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March 07, 2008
Appdev business models
Appdev business models: Last week Adobe AIR shipped. The learning cost for code is zero, if you know Flash or Ajax. The audience size is vast, currently any Mac or PC. The distribution process is open: if you have a website, you can deliver an app. The distribution costs are zero -- Adobe doesn't charge anyone for employing the Adobe Integrated Runtime. Yesterday Apple released business details about developing applications for their iPhone -- as the linked Macworld article shows, production, distribution, and return are all quite different than the AIR model. The Apple Store does offer a nice automatic transaction mechanism, though. It seems possible to be successful in either, but the more open approach seems a little more fun. Last week, this week, two dramatically different business models, for delivering applications to audiences.
NB: I'll summarily delete comments here on Flash/iPhone or variants, because they're off-topic to the observation on how business models can vary so greatly, and because I don't want to be victimized by adbloggers again. Comments here are only about developmental considerations, thanks.
Posted by JohnDowdell at March 7, 2008 12:29 PM
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There is an additional non-secondary difference between the two models: one targets desktop (Air) and one targets mobile space (Apple). [jd sez: Yes, there are also type differences, but the post looks at cost differences.] Both offers free development tools: in case of Apple you need a Mac to use the tools which are extremely sophisticated. In case of AIR you can use either Mac or Windows, the basic tools are apparently free, but any serious usage requires Flash CS3 and/or Flex, which are not free. Apple enforce the usage of a 99$ certificate in order to sign the application; a common system in the mobile space to ensure publisher identity, cheaper than the 200$ of Symbian plus the 20$ for each signing. AIR do not require signed apps, but again if you want to avoid that potential users are shown with a dialog about "untrusted app", you have to shell out some $$$ even here. Regards the distribution, it is true that if you have a web site you can stick your AIR badge over there and people download without additional costs, however users would not land automatically on your web page by magic, you have to promote your product and make sure people get the right URL to download, provide payment clearance if the app is not free and so on, all this costs money. Mobile space is different: people rarely hunt for applications (one of the recent research estimates 1.3 application installed per mobile users) so a central point of distribution that also take care of handling credit card clearance, pushing and notifying about updates and allows users to buy applications right (if they are not free) from the device sounds pretty good to me. Other distributors in the mobile space charges up to 65% of the sales price for the service, so the 30% charged by Apple is not that bad. Another thing you have to consider is that iPhone applications can install right into the device without having to install any other VM, while AIR requires the runtime to be installed beforehand; the badge does the right job, but we still don’t know the reactions of people when they are notified that in order to use a certain app they have to accept the installation of another piece of software in advance.
Posted by: Emanuele Cipolloni at March 7, 2008 05:52 PM