[timewizard]

> is years of investment.

Or just don't be greedy and have an open store ecosystem that doesn't seek to extract money from it's own developers.

> to get a lot of apps

Phones are computers. For some reason all the manufacturers decided to work very hard to hide this fact and then bury their computer under a layer of insane and incompatible SDKs. They created their own resistance to app development.

[ndiddy]

Clearly you have never actually used a WebOS device. They supported app sideloading out of the box and were easy to get root on via an officially supported method. There was an extremely popular third-party app store called Preware that offered all sorts of apps and OS tweaks.

[swagmoney1606]

When I was a little kid I "jailbroke" my palm pre, and had all kinds of cool tweaks and apps loaded. I wish I could remember the name of this funny little MS-paint style RPG... WebOS was a great OS, shame what happened to it.

[scarface_74]

People really overestimate how much people care about indy developers or how little the 15-30% commission actually makes.

Most of the popular non game apps don’t make money directly by consumers paying for them and it came out in the Epic trial that somewhere around 90% of App Store revenue comes from in app purchases from pay to win games and loot boxes.

If the money is there, companies will jump through any hoops to make software that works for the platform.

[wat10000]

That seems like a reversal of cause and effect.

Indie developers were (and to an extent still are) pretty important on computers. People made (still make) a living selling software for double-digit dollars direct to the customer, and many of them were very well known.

The App Store model provoked a race to the bottom because everything was centralized, there were rules about how your app could be purchased, and pricing went all the way down to a dollar. The old model of try-before-you-buy didn't work. People wouldn't spend $20 sight-unseen, especially when surrounded by apps with a 99 cent price tag. It's not so much that people don't care about indie developers as that indie developers had a very hard time making it in a space that didn't allow indie-friendly approaches to selling software.

No surprise that such a thing ended up in a situation where high-quality software doesn't sell, and most of the revenue comes from effectively gambling.

[scarface_74]

If every single indie developer disappeared and didn’t make software for computers - to a first approximation, no one would notice a difference.

[immibis]

This did happen and you're right, no one noticed a difference.

[timewizard]

We say all of this on top of a mountain of open source software. This isn't about market love of "indie developers." It's the basic software economy we've known and understood for decades now.

It was 30% commission for the time frame we are discussing and an investment in hardware tools and desktop software on top of all that. It used it's own proprietary system which required additional effort to adapt to and increased your workload if you wanted to release on multiple platforms.

So users don't get to use their own device unless a corporation can smell money in creating that software for them? What a valueless proposition given everything we know about the realities of open source.

You've fallen into the same trap. This is a computer. There's nothing magic about it. The lens you view this through is artificially constrained and bizarrely removed from common experience.

[scarface_74]

Yes the mountain of open source software is on the server and for developers. Regular users have never cared about open source ur being in control of thier computers.

[bluGill]

That open ecosystem needs years of investment to develop. A few people will take the risk and make a first app, but a lot will wait longer.

[timewizard]

I think you're genuinely forgetting how starved people were for phone applications when these devices first came on the market.

Developers were absolutely willing to make the investment. Billions of devices were about to come online.

[acdha]

Most of those developers were looking for revenue, though, and there’s a really wicked network effect rewarding the popular platforms. By the time the first WebOS device launched in 2009 Apple had already shipped tens of millions of iPhones and Android was growing, too. By the time decent WebOS hardware was available, there just weren’t many developers looking to target a user base at least an order of magnitude smaller – even Android struggled because not as many users were willing to actually buy software.

[swagmoney1606]

Makes me think about the VR market. Tons of hardware, very few apps. It's interesting.