The converse of the "long tail" distribution has to be the "high peak": a few apps (and a few developers, like King) are making almost all the money. "99% of the value is centralized to the top 0.01%", as we're increasingly seeing in the real economy.
Everyone agrees that app store discovery is bad. What could be done about it? Is there enough incentive for the platform holders to fix it? I'm not sure about the "decay" metric, that would seem to reward spamming still further.
The "instant app" business is much more questionable. If you want the instant transientness of a web page, why not write .. a web page? Is it because you want permissions to access privacy-sensitive parts of the user's phone?
Or we could just accept that the market is full and that all the software people are prepared to pay for is already out there.
(There might be an underserved market for niche expensive apps that would work through Kickstarter, but you can't crowdfund apps because all purchases have to go through the monopoly app stores).
Isn't this a problem in most markets though? Take writing. Most authors starve or make a pittance, while a handful of authors at the top make most of the money. Stephen King comes to mind. Same with music.
I think there are a ton of parallels between making money creating mobile games and making money in the arts. I think part of the disillusionment with budding game developers is that their core craft is still a very much in demand. The core of what they do, programming, is worth a lot of money to a lot of companies, so they assume they should be making a certain amount of money from their efforts.
The demand for musicians is substantially lower and most people understand early on that their chances of succeeding in the music business are slim and it will be a massive amount of work to even give it a fair try.
If I ever got into game development, I'd treat it exactly as I treat music -- as a serious hobby.
Regarding the supposed barrier that is installing the app: I don't know. For a paid service (as we are comparing apples to apples) the signup process on a web app can be more tedious than clicking a button, entering your mobile store password, waiting couple of seconds, and tap "Open app".
My candidate causes of the current situation:
- People are used to paying very little for apps. On the one hand, apps have been commoditized, yes, but on the other hand, web apps can be a lot more useful and productive than a phone app. We'll see what the iPad Pro and Android successors do about that. I'd suspect that there will serious money be made in enterprise apps.
- Competition (just swipe left and you find other purchase options) and reviews (highest ratings always wins) - I think OP got that right. You CAN do research about web apps before you subscribe to one, but that information is never complete and you can easily shrug off a bad review on some forum and buy that subscription nonetheless.
- Lack of trial versions. I would never buy a $10 app that has one 2-star rating. I would try it out, though. Note that almost every web app has a trial mode - it's a huge conversion driver! That one's completely missing for apps. I think that's also the reason why freemium has become predominant.
A lot of apps have trial versions. Either publisher publishes 2 versions of the same app: free trial version and paid full veersion or free version starts in trial version and switches to full mode with in-app purchase.
Sure, it would be better for app stores to support dedicated "Trial" mode. I don't really know, why they don't do that. But it's not that bad. Though I might be the only chosen one, who can find "App from this developer" or does read description from start to end :)
I am in the top 1-2% of Android developers [1], and while I've found it relatively easy to reach decent traction with a few apps (say 1000 downloads a day, or say $1000 a month), it is very challenging to keep an app in the very top (25k downloads a day, or making more than $15k a month) for very long.
You can put a good fight during your first month, since you can make it very high in the "Top New" rankings, but after that you are against the big guys.
As the article says, paid promotion is a prohibitive channel. At the usual free to paid conversion rates, making ads pay off is extremely difficult.
These two points the article makes are flat out wrong:
> The search function is unusable unless you know the name of the app you’re looking for
Absolutely no. SEO (we call it ASO in the app store) is important, and keyword search is a definitely a source of organic installs.
> This means that unless you actively manage your reviews, expect to have a 2–3 star average.
No way, a high quality app can have a 4.5+, and many decent ones have at least 4.0+.
[1] Not me personally, but the small company I cofounded
I don't think you need to worry about the suffering of current mobile app devs, I think these kinds of articles are more about shrinking the pipeline of new junior devs and devs transitioning in based on old information.
Much of the bootcamp/training/etc programs work on presumptions that may not apply by graduation about gaps in the market that require less than average experience.
Some are shit; but there are some real gems out there too. The real problem is with us developers. In the beginning of the app stores we were all charging reasonable rates, but as the number of apps increased there was a race to the bottom in pricing. Everyone kept lowering prices until everything was 99 cents and then after that free...
This is of course in keeping with basic economics; when the supply is this high we approach marginal costs. In the app market marginal costs are zero.
I agree with the overall view of the medium article that it is easier to make money on the web (again) these days. If you aren't already a mobile big fish developer then enterprise applications and contracting are the only ways to consistently stay in the green.
This I believe is where a lot of the problem is. It's hard to make money on free or .99 cents. Consumers are now used to free and cheap so I think it's going to be pretty hard to turn this trend around. App devs kind of brought this onto themselves by racing to the bottom.
> If the status quo continues, expect the overall app quality to stagnate and developers to move on to other platforms that have a less skewed power law.
This prediction likely won't come true. I don't know why but the situation hasn't changed in years and developers keep pumping out thousands of apps including many high quality polished apps.
I think the biggest issue isn't the searchability of mobile apps but rather the price point. At the current price point you cannot pay for any advertisement unless your in the top 1% and hence your whole marketing plan is then the App Store search results. If prices were more realistic and people could spend on advertising then any app could be discoverable. This is basically what happens when you go with bottom of the barrel pricing...
This is quite interesting though. On the web, search engines were built to fulfil a very specific need... finding content. The more open the web became the better search engines could find what you were looking for. Now with apps, they're being built at an extremely rapid pace, I wonder if we could expect to see some content-finding framework popping up to solve the saturation/discoverability issue.
> That's...staggering. If I tried to guess I would have been an order of magnitude out.
Yet it is still hard to find the app you really need. The amount of crap pushed at the top of the stores is also staggering. Something is definitely broken.
I would say , its still not that high and good apps will have "a feasible chance" to stand out ... above number means 1600 apps each day .. if you further divide by country it will be less .
The Google way of ranking search results does not work if there are no links to the things being searched. Do apps “link” to other apps? Do web pages link to apps?
Add to this the segmentation of the market wrt Java and Objective-C/Swift. The app converters are still not fully convincing in my opinion, while developing a web app is directly cross platform.
Independently, the idea of an app ranking similar to HN or Reddit is brilliant.
I don't know for sure, but I would guess that the statistical distribution of popularity on HN or Reddit is very similar to the hockey-stick shaped graph illustrated in the article.
This type of article comes out a few times a year.
Comparing to the Web.
How many new web sites are brought up each day, and out of those how many will gain significant traffic, and generate any significant revenue?
But finding Apps is hard? Yes it could be better, but you can use the Web to your harts content to promote your App which is searchable, assuming that's the problem.
This makes me think of the guy who did the Carrot weather App.
An independent developer that took an over saturated category and did something unique.
At the same time thousands of weather Apps, that all look like clones of each other where submitted to the App Store, and nobody cares, but the problem is the App Store right?
There's always a handful exceptions to the general rule, Flappy Bird being another example.
You only need to take a quick glance at the top selling/top grossing charts in the app store each day to see that the ecosystem for mobile apps is completely broken (at least on iOS, don't know about Android but I would be surprised if it were any different). There's literally hundreds if not thousands of alternatives for each app in the top spots of the charts that are objectively better, but practically speaking undiscoverable. At least if you count out Apple's own apps and those made by Facebook, Google, et al.
IMO someone (Apple or Google) needs to step up and re-invent the mobile app ecosystem, as it's in their own best interest to attract more diverse, higher quality applications, instead of having a handful of big developers suck all the air out of the room. Right now, they're doing a lousy job by just dumping the most downloaded apps into a few categories and calling it a day.
I imagine some beautiful, innovative discovery and distribution ecosystem for mobile apps that provides equal chances for large and small developers, and really lets users discover quality content, instead of funneling them into a handful of 'top 10' list and pretending those are 'the best', 'the most valuable', 'the most fun', etc...
An important difference with the web is the barrier to entry. Testing an idea for the web is orders of magnitude cheaper (time and money) than an idea for an app.
Whichever you do, you can't assume that someone else will take care of discovery on your behalf.
On the web, it's obvious that nobody will find your site by accidentally typing its URL. On mobile, many people still seem to assume that users can find apps on stores without any marketing to drive them there. That hasn't been true for at least five years.
Dominating mobile game companies like King (Candy Crush) and Supercell (Clash of Clans) spend over 500 million USD yearly on marketing. Unless you have that kind of money, you can't pay your way to the top of app store listings, so your marketing should probably focus on some very specific niche.
I don't watch much TV where I live, but I was in Japan last year and it was amazing how many adds for Candy Crush played on TV.
And they used celebrity actors as well.
I am not under any illusion that my side project is going to make any money on the app stores, but I do wonder what will happen if this view of powerlessness spreads through the developer community and most importantly to the companies who pay for app development.
I still want to have the possibility of a job in the sector even if I can't make it as an independent software producer.
>> Whichever you do, you can't assume that someone else will take care of discovery on your behalf.
Why not? Isn't that the whole idea behind syndication? What about adding more information to filter apps on besides name, category and star rating?
I agree that marketing is a powerful tool, but from a developer point of view, I find the premise that you need to spend obscene amounts of money to be successful in the mobile app space, even if your app is of outstanding quality, quite depressing.
That's business- it's fundamentally a combination of Product and Distribution. Both need consideration (not necessarily obscene amounts of money). Most 'Product' people, including but not limited to developers, underestimate the challenges of Distribution. Ironically, many are the first to call out the flaws when a 'Distribution' expert starts talking about "a great idea for an app/site/SaaS product, I just need someone to build it for me".
But it's not out of reach for Apple or Google to change the premise on their own market places.
They just need motivation to do so, and avoid scaring away the majority of developers that don't have a big company backing them up _might_ be that motivation.
The question is, whether Apple and Google think that something is wrong, or they think that everything is all right. They are the ones who set the rules. Will they receive more money when small companies will be able with less effort to reach the top ranks? I'm not sure.
I don't think that Apple can't change their ranking algorithms. And if they don't change them fundamentally for years, then probably they are OK from point of Apple. And users probably are OK with that too. And if ISV are suffering, who really cares? You can't pay for ads? OK, but BigCompany can, so we will sell ads to BigCompany instead of you. That's how capitalism works. So unless some government regulator forces Apple or Google to change ranking rules, I doubt, that anything would change.
I've developed a few apps, and the method that I saw huge potential in was to promote the app to early adopters by submitting it to specialized forums like xda-developers. These are the folks who go out of their way to give your app a spin and spread the word elsewhere for free.
He's right on the fact that something has to be done. But autodownloading things isn't necessarily the solution.
There's an over-saturation of applications out there and most of them are useless. App developers need to recognize the fact that whilst smartphones are becoming the primary computing devices for a large part of the market, the usecases are largely the same as with most other computing devices - media, finances, shopping and social interactions. And you can do most of that with 10 applications at most.
Personally I haven't come across an application that would prove to be useful or enable a new use case for my phone in the past 2 years.
You can offer an Android app on your site if the user/discoverer has permitted 'unknown sources' for app downloads in their settings, but to me the issue is trust. Not that the app store ensures you don't download malware, but people are not too trusting of site offering apps. Peer-reviewed apks could change that, and an app with malware would be found out before spreading too far. Maybe this is a way to at least bypass the stores. This does not address marketing and discovery.
Kind of reminds me of desktop development in the 90s. If you want greener pastures go to augmented reality or VR. Like hololens or Occulus. Throw in a couple drones for good measure and you got yourself a platform to play in.
But letting search be affected by tags more than the description text would be a way to let the devs prioritize the most important keywords. Other people don't really need to know anything about them.
As opposed to putting "tags" in the app title (motivation for all calendar apps to be named something with Calendar) or X number of times in the description text (motivation for unnatural copy).
Disclaimer: Based on what little I know about search priority in Google Play.
Steam implemented tags (and, appropriately enough, a personalized 'discover' queue) and it helps.
On Amazon's non-app store, you can also buy search ads. Apple could implement something similar and take a larger cut of the paid install market. There are search ads on Google Play (see: http://adwords.blogspot.com/2015/07/launching-search-ads-on-...).
Everyone agrees that app store discovery is bad. What could be done about it? Is there enough incentive for the platform holders to fix it? I'm not sure about the "decay" metric, that would seem to reward spamming still further.
The "instant app" business is much more questionable. If you want the instant transientness of a web page, why not write .. a web page? Is it because you want permissions to access privacy-sensitive parts of the user's phone?
Or we could just accept that the market is full and that all the software people are prepared to pay for is already out there.
(There might be an underserved market for niche expensive apps that would work through Kickstarter, but you can't crowdfund apps because all purchases have to go through the monopoly app stores).