Gone are the days when individual developers or small companies used to make mobile apps, no one was really interested into mobile app system. And it all changed with iPhone App Store. People started thinking seriously about mobile apps as a business.
Still when iPhone App Store was just released very few developers and small companies were into the serious app making business. Small companies got good stardom, users and money making opportunity with it. Whats good about these indi developers and small organizations that they did not get stardom by selling apps, they got that stardom by selling those ideas that no other developers got or dared to implement. I remember when it had just started, apps like iBeer captured market very quickly and is still one of the most downloaded apps on mobiles. This lead to a huge wave of such mobile apps, but those were just replicas of what these guys implemented and copied apps just do not have that taste and originality. These few developers really did love what they did.
Now with that kind of tide in the mobile app market its not surprising that big shot service provider companies entered the platform, It wasn’t possible for these B-dudes to just ignore this kind of business opportunity. So most of the service based companies entered the field which was created by many indi developers with their creativity and love for the platform. Now this is where the problem lies.
Most Service Based Companies (SBC) Have No Taste
Service based companies provide services to the clients which actually wants to make mobile apps. Now these service based companies have brain for writing the code for the application. Clients have content to share. What about the taste and idea? SBCs have tight schedule for each app, so thinking out of the box is strictly prohibited at places like these and clients have no clue about standards and technical information required to make these apps. SBCs have designers, developers, they have all that needs to convert the app from “working app” to “gorgeous app”, but that conversion doesn’t really take place. Basically people who don’t know, want to make apps and people who know don’t really care about that.
It Doesn’t Help Developers Improve Skill Sets
Clients want their content to reach as many number of customers as it can. They do not care about the app, their primary concern is not the app but the content. So developers are forced to use older and outdated SDK version and support it.
eg. Still many SBCs keep the lowest deployment version as iOS 3.0, right now we have iOS 4.3.1 in the market.
As they are asked by client to do this ( clients too get scared of not reaching customers due to this), SBCs do not really have any say in this thing, or they don’t really care. So using new SDKs is again not advised because then the app would have the higher base version. This is not good for developers who work in these SBCs. They don’t really get to work on newest wonders added to the fresh versions of SDKs.
eg. NSRegularExpression from iOS 4.0 is not used, instead old third party code for regular expressions is added happily to the code (which btw has few potential leaks in the code).
No Happy Users and Harm to Platform
As a result of this, users like us don’t get to see apps which are truly amazing, which does more than just providing content, which makes users feel delightful. People want to see that added value into the apps, they want to see something new everyday(legitimate way), If they don’t see that extra thing into the apps for long time, Its the time when people start thinking about different platforms. This is really harmful for the whole platform.
People and developers working in these big shot companies should think about this. Apple WWDC contains very interesting session where presenter talks about how to go about app development, how to decide which app falls into which category, say Entertainment, Utility, Serious apps, this session also mentions the points that need to be consider while making different kind of applications. Consider that as a real challenge, making the app delightful while keeping it restricted to HIG provided.
