The Missing App Economy (2022)

EDIT: Thanks for this comment — I edited the original for clarity.

I'm talking about crypto as in Ethereum, which are designed to resist centralization. HN wrongly thinks of crypto as a financial system (which it can do, for good and bad reasons thanks to its permissionlessness), instead of a family of methods for making composable, decentralized protocols with built-in economics (blockchains).

I'm familiar with dweb, but it seems that they're just preparing to relearn the lessons of the early web (federation doesn't work; you need mechanisms to maintain Byzantine fault tolerant consensus; explicit economic incentives are required if you don't want the system to develop out-of-protocol centralizing economics; etc.).

People have been trying to make that work since the 80s.

The different interfaces don’t have the same metaphors or semantics so cross-platform UI toolkits are always restricted to worst-case lowest common denominator capabilities.

You see this outside UX too — few programs are written to pure POSIX because usually you want to do more than that core.

Well, if one is an advocate of PWAs, wrapping it in an app store app should provide an equivalently good and perhaps more user-accessible experience, no?

So my point wasn't to point at the junk apps like, say, the CVS or ATT apps which are simply a web view to a shitty website that is itself just a poorly written skimcoat over a mainframe.

I'm talking about people who put a lot of effort into the web site and then turned it into an app as well to make it easier to run. I'm saying that those provide a crummy experience in practice as well, because in practice I think the web browser experience is rarely that good for anything more than simple functionality.

> spam spamifications

As much as I dislike notifications, they're becoming a necessity in a world of decommoditized email. If I could know that my mail would actually get through when I send it to a willing recipient (as opposed to the almighty Google System Lords deciding that my mail should be dropped because their chicken entrails said it looked like spam that day) then there'd be no need to reinvent email as notifications... but here we are.

“Spam spamifications” as in, notifications?

Good luck building a competitive direct messaging client without “spam spamifications”.

PWAs aren’t ideal, but building to a single platform with different screen sizes is far more efficient and achievable for upstarts than building multiple separate apps in different languages targeting multiple platforms. Arbitrarily limiting features like “spam spamifications” just gives an arbitrary advantage to the well funded over the independent and bootstrapped.

No, because they are designed for developers and privacy nuts first, not average customers. Devices like this will never achieve a level of polish necessary for general uptake. Heck, the Moko and N900 died precisely because they were too niche to justify the price.

Social interaction can be just as much of a biological imperative as reproduction.

I bet many people would be willing to pay $500 for a FaceTime call with MrBeast. Or pay $50 to choose which makeup their vlogger tries on. Maybe even $100 for their favourite comedian to make a joke about them.

Are you a user of this particular product though?

I personally don't play video games anymore because single-player is largely an afterthought, and they no longer come in a box costing $20-50. That was my mental model of the games business, but the industry has moved on to DLCs, microtransactions, subscriptions etc. And seeing as how gaming is bigger than ever, the majority appears to have accepted the pricing changes that I did not.

Similarly, those that pay for porn have likely had to adjust to the changing realities of that industry.

Monetisation always hurts users, it’s just a matter of picking the least painful poison.

You probably don’t enjoy VPN adverts in the middle of your YouTube videos either, but people need to get paid somehow.

Most of that is already on the app store anyways, besides the parts that don't make sense (ie "video fundraisers").

> What's OnlyFan's cut of all those transactions?

Onlyfans takes 20%.

If Apple had a stripe connect like API which charged 30% then the business activities I mentioned would probably be viable, if painfully expensive.

To make social payments at present, a company would have take In App Purchases revenue into its own bank account then distribute those funds to creators. This usually requires some kind of money transfer licence depending on jurisdiction. There’d also be cost in performing KYC checks on all creators and covering another layer of currency conversion (again depending on jurisdiction).

That kind of setup is possible at the moment, but hard to sustain without adding at least another 10%+ to the fee.

And the operations side of managing chargebacks, payment timings and refunds through the IAP platform stacked on top of your own money transfer business would be very painful.

Google says OnlyFans takes 20%. However, if you look at a saas business, the general metric for a well-run business is a 50% cost ratio. That means paying 30% instead of 1-ish percent for payments is actually 60% of profits in a well-run saas business. I suspect stripping/sex work has a lower cost than engineers, marketing, CS, computers, etc.

Which goes a long way to explaining the dearth of professional tools in the app stores.

> just > 30%

30% is anything but just.

I find that people making these arguments need a villain to blame to $x million. Apple's privacy protections is an easy target for why they haven't made any of the $320 billion Apple has distributed to developers since the App Store creation.

Apple’s rules on social payments primarily affect content creators and other big tech orgs like FB/YT/TT.

Whether Apple allows adult content is a separate matter from whether Apple takes a 30% cut from bloggers and video makers who produce digital content in exchange for payment.

It's not about the technologies of distribution.

Apple's moat is the 1B users who go to the app store to search for apps. No amount of WASM is going to get developers in front of a billion qualified purchasers.

I shipped an app in the App store. Over a few years, I made mid-six-figures from it. I never once begrudged Apple their 30% because without the app store I would have made next to nothing, certainly not enough to justify building and supporting the app. What was I going to do, set up a web page and hope my SEO skills were good enough to get a small trickle of users?

I often wonder if any of the people outraged at Apple's 30% (now often 15%) cut have actually tried to market an application. That is a tiny, tiny price to pay for the upside.

> the vanity of an icon on the phone/tablet screen isn't worth forking 30% to big apple.

I think the biggest problem here is that these icons on the home screen are great retention drivers and if you go through an app store the OS creates it for you while through the browser you have to actively decide to do it. Its also funny how the iPhone initially only had web shortcuts for the screen (and arguably invented the pwa) only to immediately change course once they noticed that Apps are their moat.

Surely, the concept of a web app icon on the desktop/tablet is not a new idea to anyone here.

can you dispute subscriptions through credit cards or just the individual transaction. plus you don't know if your credit card info is just going to end up on the dark web. I think it's part of the reason people don't try new apps and stuff as much.

I’d love To hear more about this