On Apr 17, 1:38 pm, Fabrizio Giudici <[email protected]> wrote: > On 4/15/10 21:41 , Karsten Silz wrote:> ur JME app across all carriers in all > supported languages, you > > needed 10,000 different versions of your app. It took a powerful > > and stubborn/arrogant company (Apple) to change all that. > > Well, "to change all that" means to try to impose a single platform. > Paraphrasing you, I'd say it's a success for Apple making money, not > for developers.
Come on, Fabrizio, you can do better than that - two sentences, three mistakes. First one: "single platform" != "iPhone". Android is a platform, too, and it's not the single vendor one like Apple. And they have their own app store, which may even be the only content Google sells centrally for Android (unlike music, books or videos). Carriers hate that because they want to sell their own content or at least get a cut, but Apple's success forced them to accept a central Google app store. And even if you hate Apple, you have to admit that the app store was the first time in history that anybody with a Mac could write apps for a computing platform and distribute/sell them easily to tens of millions of customers, leveling the playing field between "the little guy" and the big software companies as much as possible. After two years (June 2010), there'll be probably 200,000 apps in the app store or more; this is just mind-blowing. Second one: Only Apple makes money selling apps, not developers. Do I really need to wave stories like this iPhone game company making $1 million monthly in front of you (Dec 2009: http://theappleblog.com/2009/12/22/tap-tap-revenge-developer-makes-1m-per-month/)? Or this one about a Sun guy who made $250,000 in two weeks with a game that took him six weeks to write in his spare time (Jan 2009, back in the app store gold rush days: http://ethannicholas.com/blog1/2009/01/16/why-im-leaving-sun/)? Do you really think that after nearly two years, all these commercial developers would still develop for the iPhone if they didn't make money? And Apple doesn't make much money selling apps - they run the entire iTunes store "just above break-even", which still could mean a hundred million dollars on the $631 million revenue the made in Q4/09. However, selling apps is the most expensive part of the shop (approval procedure & testing), and a lot of apps are free meaning no revenue to Apple; it's much more profitable to sell music or movies. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
