Does anyone actually make money on the app Store? Either Desktop or Mobile?
I have a niche desktop app that I'm thinking about porting. It's probably a few weeks worth of work. The 30% cut might be tolerable if I can increase the sales.
Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile
351–360 of 724 posts
Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked 3 years as a windows phone dev and i'm sorry to say but Microsofts efforts were ... almost insultingly bad. It started with windows phone 8 and the Metro UI. Bad Idea. The UI was too far away from Android/iPhone to be easily ported and adding corporate design to it was hard as it was too different. Silverlight and XAML was okay for the time. Then came windows 8.1 and windows desktop 8 which was universally h…
The thing about the MS platforms that has always been an issue is that they change the developer APIs around all the time. Every year they come out with the latest greatest way to access a database or whatever and it really isn't that much better than what they had last year, but it still requires a rewrite.
That’s because you don’t get promoted there unless you do something new and super complicated. That’s also part of the reason why Android SDK is such a pile of garbage, the other part being they rush half baked shit to market all the time.
Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile
#353Apple was the 1st and got to dictate the terms of their walled garden. The told Adobe from day 1 to get lost with flash, but for a wall it had walls amazingly low for what had been tried in the past. And people lost their minds with excitement, except those pesky open source kids. Google looked around and said we want in but how? Get rid of the wall and let any carrier and everyone use it. All the carrier's saw they…
In just about any market, there are two to three market leaders.
- The first is the quality leader, who has the highest quality but also most expensive products. They sell low quantity but with high profit margins. (Apple)
- The second is the quantity leader, who has the lower quality but also the least expensive products. They sell with low profit margins but in high quantity. (Android)
- The last is the buy-in leader, who uses compliance or other methods of tying people to their product. It doesn't matter the quality or price point, because people are buying it for other reasons.
Traditionally, this third one was Blackberry in the mobile phone market with buy-in for enterprise. With the decline of Blackberry, it was a pretty sound strategy (at the time) to try and take that market share with Microsofts enterprise buy-in.
The problem is that Blackberry declined because the enterprise buy-in declined. Android and Apple began making it easier to access work-related functions on their platforms, and you no longer needed a separate phone to do it.
Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile
#354Earlier quoted context omitted.
Don’t forget Mozilla, Ubuntu, Nokia and Blackberry.
Plus Tizen and Jolla. Let's see what will happen with the Purism Librem 5. Obviously, they just just a very small niche player, just like the Copperhead OS guys and Silent Circle.
Both Tizen and Jolla are still around, though.
Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
I worked 3 years as a windows phone dev and i'm sorry to say but Microsofts efforts were ... almost insultingly bad. It started with windows phone 8 and the Metro UI. Bad Idea. The UI was too far away from Android/iPhone to be easily ported and adding corporate design to it was hard as it was too different. Silverlight and XAML was okay for the time. Then came windows 8.1 and windows desktop 8 which was universally h…
The thing about the MS platforms that has always been an issue is that they change the developer APIs around all the time. Every year they come out with the latest greatest way to access a database or whatever and it really isn't that much better than what they had last year, but it still requires a rewrite.
Basically "Fire and Motion" in a situation where that strategy is NOT to their advantage.
Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile
#356That's heartbreaking, they are two minutes away from singularity -a usable os that works on mobile, tablet and desktop.
It's stupid to stop now, they managed to take on the iPad with surface, I'm sure a mobile success is possible.
Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile
#357Earlier quoted context omitted.
> For more niche apps they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc I remember some of this vaguely. A friend of mine deep in the MS world was showing me some of what was going on, but this "ran promotions" - I dunno. I don't think I'm way out in "non-MS" land - I keep my finger on the pulse of a lot of tech communities. I didn't hear much about this except from a few friends…
I remember that story for tablets. Same was with Amazon Fire Phone. But i don't know how you can write off $1B... because honestly even iPod or iPhone wasn't successfully from the beginning. So they invest years for that status. Competitors make clones, release them and after two months declaring abandoning market. Totally non-sence for me!
What's so weird about... well. not weird - just stupid(?). The HP thing - the guy in charge who made those decisions left soon after, IIRC (maybe was forced out, but didn't sound like it).
You spend $1B acquiring palm for webOS, but don't want to invest any more in actually trying to market or develop developers?
They flew off the shelves at $150/bucks, even with knowing there's no support, etc. Hobbyists wanted them. Some of my friends and family wanted one. I couldn't justify $500, but could $200 (but couldn't get any at that price).
Let's say they'd sold them at a loss - let's say $149, and they were losing $50 on each one. Getting 2 million of those in people's hands in a year would have 'cost' $100m, but ... the ecosystem would have had a reason to grow, because there would have been a market to serve. Had discussions with folks who claimed "you can't do that" (for some reason, bringing "dumping" and "illegality" in to the argument). So... selling them at $150 while "going out of business" is AOK, but selling that at $150, taking a loss while trying to grow a market (and creating more long term value for the people buying them) "makes no sense" (that was one of the arguments I got from folks).
Of course, it's all academic, and I'm just armchair quarterbacking the whole thing, but few companies even have the option of strategic long term losses to seed/grow a market. I'd think the rewards would be substantial if you can pull it off, but we don't seem to have many who want to try anymore, and that lack of trying really cements the two-party system we have in mobile.
Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile
#358Windows Mobile is my favorite example of ecosystems being more valuable than individual user experiences. They came out later and really managed to hit a bright spot in between the customizability of Android and the sleekness of iOS. But without the deep app ecosystem backing them up, I'm not sure we're going to see any new players emerge in this current form factor of mobile computing. So far we've seen: - Amazon fa…
Amazon is a bit of a weird one and it's hard to really say they "failed" Their Fire phone failed, for sure, but they have had success with some of their Fire products. Fire TV is nearly as big as Chromecast & Roku, for example, all 3 of which dwarf Apple TV, and of course Kindle was a smashing success. The Fire tablet is also seeing some success. But these products don't hinge on app support, crucially, they are just…
By that logic Microsoft didn't fail because Office is still widely used.
Just because Amazon branded their phone under the same brand as their successful tablets and streaming sticks doesn't make the phone any less of a failure.
Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did everything they could... Ah, yes. $100 per app. I'm sure that's what most apps cost to produce. /s It seems like they did a few things, but never actually, you know, paid app developers to build out their ecosystem.
Hey, if you're optimizing for "number of apps on our store" I bet it worked great! Why spend $100,000 developing something one app when you could get 1000 for the same price?!
It was a slight eye opener for me as a student at the time getting near graduation. The part of the workshop going through the app submittal and approval process was actually really interesting, but when it became clear that the bigger effort was to boost app numbers in the store things felt really dirty.
Either way that experience always comes up for me whenever people talk about the low quality of apps on the Windows store.
Re: Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
Windows is extremely well sunk into the enterprise market, and neither Linux nor Mac are at all focusing sufficiently on it to displace them. Linux isn't user friendly enough, and Mac's support policy is a complete no go for enterprise.
If a Ubuntu in 2017 isn't user friendly I really don't know what that phrase is even supposed to mean.
I use Ubuntu but after spending a day trying to fix display drivers I can confirm it's not user friendly. An OS is more than just the software, but the support received from other software/hardware companies.