem is user interface development, which requires deep knowledge and understanding of each mobile device. Making the UI cross-platform solves the vast majority of problems associated with this kind of development. If you had to point to where the approach falls short, it would be that cross-platform applications don’t feel “native,” a shortcoming that would be solved by good design and better CSS work!

Conclusion
As the smartphone market evolves, we are unlikely to see a clear winner as we did in the PC business; and because of that, developers will be forced to write for multiple platforms. But for the first time in a decade, developers have options for multiple-device development. The cost and learning curve associated with writing native apps for every platform can finally be mitigated.

While all of these technologies are early to market, the writing is clearly on the wall. After more than a decade of discussion, the combination of Flash, HTML 5 and JavaScript will make “write once, use everywhere” a reality.

I Don’t Hear The Fat Lady

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This thing ain’t over. The Dow crossed 10,000 a few weeks ago? Big deal. It means nothing. Unemployment is over 10%. Commercial real estate defaults are rising. The nation’s personal debt is still sustainably high. As I wrote in July, this will be a W recession, not a standard V, and we need to batten down the hatches for that likelihood.

But this isn’t all bad as it needs to lead to a re-prioritization of government.

Here’s my philosophy: In 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected based on a great economic experiment. The experiment was that if we cut taxes on the wealthy, the money they saved and spent would go toward services and the revenues would “trickle down” to the other classes.

It didn’t work. What it did do was amass huge amounts of government debt and widen the gap between the wealthy and the poor to levels never seen before in the country. George H.W. Bush tried to reverse this, raising taxes, setting up the Clinton’s balanced budget, and contributing to the greatest economic expansion in the history of this country, all of which was reversed under George W. Bush.

Now I believe it’s time for our government to forge a new contract with the American people. The daddy state will have to be paired back, as the costs of social security and medicare will bankrupt the country. We need to reconsider our roll as military foundation for the world. As India, China, and other countries step up economically, they also need to step up militarily and do their part.

It’s time for a new conversation, one that starts with these basic issues:

  • A national discussion about basic services and what we should all get and have funded out of tax dollars
  • What our role in international military issues is
  • How, as a government, we need to ensure open markets where everyone is working from an even playing field
  • How government spending can be focused to provide the biggest bang for the buck, particularly in regards to infrastructure and education

If the U.S. has lost its edge, its that it is no longer the land of opportunity. The saying went that anyone could come to America and become wealthy, anyone could pull themselves up by their bootstraps.

Now it feels the deck is stacked against everyone who doesn’t already come from money or have the right contacts. It’s time for us to recapture the magic.

Winning When Software Is Less Than Free

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I just read a fantastic blog post by Venture Capitalist Bill Gurley on the less than free business model. What does this mean? In short, it’s when you get paid by the company instead of the company paying you. Mr. Gurley talks about this in terms of Google’s strategy, that rather than pay Google to use their services, Google will actually pay you a percentage of the revenues they make from ads.

Disruption is a major concern for every business. In the early days of Infinity Softworks it was disruption by Microsoft, who had the clout and power to knock anyone off their perch just by threatening to be in your market space.

But it wasn’t until Microsoft released Internet Explorer that this really got scary. Not only could a company beat you by charging a lower price or be a better known company, now it can kill you by offering for free what once was charged. Chris Anderson, author of Free, would argue that this is the natural evolution of the market. (I wrote about that here.)

The irony, of course, is that Google is now doing to Microsoft what Microsoft did to Netscape: killing it with free. But Google may be cannibalizing it’s own “free” business model. Instead of free, Google is gearing up to pay you to use it’s services.

So for all you entrepreneurs, how do you fend off less than free in your business? (You know, besides the obvious: pray Google buys you so you don’t have to worry about it.)

Wealth Wins the World Series… Again

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Two thoughts on Major League Baseball and the World Series:

1. This disparity in baseball between the haves and have-nots is so great it’s hard to get too excited about pro ball. I love the sport and I love the Indians and will always be a fan, but it’s really hard to get worked up over the rest of the league. I’ve been a major fan most of my life, listening to games (the Tribe plus anyone I can hear), going to stadiums just to see baseball, knowing the stats of every player in the league. I just can’t do it anymore.

There have been 106 World Series. The largest market teams — New York Yankees and Mets, LA Dodgers and Angels, San Francisco Giants, Philadelphia Phillies, Boston Red Sox, Atlanta Braves, Chicago White Sox and Cubs, and Baltimore Orioles, which is 1/3 of all baseball teams — have appeared in the World Series 119 times and won 60 of them. You can pretty much bet that one of those 11 teams will be in the Series every year and better than 50-50 odds that one will win it. How is that equitable and fair?

2. The Indians were all over this World Series. C.C. Sabathia pitched for the Yankees; Cliff Lee pitched for the Phillies. They are the last two reining Cy Young award winners (best pitcher in baseball). Since this disparity is so great and the Indians can’t really do anything about keeping their own players once they approach/reach free agency, I’ve decided to feel more like a proud father than a jealous boyfriend when our players move on. Thome, Vizquel, Ramirez, Lofton, Lee, Sabathia, Martinez… they will always by my kids.