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Posted by satis
Jul 23, 2018 at 07:49 PM

Luhmann wrote:
> Several people suggested that the desktop-first development strategy is
>realistic. I suppose a lot depends on whether the developer is doing
>this to make a living or just as a labor of love. If the latter, I wish
>them the best of luck. If it is a business, however, I’m not sure I
>understand. There are a couple of problems.

Steve Jobs correctly diagnosed years ago what was happening in the market, though he met a lot of resistance. In 2010 he gave his then-provocative ‘trucks vs cars’ speech at the D8 conference, saying, “When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks, because that’s what you needed on the farm. But as vehicles started to be used in the urban centers, cars got more popular. Innovations like automatic transmission and power steering and things that you didn’t care about in a truck as much started to become paramount in cars. … PCs are going to be like trucks. They’re still going to be around, they’re still going to have a lot of value, but they’re going to be used by one out of X people.”

And then around three years later tablets outsold notebooks in the US. (Albeit most of them used for consumption.)

And even then, in 2013 more of the (poorer) world found itself doing more of its computing (and banking, and buying/selling crops, etc) with a phone than a proper computer. Cheaper yet moderately capable mobile devices simply leapfrogged sales and use of desktop machines and took hold.

Since 2007 sales of PCs had been flat at an average of around 350m/year, though it’s been shrinking: global 2016 and 2017 shipments each totaled around 260 million shipments, while more than that many smartphones were sold in the Xmas quarters *alone*. According to IDC around 1.5 billion smartphones were shipped in 2017, which doesn’t of course even count the number of phones still in use but purchased prior to 2017. (Doesn’t count global tablet of 175m-200m/year either, for that matter).

Software sales are interesting. There’s rampant pirating in Windows and Android sideloading (and to a lesser extent, Mac). And while Google’s Play Store has now reached 36 billion downloads in the first half of 2018 in comparison to the 15 billion downloads for Apple’s App Store, Apple owners spent $22.6bn on applications in the first half of 2018, almost double that of Android users ($11.8bn collectively across the Play Store, Amazon’s App Store and alternatives offered on the platform). Regardless of who’s buying or stealing, $34 billion in app mobile sales in this year’s first six months alone tells an important story to developers about where their customers are, or could be, or are going.
(The one caveat for business and productivity software developers is that for 2017 and 2018 around 80% of that revenue is from games.)
All computer and phone makers have understood these trends. I think one way Apple is acknowledging reality (and helping support its macOS ‘trucks’) has been by working on easily porting iOS apps to Mac hardware by melding iOS app frameworks to next year’s macOS foundation (as opposed to using an emulator). This is going to open a floodgate of opportunity to the vastly larger iOS dev crowd to sell Mac apps, as well as help rejuvenate the Mac App Store.

I think what this will also mean is that - *assuming* the framework offers sufficient Mac hooks, looks and power - many existing cross-platform Mac/iOS apps will find it more cost-effective and less programming-intensive to rationalise their code base with an iOS base and eliminate the Mac-only versions.