Escalante
Image: iPhone App Store icon wall, photo by Ryan Orr.
Is there an alternative?
Yes, and i think the iPhone App Store is more important than we realise, because it’s the first big application of the Web model to a new world, in this case the mobile app world.
What Apple understand is that everyone has one key motivation, and everything else has to get out of the way. A person wants to have a computer to keep their photos? Okay, make it really easy to plug in and make everything else get out of their way. A user wants to play with apps on their phone? Okay, get rid of finding, get rid to crashing apps, get rid of installation problems, get rid of launching and saving and opening.
They take the same principle to developers. Developers just want to create apps. They’re creatives. So as much as possible, commoditise and get out of the way everything else. Distribution? The App Store. Marketing is just some screen shots and some text.
It turns out that when you commoditise fulfilment and marketing, you let the indies compete on exactly the same field as the big players, and you give full reign to the the creative passion of the developers, and you disrupt the app world just as much as the Web disrupted Big Media.
Why do i call this Apple taking the Web way? Because the Web is driven by passion. People make websites because they care about the topic or they care about their craft. Everything else that goes along with it can go hang.
Doing the same old database queries again and again? There’s Ruby on Rails. Using great fonts is tedious because it takes hours of Photoshop? Well, there’s Typekit. Need to make money? There’s Adsense. You don’t need a sales department.
The whole of the Web has been made so you can do only what makes you happy and outsource the rest. This is a great attitude! It means there’s a demand for timesaving frameworks and patterns, so they get created and that means we only have to do what we’re passionate about.