NimbleBit

Recently we stumbled upon Jeff Tunnels blog post “Hey Whiners, the iPhone Market Owes You Nothing“. Jeff is pissed off about the idea of the iPhone developer community wanting some changes in how the app store marketplace works.  In his words:

“All of this elitist non-informed bullshit needs to be debunked. Crap like this, along with developers complaining that they cannot make $80,000 per year just by making iPhone games is so far from the truth that it is laughable. The bottom line is that markets owe you nothing. If you can’t survive in the market, there will be a hundred other guys that want it more and will take your place.”

Jeff has a ton of experience in developing and promoting independent games, both as a co-founder of Dynamix and Garage Games, as well as having a new venture :  Push Button Labs (I am especially looking forward to checking out the Push Button Engine they are developing). Having some experience with the iPhone app market ourselves and knowing a lot of other iPhone developers, we felt like offering a counter viewpoint to Jeff’s post.

With as much experience as Jeff has, I could understand his anger at the thought of iPhone developers being upset even when given such an open and liberating platform. Such a market is a breath of fresh air for many developers who have been stuck trying to wedge their way into closed and prohibitive platforms for years. I think that Jeff is jumping the gun though in his assumption that most iPhone developers are missing this point and are angry in general that success is not easy. There are some first time developers and other people looking to make a quick buck after reading success stories with starry eyes - but the serious developers we meet are not angrily whining, they are frustrated. Frustrated because they see what a special and awesome opportunity the app store is, and perhaps seeing it be wasted in places and running down the drain pipes.

Jeff speaks on the number of apps available in the app store:

“First of all, get used to the crowding. If there are over 25,000 apps today, there will someday be 100,000, then 200,000, etc. It won’t end. If you can’t take the heat, get out of the kitchen. This is a marketplace, and you either break through or you don’t, but don’t blame other people that want to make games on your problems. Another marketplace, the Internet, has millions of products and games available. It is an open marketplace, and you should be glad for this.”

The strength of the app store is it’s openness. The fact that almost any developer can get almost any app onto the store is the hallmark of it’s success and iPhone developers’ successes. The real crux of the issue here which Jeff seems to miss, is what is the best way to let people interface with these increasing numbers of apps? As the app store works now, there is a high

incentive for developers flood the store with as many submissions as possible. There is no extra cost to the developer to do so, and seeing how the app store is mostly just a tiny window into what is streaming by at the moment, it makes sense to toss as many things into the water as you can.

The problem here is that every new app does have a hidden cost, in Apple submission reviewer time and space on the small number of “whats new” slots. If all developers have to bear these costs, there should be some relative cost associated with putting a new app on the store. $99 per app would seem more then generous. But as Jeff points out, this is an open marketplace, right? Just like the internet, it has millions of products available and developers should be grateful for the opportunity to toss their pebble into the great open sea of apps.

Not so fast. While it is true that there are minimal restrictions for getting your app onto the app store, the actual categorization and presentation of all these apps are increasingly restrictive and limiting. The internet is open, but if you want to buy things on it you have an almost infinite amount of storefronts to get it through, each of which has it’s own multitude of ways to present purchasing options to you.

“Making a great game is only part of the process. Marketing is the other part, and developers never really want to acknowledge this fact.” - Jeff Tunnell

The majority of app store purchases go through the app store on the iPhone device, which has a very limited number of ways to present you with apps. You have the option of checking out a small segment of the highest selling apps, across all apps or divided into one of the categories defined by Apple. You might also spot something you like in the small segment of the newest posted apps, or the small segment of apps which Apple has decided to feature. These are the biggest ways customers interact with the app store, and they all are for most part completely outside the control of marketing efforts by developers (unless you have a friendly relationship with Apple, which is why publishing your app through companies like ngmoco and Freeverse is becoming more common, they have a knack for getting games featured).  Here are the ways that developers can influence app sales in the current system.

1. Have a user enter in the name of your app into the search field
2. Try to get people to link to the PC/Mac version of the app store in iTunes
3. update / rename / change prices on your app continuously to get appearances in the “whats new” slot

That’s a start, but a brief study of the incestuous nature of the app store clearly reveals that most games fail to make more then a dent using these methods. The vast majority of people are looking at the only thing presented to them on the device, the top app lists as defined by sales. But what can Apple do? Well there are plenty of open marketplaces on the web that have to deal with a vast inventory, lets look at how they match people to the product they want. After all, the main goal of any marketplace should be matching consumers with the product they want most. Here are the different ways that you can find the product for you at Amazon.com, compared to browsing for apps on the iPhone.

1. featured items (on iPhone also)
2. top selling items (on iPhone also)
3. browse by category (on iPhone also)
4. search entire line of products (on iPhone also)
5. search specifically within categories (not on iPhone)
6. a multitude of recommendation methods (not on iPhone)
7. package deals (not on iPhone)
8. browse by customer rating (not on iPhone)
9. browse by price (not on iPhone)
10. browse by age rating (not on iPhone)
11. browse by developer (not on iPhone)
12. browse by tags (not on iPhone)

As you can see, there are a lot of ways to match people with products when there is a lot of product available - and Apple is only scratching the surface in that regard. That is the source of developers frustration with the current iPhone marketplace, there are potentially a lot of customers out there for their specific apps - but unless it climbs to a certain threshold on the charts, it is unlikely to be presented to much of it’s target audience.

The good news is that Apple is already steadily adding bits and pieces to help streamline the app store. They have added more categories and just recently made some changes to the way apps are rated (though you still can’t sort them by rating). Many of these features exists in the iTunes marketplace, where they have great experience matching people to music and video products. If they can squeeze that customer matching functionality into an even better iPhone app store on devices, the potential for developers to cater to a specific audience and ride the iPhone long tail is enormous. Why not have an app store genius to tell you what other apps are on the store that you would probably like?

Until the app store moves further in that direction, customers will be limited to discovering just a small slice of all the amazing apps that the openness of the app store have cultivated. We still think the app store is a great place to compete, and I think it will be an even more exciting platform as Apple works with users and developers to evolve it.