interfacelab

Even though it’s a slightly old post, it just recently resurfaced on Hacker News and I feel it’s worthy of a rebuttal.

Full disclosure: I have no apps on the App Store, though I intend to push my first one in the coming months.  I do however do a lot of iPhone and iPad development, mostly for internal use by my company.

In Jonathan’s “brilliant” post, he asks his readers if they really want to give up 30% of their profits, learn Objective-C, endure approval delays and navigate code signing just to put their iPhone/iPad apps on Apple’s App Store.  He further goes on to say that you should instead develop a mobile web application instead, because it’ll work on all mobile devices and gets you around the bullet points (the 30%, the Objective-C, etc).

Great advice, if it were complete.  What he leaves out is how exactly you’d monetize that application, which as we all well know, is the conundrum of Web 2.0.

Which is the Bigger Crap Shoot?  App Store or Web?

I would actually contend that the Web is a bigger crap shoot than the App Store.  While there are a variety of ways to monetize the App Store, doing the same with a mobile web application is a far more involved task.  With the App Store, you can charge up front, you can opt for advertising, subscriptions are another path and – finally – you can even do micro-transactions within your app.  For web apps, your best option is advertising, and as big as the mobile market is, it’s still not at a tipping point where relying on advertising is going to keep you flush with green, specifically at web rates versus mobile app rates.  Upfront fee … I can’t even think of one web app that does that, though I imagine someone is working on it.  Subscription based?  That’s a hard sell unless you are doing pornography – but even that market is sagging (no pun intended).  Micro-transactions are working for Zynga, but nobody else really.

The App Store makes all of this trivial to implement and part of that 30% you pay to Apple is for all that infrastructure to support it.  Let’s imagine that you’ve decided to blaze a trail and charge an upfront fee for the use of your mobile web application.  You’ve decided to use PayPal as your merchant – right there you are paying 3-4%.  You’ve also just narrowed your market – where everyone with an iPhone and an iPad has an App Store account, not everybody has a PayPal account.  Add on top of that the effort to implement the back and forth with PayPal, the time spent with customer service, the maintenance of it all – don’t even get me started on the user experience – and, well, the 30% makes life pretty convenient.  Even more so if you are doing something subscription based.

LOL

He further goes on to state that the App Store is an out-dated business model – yet he has not spent any part of the post recommending another.  I’m not sure how $1 Billion in revenue is out-dated.  Apparently, that shit works.  When he has generated $1 Billion of revenue for himself, well shit – I’ll be the first to sign up for his classes.  Until then, can the hyperbole until you can offer up an attractive alternative.

PS. He’s an Android developer if that tells you anything.