Escalating Smartphone Sales Means Slowing App Sales

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A year ago, according to Nielsen, smartphone purchases made up 38% of all cell phone purchases in the US. Now it is 50%. This means the market is quickly approaching a saturation point. The speed of saturation should be particularly troubling for software developers.

The reality is that most people don’t spend their time looking for new software apps to install on their devices. Especially in productivity, most download a handful of apps that they use all the time and that’s it. The best time to get a customer to look at new products is when they first buy into a platform, and that is usually when they first buy a smartphone. As the rate of new adoptions drop over the next few years, I believe that app sales will drop, at least for the kinds of general purpose apps that currently saturate the app stores.

Does that mean there won’t be break out hits? Of course not. There is still plenty of room for new entrants to make sales, but I do mean for every general purpose calculator, task list, photo and weather app, US-based sales are soon going to decrease and fall off as the demand from new customers decreases. Marketing is going to matter a lot more than it has.

How do we combat this trend? Here are a few off the top of my head:

  • Focus on a vertical market
  • Focus in a software area where there tend to be a desire to find new things (i.e., games)
  • Focus on providing additional capabilities, features and apps to your existing customers
  • Focus on International markets
  • Focus on unique products that weren’t possible before everyone had computers in their pockets

This isn’t dire. There is plenty of opportunity out there and lots of amazing opportunities that weren’t available before everyone carried a computer in their pockets. But if we thought the smartphone gold rush slowed a couple of years ago, well, I don’t think we’ve seen anything yet.

App Rejections Are a Lousy Way to Communicate Policy Changes

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App Rejections Are a Lousy Way to Communicate Policy Changes

I saw the news that Apple had rejected a few apps for using the device UDID a few days ago and hadn’t commented yet. Then John Gruber linked to this post which said pretty much everything I would have.

For those uninitiated, UDID is short for Unique Device Identifier. It is something that Apple probably shouldn’t have made available to developers but was common practice for years. Six months ago Apple deprecated access, meaning they told developers that sometime in the future they would stop giving us access to it. The implication, though, is that until it goes away we do have access. That gives us time to move away from it.

Sometimes the UDID is used for bad purposes (or could be). Most of the time it isn’t. For instance if you want to work with a pre-release version of an app then we need to get your UDID. That UDID is put inside the app and is compared when the app launches against your device to ensure you have permission to run it.

We also used the UDID for downloading templates from the Library in powerOne. We send your UDID to our server and is attached in a database to each template you request. When you quit the library (select Done) powerOne sends a message to the server requesting any templates marked with that UDID to be downloaded and then delete all the records off the server. We don’t store it and don’t connect your device to any sort of account. It is a temporary identifier. After Apple deprecated the UDID we switched and created a big random number instead and have been using it with the last few releases.

To me the surprising thing is that Apple didn’t wait until the feature was gone to reject apps. Even though we switched away from it, I hadn’t anticipated that Apple would use the review process to speed up the deprecation. It is still available for development but you can’t get an app in the App Store with it in, which makes the fact that the code is there moot. Everyone has to switch now.

Anyway, enough from me. Go read the post. It says most of what I would say if I was willing to write another 600 words on the topic.

The Reading Click Point

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I’ve been trying to read more non-current event stuff lately. For a while I was reading multiple weekly, bi-weekly and monthly magazines cover-to-cover to go along with my RSS feed, but over the last year or so I have cancelled most subscriptions and decided with another that I would just pick individual articles that looked interesting. The only magazine I still read cover-to-cover is National Geographic.

Part of the reason I did this was to clear space in the calendar for other things, like reading books. I have been reading a series of fiction and non-fiction books, some fluff stuff and other stuff with deep meaning. For instance, I read all three of the Nicki Heat books based on the TV show Castle right after finishing a 2000 page survey course on US history.

One of the books I started recently is Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age, which I discussed yesterday a little. For whatever reason, crime novels/suspense novels always hook me right away. Each of the Castle books were started and completed in a day. But other non-fiction books always take me some time to get into. For instance I was about 20% of the way through Diamond Age, starting to think about dropping it and moving on to another book, when suddenly it clicked and I was engaged.

I had completely forgotten about this phenomena — the reading click point — since I hadn’t been reading a lot of books over the last few years. I’m glad it hit me before I turned back and hope I remember to give it time with the next book, too.

Subversiveness

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“…none of Hackworth’s ideas had ever developed into companies. He lacked an ingredient somewhere, and as he now realized, that ingredient was subversiveness.” – Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

I have been thinking about this for a long time: what separates those who start companies and those who don’t. Maybe this explanation is too simple but it does seem to separate me from my mom, for instance, who I could never imagine having the guts to go out on her own.

To subvert, according to Reference.com: to overthrow (something established or existing). It tends to have government connotations and we have been trained here in the US that subversive activities are bad (i.e., cold war, CIA, etc.).

But this desire to overthrow the status quo, to see how the status quo has failed us, and to attempt to figure out how to do things differently, is a constant theme across almost every entrepreneur I have ever met.

Plus… I kind of like the bad boy image.

It Took Me 15 Years To Figure Out My Professional Theme

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I learned something about myself last week that surprised me: I really am not big into math.

Your laughing about now, right? After all, I’m a guy who has spent the past 15 years making calculators. I know, it surprised me, too, when I made the connection.

To be honest this has always kind of bothered me. I never did poorly in math in school but I never excelled at it either. In high school I got an A or B in Algebra and Algebra II and a B- or C in Geometry and Trigonometry. I got a C in statistics. I was never in the advanced classes; just at grade level, and my math grades were usually some of my lowest. By my senior year I had two math classes and used to skip them both to go the journalism room or computer room to write code. Sometimes a buddy and I would skip them and go to the mall for lunch. In college I took two quarters of Calculus and got a B+ both times and then took Statistics and still couldn’t do better than a C, but I worked my rear end off to get those grades and never really did understand what I was doing.

I really didn’t excel in college until I switched to business — accounting — and then transferred to a new school but I never really loved accounting per se. I figured the high grades were because I had figured out how to study plus the subject material came more naturally to me then engineering. It was the programming classes, once I started taking them again my junior year, where I excelled.

So when I graduated and started writing calculators for the PalmPilot it just didn’t make sense other than I saw a need and fulfilled it. It has taken me fifteen years to realize what the overriding theme of Infinity Softworks has been, even though I’ve been pursuing it the entire time.

You see, it isn’t about math per se. It is about numbers.

Working with numbers has been the constant theme throughout my professional career. Mathematics is just one way to work with them. Before I learned to program I used to create paper, dice and card-based baseball and football games. When I learned to program I wrote a basketball game, using player stats, and a golf game. The golf game used basic physics and vectors to determine ball flight path.

In the PalmPilot days I wrote a general-purpose financial calculator, loan and lease calculators, investment tracking, and personal finance tracking products. Once we added more people we developed scientific and graphing calculators. I have also tried to develop new things a few times over the years: an education specific math app called MathPoint, a data capture app called FastFigures.

The constant theme? Every one of those are about working with numbers.

Why did this dawn on me now? Because a friend, in relation to a new project that I can’t wait to share, changed a single descriptive word from “calculation” to “numbers” and suddenly it hit me like a sledge hammer.

I’m so glad he said it. Everything makes far more sense now.