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Comment by chubs | Hacker News Reader

Some theories:

* Lucrative FAANG jobs have hollowed out the indie dev market

* Apple's cultural push for $1 apps has made it hard to charge sustainable amounts for indie apps

* The rise of iOS has pulled ObjC (and now Swift) devs away from Mac software

* Our industry has moved towards vertical integration. Eg before we used to use Campfire for team communication, using indie apps such as Flint as clients because campfire had an api. Nowadays tech companies want to 'own' the whole shebang, eg Slack has no API and publish their own desktop client. But these big companies by nature have no appetite for making a nice native app, it's all electron so they can get x-plat feature parity.

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> * Apple's cultural push for $1 apps has made it hard to charge sustainable amounts for indie apps

I'm not going to blame Apple for that. Unless it is to have provided the App Store arena — within which developers quickly raced to the bottom on pricing.

Who can blame users though for expecting free stuff? Web browsers became free. Apple and Microsoft started bundling more and more apps with their OS's. Facebook: free, Twitter: free, etc.

I honestly don't know how indie developers make any money these days.

I'm considering trying shareware again. At least the odd check in the mail used to get pizza for the girlfriend and I on Friday nights.

But try and keep your day job too.

The race to the bottom was absolutely Apple's fault. Software distribution over the internet existed before the App Store. Even Steam existed before the App Store.

But Apple based the App Store on iTunes, where the songs were 99 cents and curation was a token effort. It took years for Apple to recognize that people needed to be able to find the good apps more than a few hours after they released onto the store.

> The race to the bottom was absolutely Apple's fault. Software distribution over the internet existed before the App Store. Even Steam existed before the App Store.

Being a developer on iOS still seems to be a better idea than Android:

> Consumer spending on the App Store reached $72.3 billion in 2020 and in the same period, it reached $38.6 billion for Google Play. While in 2019, the consumer spending on the App Store was recorded at $55.5 billion and Google Play Store’s spending stood at $29.7 billion.

* https://www.gadgetsnow.com/featured/iphone-users-vs-android-...

> According to our data set (€1 billion in mobile revenue since 2017), the average transaction on an iPhone is 26% higher than that on an Android! So even if the conversion rate on an iPhone reduced by 20%, that iPhone traffic will still be relatively more valuable than the Android alternative.

* https://www.wolfgangdigital.com/blog/battle-of-the-internet-...

>The race to the bottom was absolutely Apple's fault.

The trend had been in that direction already. The marginal cost of software is pretty close to zero so prices were always going to be squeezed towards that. It probably did accelerate the process though.

Yeah, if it wasn't the App Store, it would just be piracy.

I feel like there's a joke in there somewhere — something involving asking a developer why they dropped their software price to zero, answer: no more piracy!

For business software, for consumer software it largely didn’t or was heavily pirated. Apple introduced a purely consumer OS and got consumers used to the idea of paying for software. It didn’t last though, the larger trend was to push the price down to zero. Now users complain about apps having a subscription as if it’s the greedy developers fault that we’re in this position.

> I'm not going to blame Apple for that

I do not remember the exact moment because i watched it long ago, but in this video[0] by Pangea software about their games and history, it is mentioned that it was Steve Jobs himself that suggested the low prices. Initially they wanted to use similar prices to gameboy games.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wk_G7Qvj1Sk

My theory is that macOS's flat design made it unnecessary to use the native UI toolkit, because any fool can make equally bland gray flat buttons using CSS.

It used to be impossible to beat pixel-perfect obsessively polished Aqua UI. You just had to use native Cocoa, because everything else looked like a cheap knock-off. Now you can slap border-radius + box-shadow and your widgets will look the same or better than Apple's current confused half-iOS design.

Flat design indeed did a lot to dispel the magic of 'native' !

> Apple's cultural push for $1 apps has made it hard to charge sustainable amounts for indie apps

There are some pretty good $1 apps out there, while at the same time there are dumb apps written in electron demanding I sign up for a $10+/month subscription for the privilege of putting my 10kb text files in their cloud instead of Dropbox...

* Mobile app development is sucking the air out of the room.

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