Filed under: iPod Family, iPhone
App Store: Does "Free" mean junk?
Does "Free" mean junk? That's the question that this Apple Insider report has had me pondering this morning. According to AI, lucky companies are being assigned iPhone development partners who are encouraging developers to charge for rather than give away their wares. As Apple is due to receive 30% of all sales, they have a vested interest in encouraging commerce but I think the issue goes deeper.
To distribute widgets, you don't need to pay $99/year and you don't have to apply for a program. Apple has the experience of Installer.app to go by, where gems can quickly get lost among other people's "Hello World" applications. I think Apple wants to keep the signal quality high and the noise level low. Perhaps that's why they're pushing for paid serious apps rather than free frivolous ones.
Thanks, Sam.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
vandy1997 said 5:19PM on 6-06-2008
I think that some developers, especially developers who are unknown, will have to provide apps for free to establish a following. Maybe some apps can be sold for $1.00 apiece. But I am sure that users will not be as forgiving when purchasing apps from the App Store as they were when downloading from Installer. Nobody will be willing to pay for an app that is not polished or that conflicts with other apps and freezes the phone. Also, I am sure that very few people will be willing to pay for an app with significant bugs that they will have to beta test. Those developers will not be seeing income for very long. I hope that Apple permits individuals who download apps to rate them. Then there will be a checks and balances system in place to identify buggy apps. I also hope that there will be developers who develop apps that are all-inclusive. As an example, there should be one great SMS app that does searching, deleting, forwarding, deleting, blacklisting, etc. functions with respect to SMSs. There shouldn't be an app for each of these functions. That seems to be the case under Installer. I know that Apple will not allow developers to sell an SMS app through the App Store, but I am using the SMS feature as an example. I want to see some great and polished apps that are not too expensive and that are not specific to a specific phone (in the event that we have to switch out a bad phone).
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Sam Gross said 5:30PM on 6-06-2008
I would have to agree. People aren't going to pay for a crossword app, but they will pay for an application that has 5 different puzzles in it. I personally, want an integrated AIM application.
(01) said 5:30PM on 6-06-2008
I don't know that "free" necessarily denotes junk. An app where I could change the background picture for each "page" on my iPhone, give some transition effects and allow me to change the icons would be a bit frivolous (yes, I am aware that you can do this on jailbroken phones), but I can also totally see a free app that does this appear on the store. The mac community has some great programmers in it, and it would be a shame to miss out on the variety of applications just because there's not a "need" for them.
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Gp said 5:33PM on 6-06-2008
Apple could just be trying to recoup investment cost. If everyone at the beginning throws up Free stuff then Apple doesn't get a cut either which means hosting a crapload of freeware for no inherent benefit.
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Anderson Imes said 6:29PM on 6-06-2008
I think this is a very legitimate theory. If you look at things like the Windows Vista Sidebar Gadgets (I know it's Windows... try and ignore that for a moment) you get about 2% worthwhile gadgets and 98% total BS. Even if they charge a dollar, I think it will increase the quality of what people write.
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dagamer34 said 5:42PM on 6-06-2008
I mean no insult to developers, but 99% of jailbroken apps are more of a demo than a finished product. I know that the developers are working for free here, but when people pay for a product, it actually causes the developer to put more work into fit-and-finish.
Fit-and-finish is usually what separates a good app from a bad one.
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Tom said 6:12PM on 6-06-2008
99 percent of jailbroken apps are books and summerboard themes, actually.
Tom said 6:13PM on 6-06-2008
Oh, and dictionaries for wedict. Forgot those. If you remove the books, themes, and wedict files, you get to the apps, and then from there maybe 50% or so (I haven't really seen much straight up crap on the recent apps list).
jakelson said 6:40PM on 6-06-2008
I think 99% is a bit high to say they are demo's...maybe 50-75%. A Dollar an app that does simple things sounds like a good price. I will say that Apple doesn't want to become like "Downloads.com" with all that junk. The thing is that developer's shouldn't charge much for simple mobile apps. Now if it's a money management software, maybe $5, but otherwise a buck or MAYBE $2.
dagamer34 said 8:32PM on 6-06-2008
I would prefer less apps that are high quality than more apps that are pure shit.
Tony Bowman said 5:52PM on 6-06-2008
i'll pay for good apps but not for limited function apps.
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David Chartier said 6:03PM on 6-06-2008
I think you're spot-on Erica. Mobile devices are still such a new space, and Apple needs to maintain quality in order to earn consumer trust. When third party software causes a phone to behave poorly or gobbles up the battery, I think most consumers still blame the phone or the brand name on the front of it, not the stuff they downloaded.
Speaking of developers though, have you heard how Apple is handling entries for the iPhone SDK program? Are they letting devs in arbitrarily, or is just about everyone getting in? Do they take a long time to "proof" an app before allowing it in the store?
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BabyGotMac said 6:07PM on 6-06-2008
I think it's going to be a hard row to hoe. Take a look at this trainwreck of a thread over on AppleiPhoneSchool regarding (the great) IntelliScreen.
http://www.appleiphoneschool.com/2008/06/05/intelliscreen-101/#comments
The internet has made selling software a tough proposition and people seem to think that just because an app is on a phone it doesn't count as a 'real' program, despite dozens of hours of programming.
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Kai said 6:57PM on 6-06-2008
From a *business* point of view, this is the best comment to this piece so far.
I was just in a conversation with another mac dev last night about the "iPhone App" landscape, and was telling him that since Apple is persuing their idiotic Verizon/BREW model, as well as the myriad restrictions on the license and other things we can't go into, the iPhone app business is risky, at best, and the customers are NOT paying "desktop" prices for "toy" apps.
This is of course Apple's, for want of a better word, "fault" due to the aforementioned hamstringing, the half-assed implementation of having demos (this is a newish development btw...the complaints were over the top about this) and the whole horrible, horrible (for anyone but Apple) business model.
I mean really, would you pay $50 for an iPhone app, given that it can't tell you things unless you are looking at it actively? :)
-K
Tom said 6:15PM on 6-06-2008
I think you're wrong, Erica Sadun. Because installer.app sucks (and it does) doesn't mean that it's the only way to do it. I've been campaigning (in #iphone on irc.osx86.hu/irc.conceitedsoftware.com) for the replacement of 'categories' with 'tags'. If there were tags, one could instead scroll down a much shorter list, like 'irc', 'aim', 'msn', and only tags relevant to the app. Game could be a mega-tag for games, but I don't think we'd need one for network based apps (since their function, not the fact that they use the network, would be important).
In short: There's not really a crowding problem because there's a lot of crap, it's because there's no way to filter the crap.
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JD said 7:43PM on 6-06-2008
That's what I was thinking too. Basically, all you need is a way for the community to rate apps, as in Versiontracker, and you're fine. To avoid the crap, just select "only show apps with > 3 stars". This supposed problem with crap-ware is just as poor an excuse for foiling the software community as the whole "it will take down the network" excuse was. There are plenty of easy ways around the problem -- solutions which aid the freeware/opensource community, instead of fighting it to further enrich Apple.
punkassjim said 8:01PM on 6-06-2008
It kinda depends on your subjective opinion of what's "crap." To me, it sounds like you're acknowledging the presence of tons of crap, but you prefer to point your finger at the lack of methods to filter it out. You're totally right to make that point, but you're denying there is a mountain of crap in order to make your point.
With regard to the topic of this post, my opinion is that "more free stuff" doesn't mean it's gonna be crap. To me, the more obvious problem is that there's no real standard or requirement for excellence. Lots of people are releasing (potentially-awesome) software far, far before it's ready for prime-time. It's not that it's a hello-world app, it's just that it ain't done cookin'. And, of course, the method of delivery for pre-alpha, alpha, pre-beta and beta software is exactly the same as the ready-for-prime-time stuff. And, of course, the majority of novice programmers aren't labeling alpha software as alpha, they're calling it beta even though it's way less mature than that.
Your point about wanting to filter out crap via tags is a good one, but it helps to limit the signal-to-noise ratio before you even get that far. Not only that, but tagging is just another system that needs policing. And an added layer of complexity. Not very Apple.
ramond said 6:29PM on 6-06-2008
It just needs one person to buy the app and put it in an Installer source and we all get it for free anyway.
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(01) said 6:35PM on 6-06-2008
EXCELLENT way to look at it
(01) said 6:39PM on 6-06-2008
/sarcasm