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“Can the App Store Be Full?”

David Smith, in an excellent episode of Developing Perspective about the hyper-competitive nature of the modern App Store:

It’s hard to talk to those people sometimes, because I have the understanding that it’s very unlikely that you’re going to come up with something that is truly new, or something that will be adopted just on its own merits, on it being novel and it being interesting. If you do, it’ll likely be copied very quickly. It’s just the nature of the store. If you want to make it in the App Store, it’s much more a question of patience, a question of savvy maybe, too. Of being really thoughtful about how you’re doing things from a business perspective, on keeping your expenses and your costs really really low. That’s one point that I know I’ve been able to make a living out of this, is that I keep my expenses very low on the development side.

The entire episode is worth listening to (or watching), as David makes some great points about facing the realities of the App Store, which is “full” of free apps and where the majority of customers don’t fall in the power-user end of the iOS device owner spectrum.

I started MacStories in April 2009, less than a year after the App Store opened. Over the years, I’ve tried and written about thousands of apps, generally from indie developers who have an idea and want to make an app out of it. From my experience, it’s pretty clear that the people who used to make apps in the early days of the App Store have been forced to adapt to a race to the bottom, increasingly harder ways to monetize productivity apps, and a general saturation of ideas. With so many developers making apps, it’s almost inevitable that the same idea will happen in different parts of the world at different price points. By 2008-2010 definitions, the App Store can be seen as “full” and the market is tough and sometimes unfair (also because Apple has been slow in providing better tools for testing apps or measuring analytics).

But, it’s important to stress the amount of opportunities that new developers starting out today have to make a meaningful impact on the App Store. New ways to monetize, new technologies, new types of customers that are more diversified than five or four years ago. Apps like Workflow, Overcast, Newsify, Elevate, Clips – these, I think, are good examples of the kinds of businesses that can be explored on the App Store today.

By certain metrics, the App Store is less fun because apps are harder to discover, free apps with inferior designs and feature sets tend to dominate, and many developers haven’t been able to adapt to new trends, rules, or limitations. And I’m especially sad when I hear the stories of developers whose livelihoods have been complicated by rip-offs, questionable App Store rejections, or piracy. That, unfortunately, is the consequence of a vast and popular marketplace where anyone can make anything within a few guidelines. Everyone is fighting for customers and survival.

Realistically, though, the App Store isn’t “full” if you can adapt to its nature in 2014. New ideas are still possible and new apps will be invented to solve new problems for new customers. The App Store is denser, noisier, and more unforgiving than before; developing successful apps – even only by the sheer amount of functionality in iOS – requires more patience and scrupulousness than four years ago. And creating novel apps that are also successful is incredibly challenging and time-consuming. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to this other than advising against relying on luck alone.

The App Store is full of opportunities, but it’s a lot of hard work – more than ever.

Converting Multiple Currencies and Units with Soulver

I needed to convert a series of different currencies from a list to Euros tonight, and I thought that it would have been nice to have an app with natural language input for currency conversion. The problem was fairly trivial – a list of amounts to convert to EUR to get a total – but I didn’t want to alter my PCalc layout or come up with a workflow for all those variables. To my surprise, I learned that Soulver can convert multiple currencies and units at once without much effort.

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A Safari View Controller→

Bryan Irace writes about web views in iOS and offers a great idea for the future: a Safari view controller.

But in-app browsers have some pretty massive downsides as well. They can’t access cookies stored by other in-app browsers, nor Safari, requiring the user to repeatedly log in to websites that they should already be authenticated with. iCloud Keychain is great for syncing credentials across devices, but while Safari has access to its data, in-app browsers don’t. This isn’t merely Apple being punitive – it’d be horribly negligent to give third-party applications access to this kind of information.

Essentially, developers would be able to implement a web view based on Safari that offers Safari features to other apps while also isolating code from third-party access. This would be good for security, for example, but also for consistency with extensions and iCloud features.

As I noted earlier this week, implementations of web views can be massively different from app to app. A native Safari view could offer more options than standard web views and secure user data from third-party apps (case in point). It could also provide a solution to this:

You can find Bryan’s suggestion on OpenRadar.

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Virtual: Weaponized Hashtags→

This week Myke and Federico catch up with the current progress in the new Pokemon games, before discussing No Man’s Sky, Zelda Wii U and a tonne of news and announcements from the Video Game awards and the PlayStation Experience Event.

News-packed show on Virtual this week. You can get the episode here.

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Connected: On Principle, I Shunned These Ideas→

This week, Federico, Myke and what’s left of Stephen discuss some Evernote follow-up, recent App Store drama and what’s going on with Twitter clients.

On this week’s Connected, we discuss recent App Store rejections (Transmit’s iCloud Drive feature has been reinstated) and the conclusion of my Twitter article. Get the episode here.

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iCloud Drive Sharing Restored in Transmit→

Earlier this week, Panic was forced to remove Transmit’s ability to send files to iCloud Drive following a request by Apple. Fortunately, Apple has reversed their decision (as it happened for the PCalc widget) and a new version of Transmit has been released on the App Store.

As I argued last night on Connected, there could be an issue within Apple that leads to confusion with apps that can be promoted and rejected at the same time. We don’t, however, know the extent of this probable issue, and I don’t think speculating about internal conflicts is worth much (as with most things Apple, speculation isn’t useful).

We can (and should continue to) point out unfair and unreasonable rejections, especially for apps that aren’t made by popular companies such as Panic. Hopefully this latest string of questionable rejections and reversals will allow Apple to improve their internal App Review processes and make sure these cases become less frequent in the future.

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HockeyApp Acquired by Microsoft→

With a blog post, mobile development testing and feedback service HockeyApp has announced they’ve been acquired by Microsoft.

From the HockeyApp blog:

Microsoft has been a HockeyApp customer with many apps since the early days back in 2011, so they were already familiar with the stability and quality of our service. Creating the best developer experience is key to both Microsoft and HockeyApp, this includes delivering industry leading tools for the major mobile platforms: iOS, Android and Windows. We saw the potential of the added abilities and resources of Microsoft to make our platform even better. It may sound cliché, but it really does feel like a match made in heaven.

We want to be very clear about the most important thing: we remain dedicated to our mission of making the best mobile app development feedback and testing distribution platform in the world. Your HockeyApp apps and accounts will continue to work and the team has not stopped working on advancing the platform. Throughout the next few months, we’ll reveal more about our plans with Microsoft.

In a separate blog post, Microsoft has also shared details of what to expect from the near future of HockeyApp:

In the coming months, we will introduce new iOS and Android SDKs for Application Insights based on the features of HockeyApp. Application Insights offers a 360-degree view of application usage, availability, and performance across both client and server/cloud application components. Integrating HockeyApp crash reports with Application Insights usage analytics will extend device support for Application Insights across all major mobile platforms and make application analytics an ambient part of the application development cycle with support for all tiers of a modern “mobile first, cloud first” solution.

It’s not surprising to see HockeyApp becoming part of Microsoft following TestFlight and Crashlytics joining Apple and Twitter, respectively. Mobile development testing has become essential to the app economy, and big companies want to control that part of the stack.

As a user, I always preferred HockeyApp to the original TestFlight. HockeyApp was fast, its Timeline view was excellent (see all beta builds from newest to oldest), and it was always more reliable than the old TestFlight. The new TestFlight, though, is much easier and integrated than third-party beta testing services: developers can add up to 1000 external testers using Apple IDs rather than device UDIDs. That alone has been a massively welcome change: I only need to give my email address to developers, and then I can download an app without going crazy with certificates and UDIDs.

Most of the betas I try for MacStories have switched to the new TestFlight. It’s just too convenient and integrated. I do think, however, that there’s still room for services like HockeyApp, which offers developers more insights, cross-platform support, and the ability to avoid Apple’s often problematic web services. It’ll be interesting to see where Microsoft takes HockeyApp.

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