A few days ago I completed an analysis of what my profit and loss looked like for both of my applications. What I discovered was very disturbing, or would be to any entrepreneur.
I have to date put around 200 hours of work into Mides and around 90 hours into CycleMetrics. So far I have made less than $2,000 total on either of them.
Part of this is my fault, I started out with something of a flawed concept with the design of Mides because I was in love with the idea of nested code, self closing tags, and closures. This ended up eating away almost all of the devices’ memory, and was so recursive as to be nearly unmaintainable.
So I killed my darlings, went in for a heavy refactoring of the code without nesting, and ended up with a pretty decent mobile IDE.
However, at what my hourly rate is at this point in my career, based on my salary plus benefits, I am as of now, with all of my original plus ongoing effort into the software, about $30,000 in the hole on Mides, and $10,800 in the hole on CycleMetrics.
When I launched my app, shortly after the app store launched, I thought that I would be able to make back my money in 2 years and get positive. It has been 2 years, and I’m nowhere near making my investment back.
This is mostly O.K. since I have an awesome job, and I’m not missing a house payment or anything, but I think it is unwise to basically give away software that you keep shelling out effort on. I can’t let it die either, that doesn’t make sense, I love the idea of programming on your mobile, and I love the idea of being able to code on the apple tablet even more.
I also hate ads, and don’t want to do the ad driven thing. So while I’m still subsidizing the hell out of Mides at $9.99, it isn’t the slap in the face that $4.99 was.
So as a result, I have decided on $9.99 for Mides. I am putting in a fair amount of work to get to the tablet in an intuitive and sane manner, I also have a bunch of features planned. Some of which have been suggested by the awesome community at getsatisfaction.com/mides, and others that fit in with my dream of Mides.
I am still not sure what I want to do about CycleMetrics, but I have some online features that should be able to drive more reveneue for me. I don’t want to go to ads, and I don’t want to lock users in or try to steal their personal info to try to make a buck on it. That just doesn’t jibe with my philosophy.
We’ll see if the market thinks Mides is worth $9.99. I still think it is worth way more, but that is because I see it as it will be, not as it is. If people don’t think it’s worth $9.99, then they will later, but I can’t promise to keep the price there as I struggle to make it my dream of a fully featured mobile development environment.
This past weekend, I was thinking more about the iPad. One of the thoughts that kept coming back was about the iPhone / Cocoa Touch development ecosystem as a platform, and how that looks in comparison to existing platforms. The conclusion that I came to was a bit disturbing to me as a developer concerning the future of application development in general.
It is somewhat useful to quickly recap the development environments of the past to contrast them to today. First we need to talk about Microsoft and what a platform meant to them. To Microsoft, the computer was a tool for technical users. Even if their said goal was to put a computer on every desk, the engineers clearly have and had difficulty putting them into the place of their users.
As the computers’ abilities increased, so did their complexity, and the complexity of the OS. Doing simple tasks like taking a piece of text from a word processing program and putting it into your spreadsheet program in DOS was mostly ridiculously complicated. Windows made things a bit easier initially, but only for the most technical users. Doing what should be mostly simple tasks were still difficult, DOS was still around and necessary to do many common tasks. The thing booted from DOS which created no end of problems. It just wasn’t an optimal solution for the mass of computer consumers out there. This was evinced by a proliferation of “computer” classes which were supposed to take the burden of designing something that was easy off of the engineers who designed the system. That it did, and they proceeded to make a system that was even more of a tangle.
For those who would say that the Macintosh is much easier, I take issue with the word “much.” In reality Unix / Linux / Mac OS X.x is not terribly easy to use. To someone who has a good understanding of the computer, and conventions it is much simpler and more straightforward to use and manage. For a technical user Apple does a fantastic job of making most things that normal people want to do easy without preventing technical users from doing complicated things, but the underlying complexity is not without its cost to the typical end user.
Now, if you were designing a platform today, for millions of people worldwide, with different levels of technical ability, the issue of computer and operating system security looming large, and the ever increasing abilities developers have to make computers do insanely complex things in the blink of an eye, how would you develop it? Would it be like Windows, putting the burden of learning, understanding, and protecting themselves on the user? Would it be like Unix / Linux, putting the burden of everything on the user, but exposing incredible levels of customization to the user?
What you would do would depend on what your goal was, but if your goal was to provide the best possible user experience, you would likely ( I know that I would ) take it upon yourself to protect your users from viruses, phishing, hacking, malware, etc… You would likely make it difficult or impossible for developers working on your platform to make choices that would negatively impact the usability of the platform. You might choose a somewhat difficult language combination for development to make a barrier to entry for developers, to make sure that the developers that did create for your platform were of a caliber such that they could actually make compelling content for your devices.
You might establish a certification board of some sort to determine if the applications being developed for your platform met your requirements for ease of use, stability, and security. You may come to the conclusion that the only way to enforce your vision of the platform and be the ultimate consumer advocate, you would have to make sure that every application went through this board before they were available on your platform. Once available for your platform, you might make the installation and configuration experience as painless as possible for the user, even if it meant imposing further complexity of implementation on the developer.
Does any of this sound familiar. When I went through, designing a platform as a consumer advocate, what I ended up with was pretty much like what Apple has for the iPhone / iPad / iPod Touch development environment. With one exception, I was actually more stringent in that I wouldn’t allow wapletts ( web application applets ) on the platform. I would require those developers to just build a web application customized for the experience.
The funniest thing, or strangest if you don’t like that colloquialism, was that designing the platform as a developer, it didn’t look anything like this, in fact, it looked much more like the development experience around Ubuntu linux. Where I ended up is that perhaps as developers, we are heaping too much responsibility on the average user trying to use the platform. I think that Apple has the right mix with the app store experience for the types of devices that are running the Cocoa Touch framework on Objective-C.
That being said. I don’t like it. However, I understand it, and the UX / UI Designer at my heart rejoices at the emergence of this paradigm, where the responsibility for security and workflow consistency are on the developer, not the user. But the programmer in me rebels at having someone tell me how to design and implement what I want on my device. Having someone lord over me as to what is an acceptable software application is irritating to say the least. I think the UX designer, and consumer advocate in me wins, and there are platforms like Mac OS X that I can work on to satisfy the programmer urges in me.
I predict, however that Apple will do away with the use of the existing Mac OS X on the MacBook,the iMac, and the MacBook Air. I think they will start running this Cocoa Touch OS with all of the restrictions and HIG guidelines as the iPhone. I think that there will be an app store for these devices, and I think that it will be the only way to install software. Seeing iWork on the iPad is the first example of the migration of Cocoa Touch to a full fledged computer operating system.
Apple will probably, keep the MacPro line and the MacBook Pro, perhaps adding an iMac Pro running Mac OS X.x in the way we have always come to expect it, and it will likely become even geekier than it already is. The most floor slapping, hilarious thing is that Apple has come full-circle to an old Microsoft idea that was right on, however, big surprise, was improperly executed.
Originally Microsoft had its Windows Professional and Home lines, they had Windows 2000 for business and Windows 98 for home users. The concept was that they wanted to have a much simpler OS for normal consumers and a much more complicated, and powerful, platform for businesses to use. Apple has slightly turned this on its head, they, in my humble opinion, want to have a platform that is an awesome one for media consumers, and general consumers, and a platform for the programmer geeks that have made Apple what it is. It is for that reason that I anticipate a iPad Pro soon after the launch of the iPad, perhaps even as soon as WWDC ‘10. The iPad Pro would likely run a Cocoa Touch OS that was less restricted, and more like Mac OS X.x.
Ultimately, I think Apple wants, and will make everyone happy, but we are at the beginning of this incredible consumer platform, and I think that for its stated goals, the App Store, the “awful policies,” et cetera, are the best possible way to get to it. However, I think for its perception among geeks, Apple needs to communicate their strategy as soon as possible. If they intend to make all of their devices like the iPod Touch, then we have a problem. However, this is extremely unlikely. I can’t wait until WWDC this year!
First off, let me say that I am an apple fanboy to the highest degree. Prior to today, there has been only one Apple device since 2001 that I have not really wanted in its original form, that product is the Apple TV. Today, there are two. In the rest of this post I’d like to explore why I feel this way.
There are bound to be many, many people who will find a tablet like the on Apple described yesterday to be wonderful. I am coming from a slightly different place, as I have a MacBook Pro, an iPhone, and a Kindle. What I was looking for was something innovative enough to replace all three, and the tablet isn’t it.
Looking at my needs for a portable computer, we can eliminate the tablet right off. It can’t run GCC, it can’t run clisp, PHP, etc… So for me as a developer it isn’t practical, as a writer, it is. Between iWork’s pages and the keyboard attachment, it will make a fantastic transportable word processing device. The biggest problem with this is that I can’t run openoffice or word. Not that I would necessarily want to, but if all of my files are in word format, and Pages mangles them, then this is a non-starter. Also, without the ability to move files easily onto and off of the device, I’m sure there will be a mobile me tie-in here, it just isn’t as flexible as my laptop, ahem… netbook.
On the smartphone front, this device is way too big to put into my pocket, doesn’t have a camera, and doesn’t support standard cellular voice. Of course I could use skype, etc… but sometimes, for as much as we complain about AT&T, it is nice to just make a regular voice call and have it not be complicated. On top of that, since it doesn’t tether to my iPhone, something that I should be able to do just in general. Instead, I have to, on top of the data plan that I already pay for for my iPhone, pay an additional $29 per month to use the internet. The 250 MB plan is a joke, as soon as I watch a few Hi-Def youtube feeds, I will have gone through it. This doesn’t replace my smartphone, iPhone. It doesn’t even really work together with my iPhone.
While the iPad, even with its unfortunate name, has a really beautiful ebook reader application. The books are way more expensive than the Kindle, and the screen is still a backlit LCD. I can read my Kindle just fine in the high-noon sun, which I do a lot. I can read my kindle with no problem at the playground with my kids. I can’t even see what is on my laptop in the sun, perhaps the iPad will be better, but it doesn’t even come close to the readability of the Kindle. It is great that the battery life on the iPad is 10 hours, I can’t look at the screen reading text for that long. So it doesn’t really replace the Kindle in its current form.
Overall, it is awesome at some things, but it doesn’t really replace what I have, is it better at browsing the web than my laptop with a 3G card? No, not really, I can use Verizon or Sprint 3G, I’m not stuck with AT&T, I have the choice to use Firefox or Google Chrome, I’m not stuck with Safari. I like Safari, but Chrome and Firefox have better features. Is it better at media, since I tend to consume a lot of audio podcasts, no it isn’t. For users like me the iPad is just what I hoped it wouldn’t be, its a big iPod touch. I already have an iPod touch and an iPhone and a laptop. There is nothing that the iPad does that would make me replace any of them, not even the iPod touch, since I can actually put that in my pocket and take it with me. There is also the neck pain that comes from looking down into your lap for 4 hours that we have all felt from playing games on the iPhone.
I don’t intend to buy the iPad, at least in its current form. I was really hoping that Apple would come in and do something super cool with gestures or something to make that form factor work, what they have done is smart in that they aren’t really challenging the other markets, they are trying to make a niche that is there own. I think the super wealthy digerati will buy this, and some people who don’t already have an iPod Touch or a Kindle, or even some people who don’t have a laptop, but most people will still spring for the $300 netbook over the iPad.
It has dawned on me though that the iPad is a megaton bomb on Google’s Chrome OS hopes. iPad Safari will be able to run all of the google apps in the same fashion that Chrome OS likely will, from an icon on screen, so to the majority of users they will be the same. Google does have one advantage, and that is its openness. Google is talking about allowing NSAPI plugins that run native code on the platform, Apple can claim that one could just write a native application, but it doesn’t allow augmenting the web browser to provide additional functionality to web applications. The lack of openness could end up biting Apple as we transition all of our desktop environment to the web.
For a few months I have been thinking about the app store. Specifically I have been thinking through all of the drama and screaming that is occurring on the internet over the rejection of a few apps, the difficulty of finding anything quality in the app store, and the impact to actual users. The conclusion that I have come to is one that is different from the conclusion to which I had figured I’d arrive before thinking deeply about it.
Basically the App Store is great for Apple, but bad for developers. OK, you may think, well that is obvious and it is, but I don’t think that it is quite as simple as that. Firstly, I think Apple has brought their brilliance for marketing physical machines, accessories, and their integrated software and applied it to third party applications. Secondly, they have created an ecosystem where sales volume is king and the primary means of competition is over price, not quality. Regarding the second point, I am certain that they did not intend to do this however, it is in fact where things are today.
To understand why volume alone in software sales does not make one rich or profitable, you have to look at the contrast between physical goods sales, and service sales in an environment similar to the app store.
Imagine that you have an area like the Akihabara district in Tokyo, Japan, where you can buy anything technology based, motherboards, cameras, MP3 players, etc… Everyone who wants to sell this stuff crams into the Akihabara district even though there are already thousands of people there selling the same exact thing. So why would you do this one might think? It is because even though you have to drop your price to compete with the others, the number of people who will come to the Akihabara looking for some electronic thing is very high, if you were to locate elsewhere, you could increase the price, but you would have fewer people coming to your store. This is less than optimal for someone selling a physical good, to understand this, you have to look at how profitability works when selling a real thing.
If I can buy 5 widgets at $2, my cost is $10, if I sell the widgets at $4, my revenue is $40, my net profit is $30, not too bad. Now lets say I move into the Akihabara, I will need 1000 widgets to accommodate all of the foot traffic, and the people who want my widgets. Because I can sell 1000 widgets, the supplier is willing to sell them to me for $0.25 each. Now I have to cut my price because I have thousands of others selling the same type of widget, so lets say I cut the price to $2.50, my cost is now $25.00, but my revenue is now $2,500, that leaves my net profit at $2,475. I am making way more money now that I am in the Akihabara, even though I am losing some business to my competitors and my per item cost is lower, my profitability is actually better.
Now, lets say we do the same thing for a service based industry like plumbing. I have a plumbing business out in the suburbs and I charge $175 / hour to fix plumbing, maybe I get 100 hours of work every month since I am out in the suburbs and I am the only one. I am making $17,500 per month, I’m doing pretty well. Now I move into the plumber’s alley in town with 50 other plumbers, well, in order to get jobs, since it is so easy for customers to shop around, I have to cut my rate to $65 / hour, and since I am around there with 50 other plumbers, there is a bit more foot traffic, but I am just one guy so when I am out on a job, I can’t collect any more work. Now I am doing 150 hours of work each month, but at $65.00, I’m only making $9,750 per month. The answer would be to hire another guy, let’s say I do that, now I can do 300 hours of work each month, but I have to pay this clown, plus the drain on my time to train him to do it my way, after his pay, I am making $45.00 / month, $13,500, not bad, but still not as good as working less and making more in the suburbs.
Software is not exactly the same, but it is similar enough that the calculus works out nearly the same. I have just seen this happen with my CycleMetrics application, which applies to a broad vertical, versus my Mides application, which applies to a very narrow vertical, and came out when there were very few items in the app store.
With software, there is a significant up-front cost of your, or if you have to hire a team, your team’s time. But for most people in the App Store, it is just you, lets say you want to build a really high quality application, it takes you about 18 months to get it all done alongside your day job. You have put about 2,000 hours into it. Typically your time is worth about $125 / hour, or at least that is the neighborhood in which an agency would price you out at as an iPhone dev in the bay area. So you have put $200,000 into this iPhone application, or if you were to do a 12 month consulting job instead ( because it would be full-time ), that is what you would have made in salary plus benefits, or salary if you are a typical contractor.
By the time you put out your app, there are 300 other applications that do the same thing, 90% of them are crapware fake web apps with a Cocoa wrapper. But in the App Store, the users can’t really tell the difference since the reviews have been gamed endlessly. You don’t do any of that stuff, you play by the rules. All of the other apps are priced at $0.99. The target you have set to recoup your initial capital investment of $200,000 is two years. You expect to sell about 100 a month average over 2 years, because your app is super awesome and you get a good pre-release review. You realize that you would have to sell your app at $84 each to make that up in 2 years. So you give up and hope for the best, you hope that Apple features you, or you hit the top 50 list. You price your app at $19.99. Apple rejects you a few times, so you have to put in another 100 hours into getting through the review process, now you are 2100 hours into it. You figure you will eat that as a sunk cost now, chalk it up as a learning experience.
You sell 15 initially because people think it is so awesome that name-the-apple-podcast reviewed it. Soon you start to notice a few bugs being reported in the comments that the Apple review has missed, and so have you. But it will take a while to get the fix to market, and so you start this process over and over again. This time it only takes 10 hours, but you have invested 2110 hours into the project, and have a 2 star rating in the App Store. Now your sales are so low that you have to drop the price to keep moving units. If you try raising your prices later, you will just not sell.
Even if all of the past time is sunk, you have future time in support and maintenance costs, even if you don’t add features. It is the plumber model, you can never be as profitable as if you are a single guy working in an area in which there is nothing else like what you offer.
Most developers don’t count their initially invested time as money, so most developers don’t see this, but time is the only truly non-renewable resource. They hear about the guy that sold 80,000 copies of x game in a month and raked in a million dollars. Of course there will be a few like this, its like winning the lottery. Apple picks a few and they do well for a time, after that however, they get pushed back into the pit with everyone else.
So, is there any way to fix it? Apple has no incentive to fix it, they, and the app consumers are the beneficiaries of the huge delta in hours invested in the iPhone apps in the app store, and the lack of profit that the devs are getting. I don’t think we should complain about it though. It is awesomely powerful to be able to reach millions of people through the app store with a tap and a search.
There are three ways for devs to acheive profitability, one is for everyone in a section to raise their prices. The overall sales volume would drop, but the profitability would increase, and everyone would make more money, not as much as if they were by themselves in the section, but more than they can make with the brute force of the quasi-free market forces in the app store.
The second way is to use the app store and your application to sell services outside of the app store, like Omni or pandora. In Omni’s case, they use OmniFocus to drive sales of their mac desktop application where they have a vertical they own, selling productivity products for Mac OS X. In Pandora’s case, they are using their application to drive affiliate link revenue as well as potentially some aggregate data mining products. Either way, the bulk of their revenue is going to come from their other business efforts, the App Store is just an adjunct to this.
The third and probably most difficult way would be to come up with a product that is so unique in its technical application that it creates a natural barrier to entry, or to create a product for a vertical that is profitable, but is so small or difficult to understand that most competitors wouldn’t bother. Examples of this would be like some sort of law research assistant with artificial intelligence that you could charge $199 for, or a notional application that would speak to industrial robots for which you could charge $30,000, but then you become acutely aware of the 30% that Apple charges. At that price point, it might make more sense to develop it for Android and offer it directly from your site, but you get the idea.
The gist of all of this is that Apple has created a wonderful retail location in the image of their physical item store, one in which they have a monopoly on impressions and can leverage economies of scale. Since economies of scale have no clear practical application to software development, the App Store should be seen as a massive lead generator for some other monetization strategy. Getting angry at Apple for being Apple is pointless, take what they have given you and use it.
The last thought that I will leave you with is that Objective-C development is fun, and researching the background of Objective-C / Cocoa from smalltalk is also fascinating. I am not for one minute suggesting that you shouldn’t develop applications for the iTunes App Store. On the contrary, I think you should, but you should develop the applications because you enjoy the process, not because you hope to recoup your investment in a number of years. You will likely not be able to recoup but a fraction of what you have invested. That is not to say that you won’t get an awesome job with someone who has figured out how to make money in the store because of that initial time investment. That is what I would be using the developer program for, to enrich and expand my programming abilities, not to try to get rich quick.
I have been getting killed in the reviews for the past couple of weeks. Probably deservedly so. I wanted to drop a brief update as to what is going on with Mides. After exploring the concept of including a PHP interpreter to debug scripts, I have decided that at this time it isn’t practical. There are too many problems and roadblocks to implementing it, not to mention that it is only palatable, performance wise, on the iPhone 3GS, which many people do not have at this time.
What I have decided to do is to work on additional features to improve the functionality of Mides as an IDE. I have some code completion features I am working on, improving the performance of the documentation searches, and adding line numbers are a few of the improvements that I have brewing for the next release of Mides.
I appreciate all of the awesome feedback, and am working to implement as much of it as I can, or at least as much as my day-job will allow.
The primary problem with my iPhone, G1, iPod Touch, etc… Is that they are too small and have too limited a battery life. What I have been hoping for, for a very long time is a single slab tablet computer, sort of like a big iPod Touch with a 3G / LTE modem, a soft keyboard, and an open set of programming APIs so that I can make whatever applications for it that I wish. Ideally it would have a dual core ARM CPU and great battery life, plus the option for a physical keyboard, well it seems that while I was hoping that Apple has done it, Always Innovating has taken matters into their own hands:
The TouchBook will run a variant of an open operating system called OpenEmbedded, a variant of something called the Angstrom Distribution, which I suppose is a distribution of the OpenEmbedded OS. Although I have only seen the you tube video:
It seems to have the right stuff to be successful. At $299 for just the touch part, or $399 for the touch part with the keyboard and second battery, the price is right. The 3D in the video appears to be sufficient to compete with the iPhone, but what it will likely come down two are a couple of things:
Are the APIs polished, or are they as disjointed as the normal Linux programming APIs
Is Apple going to do a large form factor iPod Touch
If Apple is going to do a MacBook Touch, or a MacBook Mini, even at $499 or more, that can run the current crop of iPhone apps as desktop widgets, it will make it difficult for normal people to justify buying the TouchBook over a big iPod Touch. Hax0rz, evangelists, early adopters, and general geeks like me may buy the TouchBook, but it is going to be an uphill battle for widespread customer adoption with yet another programming environment for developers to adapt their iPhone apps to.
On the other hand, if they were to make a pre-installed Android option available that was running Gnome or something, but could still run Android apps with little to no modification, in the same widget system as was described above, it could be interesting.
I respect what these guys are doing, its something I have thought of doing many times myself, and I might even spring for one if I get a little personal government bail-out money, but I just am afraid that I will crave whatever Apple makes. Even though I have switched my personal phone over to a G1 and love it, and love coding for it, I still pine after the iPhone, some things are just simpler. It really has nothing to do with the G1 hardware, while it is ugly as the offspring of sin and feces it functions adequately. Its the OS that seriously lacks polish in places, and the unavailability of any sort of desktop synchronization mechanism is difficult at times, especially since the iTunes app doesn’t always play ball when dragging large numbers of UN-DRMed files out.
I suppose Google could modify gears to allow Android to tether to some kind of web app / web management system, that would be interesting, but I see that as being in the distant future. Love it or hate it the iPhone and the iPod Touch, Cocoa Touch is just way ahead of any of its competitors. If Apple would loosen up on the app store policies, allow 3rd party libraries and scripting languages on the iPhone, I think most of the competition would disappear overnight. You’d still see the Linux guys pushing stuff for the fringe crowd, but Apple would have the consumer market locked up.
I think that the App Store situation is what is going to hurt Apple the most. I am only developing for Android because I can’t flush out my app on iPhone, not because I can’t or because its obscene, but only because Apple doesn’t allow PHP, Ruby, and Perl, which is what my application is all about. I can’t believe I am the only one who is playing by the rules and doing what Apple is making me do, develop for competing platforms. I’m sure Apple doesn’t and wouldn’t care, my application applies to only a subset of a subset of a subset of the general population, web developers, and isn’t likely to bring in a ton of money for them or me, but I do it because I love the concept of building web apps while mobile.
The TouchBook is really perfect for my application, so after the Android release, I guess I’ll be doing it again for the TouchBook. Here’s to hoping people buy it, and that Apple doesn’t announce a large iPod Touch at WWDC.
For the past few weeks I have been working on writing a PHP interpereter for Mides. As I know that I am not allowed to do it for iPhone, as it would involve downloading and executing scripting code, which is not allowed. I have only been looking at the tokenizer for the iPhone, while I have been looking at the full monty for Android.
I actually have gotten to the point where the tokenizer is passing a lot of my tests, but there is a lot of ground to cover with PHP. Tommy Carlier’s blog on writing a parser has helped tremendously. Still, even after getting the tokenizer working, I have to write an interpreter to execute the tokens. This involves implementing the many methods that PHP has built in, so it will be a while until I get that completely done.
I am pretty frustrated with Mides for iPhone, actually, I wanted it to be a full PHP implementation and editor, but until the Terms and Conditions change it isn’t worth the effort to build an entire PHP interpreter just to have the app rejected. I am still improving the iPhone version, and the next update should be a huge improvement over what is currently there. I had to remove the nesting because I need the memory for documentation search as well as the PHP tokenizer that I am working on. Overall, the next update for Mides will make it better, it will be close to what I was hoping for, but it will never be completely what I was hoping for on iPhone.
The Android version of Mides on the other hand is shaping up nicely. The Android text view supports color so I have some syntax highlighting happening which doesn’t hurt performance on the G1 too badly. The tokenizer is mostly done, and now I am designing the interpreter. Development on Android is going a lot faster since I don’t have to worry quite as much about memory leaks, although if you try you can still make them happen.
At any rate that is why there haven’t been any updates for Mides in a while, I have been working on localization, parsers, and interpreters. I am spending most of my time on the iPhone version of Mides, but it seems that I am getting farther with the Android version, go figure.
Today I as looking into using HTML 5 databases on Android and iPhone. It turns out that the Android browser doesn’t seem to support window.createDatabase at all. It may be that it does work with Gears or something, but I didn’t try it.
What I did find, when enabling the developer menu for iPhone Safari was that in the 2.2.1 firmware, a user can view the databases that are currently stored on their device in the web browser by domain and delete them.
In the detail screen, it shows you how much data is currently stored in it, and it has a max, which appears to be stuck at 5 MB. I wonder if Apple has plans to improve the mobile Safari dev environment to allow for richer web applications at some point in the future when the AppStore revenues have died off a bit.
*EDIT*
Actually I did figure out that the G1 uses gears, so I guess they are equal, but gears doesn’t seem to care too much how much space I can use. I haven’t tried the WorkerPool, or the local caching stuff, but I found another blog where the guy had an icon on his screen for a web-app.
I think for Apple to build an iPhone nano would be an indicator that the end of Apple is near. To be clear, I do not think that Apple will build any such beast. However, let’s postulate a scenario where Apple builds such a thing.
Firstly, let’s look at a picture of where the iPhone currently is. Apple has a device that for all intents and purposes is $200 that is selling at a brisk clip. Not to mention that people are snapping up applications at an even more intense rate. All of this is making Apple rich. There are several questions that occur to me when thinking about a conceptual iPhone Nano.
What does Apple have to gain from such a device
How do they account for it technically
What type of person would buy such a device, and how do they fit into Apple’s core demographic
What sort of hardware would be in the iPhone nano
Let’s talk about number one. What does Apple have to gain? If Apple were to build this mythical device, and it were to be smaller, etc… How could they build it cost effectively, their parts chain is tied up in 320 x 480, 120 dpi screens, ARM-1178J CPUs, etc… They would have to negotiate and buy a bunch of different parts. Tooling up for a different device line would be expensive right now. Then, assuming they spent the money on that. They would need a sufficiently different software stack for this device. That would cost money as well, then lets say that they pulled off the miraculous and got the iPhone nano’s manufacturer’s cost down to $299 ( which would be amazing ). Would AT&T really do another hefty subsidy, to get the cost of the device down to$99 or free when their bottom line is already hurting from the steep discounts on the iPhone 3G? The answer is no, it doesn’t make sense.
On the technical side, how do they account for an iPhone nano? Assuming that the device would have a different form factor, most applications would have to be rewritten, not necessarily for technical reasons if they used interface builder when creating their UIs, but for usability reasons. If the screen had a much greater density, it would be harder for the user to see text, etc… So developers would have to make their fonts larger and change their navigation and text entry systems if it used a click wheel. That really makes the AppStore out. This makes no sense.
Who would buy an iPhone nano that wouldn’t buy an iPhone? This is interesting. The iPhone 3G is doing well even with the income challenged segment, so who would buy the iPhone nano? Maybe kids, perhaps teenagers, but without the AppStore, what is the draw over a normal iPod? Or the iPod touch for that matter. Maybe the extremely impoverished would consider it as a stretch, but if you are that challenged for cash how would you afford any monthly plan with data attached? Does AT&T want credit challenged, cash strapped customers? Does Apple want to serve the bottom of the market, even though they don’t in any other case? No, they don’t.
Finally, what sort of hardware would be in a thing like this? Well, they could use the same chips and just underclock them, maybe they would have a smaller touch screen, but then a higher density touch screen would be more expensive, and modifying the software to fit a smaller enclosure doesn’t make sense. Perhaps the iPhone nano wouldn’t necessarily be smaller, but even then with a hardware configuration like 2 or 4 GB of RAM, the ARM CPU underclocked to like 35o MHz to control heat, maybe 64 MB of RAM, you start to have a device that is going to have a hard time with SD video, let alone the 480p stuff you can get now, so Apple would start to lose money on media sales.
Apple is not in business to lose money. The iPhone nano idea would just be a dog. If Apple did do something like this I would advise everyone to get your money out of the stock, that ship is headed down. It would indicate panic, and an irrational view of the market, as well as an abandoning of the company’s core values.
In the absence of an iPhone nano, what is the iPhone 2,1 that is appearing in the strings in the 2.2.1 firmware? Well, obviously it has been in development for quite some time since the first time the string appeared was in the 2.0 firmware. Apple is not a company that deviates from its patterns, so let’s look at the mac laptop to determine what they might do.
Apple typically will announce a technology that is at the top of their pricing structure, then as newer equipment comes out, they will drop that item down into the next tier down, until they have about 3 items. At that point the technology that used to be new will be pushed out of their product line. Right now there is one iPhone. What is likely to happen is that they are likely to release an iPhone Pro. It will probably come in 32 and 64 MB storage units, have 256 MB of DRAM, and feature an ARMv6K CPU ( ARM11 MP Core ) with 2 or 4 cores. The iPhone Pro would feature iPhone OS 3.0 which would allow full background processes that the user could kill if necessary. The pricing would probably look something like this.
iPhone 3G 16 GB – $199
iPhone Pro 32 GB ( 2-core ) – $299
iPhone Pro 64 GB ( 4-core ) – $399
I’d expect the form factor to be largely unchanged, with the same screen, shape, size and battery life. That is what makes sense, that is Apple’s style. It would then enable them to keep the high-margin, high-price item in their lineup. For Apple, the iPhone 3G is a little too cheap. It would be strange for them not to have 3 SKUs for the iPhone and the iPod Touch.
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