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The Faceless iPhone Developer
Posted on 11/12/2008 at 04:52 AM in
Many iPhone developers have long had an issue with the price of applications on the iPhone and the way many applications are pushing for the lowest price possible and to make it up in volume. These have been coined Ringtone Apps by Craig Hockenberry.
A friend then linked me to another article by Jesse Farmer. In it he counters Craig's post by pointing out that the App Store is merely a distribution channel and that you still have to market your applications to get the most out of your product. My friend then remarked, "It's clear to me that the [iPhone app] market is nothing like the Mac market". What is unfortunate is that he is right.
One of the best aspects of the Mac software market is how open it is. It is like a local market where you can talk to vendors at the market stall directly, vendors who are more friendly and open and who are likely to be more flexible. They also pride themselves on the quality of their goods.
In the same way, Mac developers will go the extra mile with their application to make it very high quality and are willing to be much more open. You can talk to the people making your applications through their blog, through email, through twitter etc. And when there's a problem then you are either talking directly to the developers, or to someone who has direct contact with the developers on a daily basis.
The iPhone app market is more like a supermarket. They will give the highest quality possible at the lowest price, but they will also offer dirt cheap goods that aren't exactly high quality. It's also very impersonal and hard to get significant problems dealt with. The machine that runs the business and makes the product is more more sealed off from the machine that distribute the product.
Because of the way the App Store works developers don't really have as much choice in the matter. They can list a support email, but it's not very obvious. They can link to their website (if they have one) but again, it's not very obvious. On the Mac the various forms of communication have an almost equal footing with the distribution, on the iPhone they're a distant second.
Apple can fix the various problems with the distribution system and developers can start to advertise more to get more sales, but for those wanting the iPhone app market to be closer to the Mac app market these aren't the core problem. The core problem is that small, friendly, open developers are portrayed to most as closed, faceless companies.