Posts by Relwal

Apple 'greed' tax spreads beyond music, movies, magazines

Jury is still out.

The jury is still out with In-App-Purchase as a content market. Customers were pretty much luke warm with the newspapers and magazine apps (Conde Nast, Sports Illustrated etc.) which presaged the new subscription content rules.

Porn and pirates hide Android's money maker

Google should say no to Android Market curation!

Google promotion of apps on the Android Market would be a two edged sword. With hundreds of thousands of apps it becomes a lottery. Developers on the Apple App Store have discovered that the only apps that do well are those that are magically selected to be featured by Apple on the App Store. Apple calls this kingmaker function "curation." (Track every App Store success story and you will find they ALL ultimately lead back to the app being featured by Apple.)

Now some developers might prefer a lottery to the mosh pit that is the current Android Market. But the problem is that curation model is derived from the hit-oriented music business, and as such app distribution is characterized by a very strong power curve, with the vast majority of downloads going to a small number of "hits" and the vast majority of apps not getting enough downloads to make and money let alone cover their fixed expenses. In other words there is no "long tail" on Apple's App Store.

Apple and iPhone users have benefited from the constant string of distractions that the Apple App Store model pumps out, but ultimately it is counterproductive for development of deeper and richer apps.

Hopefully Google with all their experience and insight into search has better ideas for what is essentially a SEO problem.

Apple app police anoint un-Flash code translation

Adobe DID release the iPhone packager

Adobe did release the iPhone packager. It's part of Flash Pro CS5. It works great. You just might not be able to get your apps approved, but I don't know what people are actually experiencing if they submit Flash Packager apps.

A very similar toolchain is one of several options available to support Flash's Air for Android which is currently in Beta. One major difference is that the AIR runtime is shared among AIR apps on Android.