“The App World has been a bit of a trip” :: The Future of the Internet

“The App World has been a bit of a trip”

June 25th, 2009 | by elisabeth | Published in iphone

—By Elisabeth Oppenheimer

Marcus Watkins, over at VersatileMonkey.com, has a writeup of what it was like to develop his first BlackBerry app. (BlackBerry came out with its own app store earlier this year, but it’s been strangely reticent about advertising it. BlackBerry users have long been able to get third-party apps from individual developers’ websites or websites that aggregate apps, subject to their own corporate policies if it’s not a personal device.) It’s a great read — go check it out.

A couple things struck me about this:

—The technical side of developing has gotten infinitely better since Tim Wu’s 2007 account of mass confusion and interoperability problems, but a developer is still looking at significant tradeoffs between portability and capability.

—There are plenty of stories out there about how the iPhone can turn the hobbyist developer into a millionaire after a week of work. For most developers, though, the app and its marketing will require a lot of TLC. It doesn’t sound like Watkins has been overwhelmed by the marketing responsibilities, but he has had to become savvier about the sales side of app development. A sample of his early strategy: “I did some googling and saw MobiHand [a site that collects apps] but decided it must be less popular than Handango since I hadn’t heard of it. (Not exactly bullet proof reasoning.) So, I went with Handango for my first sales.”

Still, it’s definitely easier than marketing standalone software for a PC. In that sense, the app stores are very useful, prompting innovation from people who aren’t willing to commit to developing/marketing as a full-time job.

—Slate columnist Farhad Manjoo speculated that iPhone might crush its competition by co-opting most of the development community. If the apps available for the iPhone are much better than the apps available for other smartphones, people will stick with iPhones even if another phone has better hardware. As Manjoo points out, it would be the reverse of the situation that allowed Windows PCs to dominate.

But Watkins’ story makes me think that another platform could attract developers if the owners aggressively pursued them with great technical support, more capabilities, a favorable revenue split, help with marketing, etc. If I were in charge of Palm Pre sales, I would be thinking really hard about how to get the best developers.

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About Jonathan Zittrain

Jonathan Zittrain is Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School

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