[SwellJoe]

Do you want to be a sharecropper? Or do you want to own your own business?

I've had vaguely uncomfortable feelings about the app store concept on phones from the very beginning (and I've commented on those misgivings here on several occasions over the years, to mixed response), and I think all of the concerns I aired back then are coming to be proven to be real problems. When you sell an app via these stores, you don't have a customer...you have a sale. A customer is more valuable to a software developer than a sale by a vast amount. A few thousand customers can sustain a business indefinitely.

Customers can help you make your product better, and you can help your customer get more value out of the application (which means they'll be happy to pay you more). Customers can be rewarded for recommending your application to friends or coworkers. Customers can help support your product in your forums or support tracker. Customers can end up becoming your best employees (our first employee is someone who used our Open Source stuff for years, and was one of our first buyers when we created a commercial product; he's a true believer in what we do). A sale without that direct customer relationship is just a sale.

I have hopes that this is a temporary anomaly in an evolution toward a more open web with more direct connection between developers and users, but I don't have a very high level confidence in that outcome. But, I can encourage folks to not become sharecroppers, I guess.

About 15 years ago, there was a really common sentiment among tech industry titans that curating the web would be where money was made (which led to things like push content, and "portals", which mostly failed, or evolved), and this seems to be that same idea coming back in a new form. But, the curators are simply extracting value from developers and users without substantially improving the ecosystem...in fact, they're kinda bleeding the ecosystem dry, and enforcing a "software-as-commodity" model...it's Walmart applied to software. Which is a pretty dangerous situation, I think, for independent software developers, and probably only serves the largest corporations.

[ken]

That's a good point, but I think you're actually conflating two independent factors.

All else being equal, I wouldn't like working so that I can be shut down by another company at their whim. Nobody would.

But at the same time, I can get "customers" from App Store sales. Whether you develop your sales into customers is entirely independent of whether your work is hosted (and veto-able) by someone else.

For example, I bought an app on the App Store, and found a nasty bug in it, and so I sent an email to them. I got a personalized response, and started a dialog with the programmer. I've reported many issues and requested some features, was given a pre-release beta to test, and after a few weeks, the next release had my bug fixed. A "sharecropper" under Apple, perhaps, but earned my trust, and I'll buy from them again if I have the chance.

On the other hand, I have in the past bought software in a cardboard box from a store. The publisher wasn't under anybody's thumb, and I'm sure they were happy about this fact. But it was nearly impossible to give any feedback to them, and when I did, I never saw any of it included in any future release. Owned their own business, but made a one-time sale and definitely not a repeat customer.

[SwellJoe]

So, I agree there is some conflation going on, but it's based on the way Apple is doing business in the app store. I didn't cause the issues to become conflated, Apple did.

Given your example:

'A "sharecropper" under Apple, perhaps, but earned my trust, and I'll buy from them again if I have the chance.'

That's the problem. You won't have another chance, unless the developer makes a new product. The store doesn't allow for purchase of upgrades or renewals of service. It is a one-time purchase and the purchase price has been driven down to insanely low levels; which is fine for one-off games, but unsustainable for large applications that need ongoing maintenance, bugfixes, enhancements, etc. to provide a great customer experience.

The ideal experience for both customer and developer for complex software is often one of constantly increasing value, in exchange for fair payment. It doesn't have to be a traditional "upgrade every year" model...it can be a subscription style service, where you pay a fixed, fair, amount, and get updates every couple of months.

And, I'm definitely not campaigning for a return to boxed software in stores, as it has all the problems of the app store, plus many more. That was a tradition imposed by technical limitations. There was no good way to deliver software without boxing it up and shipping it out. That hasn't been the case for well over a decade. Nobody should be delivering software in boxes, today, as far as I'm concerned.

[delllapssuck]

"Do you want to be a sharecropper?"

Beautifully put.

Look at this way. Apple is not the first and last company to make a device that will function as a "phone". Or as an MP3 player.

How are they going to stop people from 3D printing their own cool casings? And from using free open source code that is the same or better as what Apple uses? With lawyers? It's not going to work.

For now Apple is riding high. But it won't last forever. Apple needs developers, as in the ones who do not work for Apple and can speak freely. Just like Microsoft needed developers in the 90's. They hired as many as they could and flooded the developer ecosystem with a gazillion closed API's and an easy peasy IDE. Strange as it may seem, these companies need you in order to stay competitive.