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Secret iPad

thinkfractional.blog

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Re: Secret iPad

#41

Post by mortenjorck »

chronogram wrote: post #15
criddell wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are some fantastic iPad apps. Procreate and GoodNotes are two of my favorites. They are also insanely inexpensive. I can't imagine making something as good as Procreate and then only charging $10 for it. If I had an idea for something complex on the iPad I would have serious reservations about developing it. You can't charge reasonable prices for software unless you do it in $0.99 chunks.

Procreate is the killer app of the Apple pencil and maybe even the iPad Pro. The pricing is indeed strange. There are people paying $999 for a tablet, $129 for the pencil, just to run a $10 app.

This is, of course, completely unsustainable. Savage Interactive has only been able to sustain this particular price point because it's presumably closely correlated to new iPad purchases. It's the most high-profile iPad visual art app, perennially promoted on the App Store, and so you can model it more or less as a tiny percentage of quarterly iPad revenue. That is a market position, in its vertical, with space for approximately one.

I don't have a solution for this problem. There has to be something in between a one-time $10 purchase and a $120 annual subscription, but Apple hasn't shown any interest in finding it.

Re: Secret iPad

#42

Post by astronautjones »

sneak wrote: post #7
_bxg1 wrote: post #5

Even now, hearing about this app I think "Wow! That's so novel and cool! ( magical , even)". I've said it before, but I dearly miss the creativity people had in the first few years of iOS. We have much better devices now; we should have better apps! I should be so desensitized by how interesting the new apps are that a skeuomorphic guitar tuner sounds banal and obvious! Instead today's apps are boring. They've been r…

It turns out you can make more money repeatedly selling $0.99 token packs for simple dot puzzle game powerups than one-time $1.99 or even $2.99 whole-app purchases. There are also more people who play silly puzzle games in waiting rooms around the world than people who play guitar. There is still tons of innovation in the App Store. It’s just on Skinner Box mechanics now.

it's also a completely hostile and unnavigable app store. the search is bad, the charts are bad, the recommendations are bad, it's obscured on purpose.

Re: Secret iPad

#43

Post by kick »

_bxg1 wrote: post #5

Even now, hearing about this app I think "Wow! That's so novel and cool! ( magical , even)". I've said it before, but I dearly miss the creativity people had in the first few years of iOS. We have much better devices now; we should have better apps! I should be so desensitized by how interesting the new apps are that a skeuomorphic guitar tuner sounds banal and obvious! Instead today's apps are boring. They've been r…

A lack of constraints mixed with a lack of real benefits.

Late-stage iPhoneOS was magical because of the constraints people were working with.

If you tell a developer, "Hey! Here's hardware with effectively no possible limits," they'll never write anything of value for it. A text editor and a way to do something you're already doing 5% faster.

If you tell a developer, "Hey! Here's hardware that's extremely slow and limited by today's standards, make something magical," they'll move the sun and stars to get you something that'll wow you.

Early-stage iOS was magical because of the new frontier offered; the constraints had mostly disappeared by then, but the ground was new and it presented what was effectively a new way to interface with the machine.

Re: Secret iPad

#44

Post by hyperpallium »

kick wrote: post #43
_bxg1 wrote: post #5

Even now, hearing about this app I think "Wow! That's so novel and cool! ( magical , even)". I've said it before, but I dearly miss the creativity people had in the first few years of iOS. We have much better devices now; we should have better apps! I should be so desensitized by how interesting the new apps are that a skeuomorphic guitar tuner sounds banal and obvious! Instead today's apps are boring. They've been r…

A lack of constraints mixed with a lack of real benefits. Late-stage iPhoneOS was magical because of the constraints people were working with. If you tell a developer, "Hey! Here's hardware with effectively no possible limits," they'll never write anything of value for it. A text editor and a way to do something you're already doing 5% faster. If you tell a developer, "Hey! Here's hardware that's extremely slow and l…

True, constraints promote creativity, the form of a sonnet or the rules of a fictional world or 8 bit graphics.

But in this particular case, they used the new strengths of the device that enabled things not possible before (removing constraints), yet thought their idea might be too much for it (hence the prototype), and their later idea was too much for it (needed a bigger screen). So their ideas didn't benefit from the constraints.

An upcoming test of your hypothesis is the PS5 100x SSD. Will it promote or stifle creativity?

The sense of the "magical" is the newness. Miracles, when commonplace, become commonplace. (Though I am still in awe at billion/sec pocket electro-computers... OTOH no one else is, it's just a cheap phone).

Re: Secret iPad

#45

Post by cageface »

scarface74 wrote: post #26
underwater wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was the argument of why an Apple controlled app store was so important. But they seem to be actively pushing people towards those high profit, user hostile, apps. There is a cohort of games that is 10x worse than anything you'd find on the web. Unskippable 30s blocks of ads every few minutes, that just promote more crappy games.

Apple introduced Apple Arcade because of the horrible state of games on the App Store.

I'm curious how well devs are doing in AA. The potential market is huge but you're also getting a tiny slice of $5/month. I see some of the same games on consoles for $20 each and up.

Re: Secret iPad

#46

Post by rchaud »

scarface74 wrote: post #39
rchaud wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gamepads have been available for the iPad since at least 2013.

We have over three decades of evidence in the console market that a game can’t be successful if it requires a non bundled accessory.

The iPad Pro doesn't come with a pen or a keyboard but that doesn't prevent them from flying off the shelves anyway.

Re: Secret iPad

#47

Post by tomc1985 »

freehunter wrote: post #31
scarface74 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So “real software” is just development software?

No. Name desktop class software you want that isn’t available on an iPad and it’s just as valid. Name a profession who can’t do their work on an iPad and it’s just as valid. I just called our development software because this is a software development forum full of software developers. Hell, why aren’t there more desktop class video games on the iPad? Not because it can’t run them, that’s for sure. The hardware is mo…

Because many of us would rather game on a PC, or a console

Re: Secret iPad

#48

Post by cageface »

mortenjorck wrote: post #41
chronogram wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Procreate is the killer app of the Apple pencil and maybe even the iPad Pro. The pricing is indeed strange. There are people paying $999 for a tablet, $129 for the pencil, just to run a $10 app.

This is, of course, completely unsustainable. Savage Interactive has only been able to sustain this particular price point because it's presumably closely correlated to new iPad purchases. It's the most high-profile iPad visual art app, perennially promoted on the App Store, and so you can model it more or less as a tiny percentage of quarterly iPad revenue. That is a market position, in its vertical, with space for…

Paid upgrades have worked well for other platforms but Apple stubbornly refuses to support this, instead trying to drive users into subscriptions they don't want.

I think it's too late now. Apple has taught an entire generation of users that mobile software is not worth paying real money for and effectively killed the ecosystem of apps they need to promote the iPad as a general purpose computing device.

Re: Secret iPad

#49

Post by connordg »

Here’s another post about a similar situation with an app which was on the first iPad’s sent to reporters:

    https://home.theodoregray.com/blog/2014/7/31/how-the-elements-came-to-be

    Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22775624

Re: Secret iPad

#50

Post by dharma1 »

rhinoceraptor wrote: post #12
freehunter wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There really is no excuse for the lack of "real" software on the iPad (using "real" as in desktop quality). Only a small amount can be blamed on the system itself, appealing to a very niche audience (like XCode). Arbitrary Javascript code written on the iPad can run, as evidenced by Play.js. Arbitrary Python code written on the iPad can run as evidenced by Pythonista. Arbitrary Swift code can run as evidenced by Swif…

There are a ton of great desktop quality apps on the iPad, I think the thing is that prosumer users don't know about them, and also people have been conditioned to think that any iOS app over $5 is expensive. As one example, the music ecosystem is really good. There's Garageband and several great 3rd party DAWs, and a ton of apps which provide audio units that you can plug into, such as Model D for synths, or Stark f…

Agreed on the music ecosystem. The only thing that gets to me is the lack of keyboard shortcuts and being able to bind any midi cc to anything. You can't use midi to start and stop recording in Garageband for instance, which is something all desktop DAWs let you configure.

LumaFusion is good but I really wish iOS supported more video codecs than two delivery codecs (h264 and h265). I mean, they own ProRes. Cmon just add support for it in iOS.

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