iPhone =/= Debian app [LWN.net]

iPhone =/= Debian app

Posted Jun 18, 2010 9:39 UTC (Fri) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
In reply to: He's not getting it by drag
Parent article: The Party of Gno (Linux Magazine)

The _vast_ majority of iPhone apps are basically analogous to web pages, not Debian applications.

Remember when the web "took off". Every double-glazing sales company, rat catcher and accountant wanted a web site right away. They'd all call up some spotty kid who happened to know a bit of HTML and he'd make them their very own web site for a reasonable price. And then they'd go pay the sign painter to write "Threepalmvalleycentralheating.obscureisp.com" on the side of their vans.

The spotty kid would eventually figure out that he's paying himself minimum wage because he's lousy at business finance and he's no longer excited about making web pages, and the rat catcher would figure out that the web isn't bringing in much business. But meanwhile business was "booming".

That's where the iPhone is now. Countless people have breathlessly told me that they're now an iPhone developer, and hey that means they can buy a new iThing every couple of months and see it as a business expense, and oh, the money? Well they don't have the money part figured out yet. In 18 months most of them will be back working for the Man. But meanwhile they're generating thousands of me too apps, and more importantly, tens of thousands of very niche special purpose apps for just a handful of people, which outside the Reality Distortion Field would have just been web pages (especially since they often don't work without Internet access)

Imagine if there were debian packages like view-lwn-kinda-like-a-web-browser.deb and view-phoronix-sorta-like-a-web-browser.deb would you be more impressed and believe Debian was going to explode in popularity? Or would you think its developers had gone crazy? For Debian thousands of worthless packages is a cost, so they're against it. For Apple every "Hello, world" app is money in the bank.

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iPhone =/= Debian app

Posted Jun 18, 2010 13:52 UTC (Fri) by pboddie (subscriber, #50784) [Link]

Once again, someone posts a great comment that succinctly dissects the hype around something in a way that no-one else has managed to do! In this case the bubble is iWhatever applications, and Apple, like the various banks and venture capital houses in the dot-bomb era, is the player skimming off the cream while the champagne is still flowing.

iPhone =/= Debian app

Posted Jun 19, 2010 4:40 UTC (Sat) by bartszyszka (guest, #67794) [Link]

I don't think your analogy to websites during the dot-com bubble works exactly. During the dot-com bubble, people gave everything away for free without a business model, running on borrowed time until the investors' money ran out. With iPhone apps, the actual customer pays for what the developer makes (with Apple taking a cut, they are a business afterall). I, as a consumer, pay $9.99 for an iPhone app and the developer gets a majority of that money and developers make real profits. That's a big deal. There are very few websites people are willing to pay even a dollar for.

iPhone =/= Debian app

Posted Jun 19, 2010 8:11 UTC (Sat) by k8to (subscriber, #15413) [Link]

Sure, but the developer paid several hundred developers this year, and so did you, to Apple. And both of you are going to pay several hundred dollars again, when the next revs comes out in another couple of years. That's a bigger deal.

iPhone =/= Debian app

Posted Jun 19, 2010 8:49 UTC (Sat) by asaz989 (subscriber, #67798) [Link]

Spot-on article. On a side note, this is what I think is behind Apple's promotion of web standards - they don't think that the iPhone-app craze is sustainable, if only because people now have non-Apple smartphones and developers will not put in that much effort for a smaller bite of the mobile market. Apple wants the iPhone to still have consumer appeal if and when sites realize that web pages should be designed for web browsers (perhaps with a touch-screen version or stylesheet), and not for any specific platform.