Back in the nineties, Microsoft threatened to stop developing Microsoft Office for the Mac. Had this come to pass, there would be no Apple today. Similarly, Apple had to go begging to Adobe to port their popular creative apps to Apple’s new platform. Their refusal to do so held back OS X for a long time and forced Apple to develop the Carbon compatibility APIs to bridge between the old and the new. Many suspect that these events have left deep scars inside Apple, and that this is why it is fixated on never being dependent on a third party software developer again.

The irony is that Apple may find itself in such a position again despite their efforts. At this week’s introduction, two companies to centre stage at the iPad Pro’s announcement; Adobe and Microsoft. The choice made sense; both companies are known for making professional software and are actively developing software for iPad. But since Apple has made it basically impossible for smaller third party developers to have any stab at making serious software for the iPad, Adobe and Microsoft are also the only ones left in the arena. Adobe can afford to play around because of their CreativeCloud subscription model and Microsoft has to be on the iPad because the only way for Microsoft Office to remain the dominant office suite, is if they are everywhere.

This puts the fate of the iPad Pro back in the hands of those who nearly killed Apple in the 90s: Adobe and Microsoft. It is almost like a Greek Tragedy; while Apple desperately tried to avoid it, it has unknowingly helped make the inevitable come to pass.

Commoditise your complements. I first encountered this phrase on Joel Spolsky’s blog. Instead of butchering the idea, I’ll quote him:

Every product in the marketplace has substitutes and complements. (…) A complement is a product that you usually buy together with another product. Gas and cars are complements. Computer hardware is a classic complement of computer operating systems. All else being equal, demand for a product increases when the prices of its complements decrease.

I know I’m not the first one to point this out, but Apple Hardware and iOS apps are another such example. Your iPad may cost $500, but look at all this great software you can get for it for next to nothing!

And Apple seems to have done well following this idea. Here’s quote from a user of the excellent iA writer app:

I guess I paid a dollar for it, maybe two or maybe it was $10; I don’t remember. But I will tell you this: Knowing what I know now, I would buy an iPad if the only application on it was yours.

Not a bad deal for Apple; persuading someone to buy a $500 piece of hardware with an on-average profit margin of 30% because of a $9 iPad app (from which they also get to keep 30%!). It’s a terrible deal for app developers though, who are forced to race to the bottom while they slowly suffocate.

There might be some hope though, as I think the strategy is backfiring on Apple in the form of the iPad. The device is not selling as well as it used to, and Apple seem to recognise this by finally putting distinctive ‘pro’ features into iOS9 that target only the iPad. It might be too little too late, but at least we can see that they recognise the problem too.

The problem is of course that anything you can do on an iPad you can also do on an iPhone - so why buy an iPad? Is the iPad, after all, just a big iPod Touch? There are fewer and fewer popular iPad-only apps, and those that are universal are often just blown up versions of their iPhone versions. I don’t blame the developers; Apple encourages universal apps but you still can’t charge decent money for your iPhone apps, so why waste time on making a really good iPad version?

I think to make the iPad a success, Apple needs the help of their third-party developers. I’m convinced that they would have loved to help Apple make the iPad a thrilling succes, if only Apple had given them room to breathe. But while developers cried for help about, for example, paid upgrades; here and here, Apple seemed to be blinded by dazzling numbers paid out to Candy Crush-like applications. But Candy Crush won’t save the iPad.

With iPad sales faltering, maybe Apple will realise it can’t build a thriving and diverse platform on its own. Just maybe, they will try to get developers back with the things we’ve been asking for all this time. After all, although Steve Jobs vowed to never have a third party like Adobe dictate Apple’s future, the simple truth is also that there would be no Apple anymore if it wasn’t for Adobe. One can dream…

I often joke that I’ll retire to the countryside and take up beekeeping when I’m done with the business of making software. The reason is, and this may sound strange coming from me, that I think I have a dislike of software.

The joke comes from the Sherlock Holmes stories where he is said to have retired to that exact same profession - something far removed from his previous preoccupation.

I have to admit that dislike nearly every app on my computer. I’ll skip over the obvious ones like iTunes, but from Mail to Calendar, to our developer tools, every piece of software I rely on is a headache one way or another. Sam Deane recently expressed the same frustration on his blog, which prompted me to write this.

Sometimes I think Sketch is exempt from such criticism. Sure, there are a ton of improvements we could make, but we’re doing well comparatively, right? Well, not so fast…

When we were in the final stages of Sketch 2.0’s development, I did some user testing with people unfamiliar with the app. A truly humbling experience, resulting in pages of feedback in just half an hour of testing. It’s the best example I can think of how familiarity blinds us to problems. We instinctively know the holes in the road and we navigate around them without conscious thought. This is something we should all keep in mind as we develop software; we risk being its worst critic as we become blind to its flaws.

Sometimes I think the beekeeping problem stems from the fact that our industry is a comparatively young. Or maybe it’s a constant thirst for something new and our willingness to ignore the lesson learned. Sometimes I think what software needs is stronger requirements and less of people doing their agile thing and using their users as test subjects. And then I remember my bank still works with MS-DOS-like terminals and I think that can’t be the answer either.

Maybe I’m just more attuned to software and therefore more easily recognise its flaws. The real world might be as flawed as this and I just don’t notice it as strongly. But because ‘Software is eating the world’ (Ironically, behind a paywall), I am somewhat concerned…

When I started as an indie developer, I did everything myself; development, design and support. Very quickly I came to realise that I should outsource icon design and web design but I kept doing everything else myself. Later on, first with Fontcase and then Sketch, I learned the real value of a designer. One who could do more than make pretty icons but make a cohesive whole out of disjointed feature ideas. The next part to be trusted into more capable (and patient) hands was customer support.

With support taken off my back, all that was left was development. I did dabble in other dark arts like marketing, but I was first and foremost a developer. Finally having had to hire more developers to help me out, I realised they were much better than me at building reliable, solid foundations for our app. If everybody was better at all the things I used to do, was I going to make myself totally redundant? But in the past two years, it has been rewarding - and at times difficult as well - to see this transition taking place; other developers doing a better job than I could have done, with what is starting to feel less and less like ‘my’ code.

The upside of this is that I’m finally lifting my head out of the code and seeing more of our business than before. Being a developer can give you wonderful sense of focus: you open your text editor of choice in the morning and you can forget everything around you, diligently working your way through your tickets.

But as a business owner, I believe it is important to be able to take a step back, and view the business in all its aspects with fresh eyes. I’m realising that every time I’ve been forced to do that, new insights have come up that are probably of more value to the company than the developer ticket I would’ve closed instead.

Leaving the comfort zone of your text editor to set up a newsletter, improve your on-boarding process or making a compelling product video might just be a better use of an indie’s time than that next minor bug or feature improvement.

(Edit: Corrected the sentence about the real value of designers to better reflect my intention)

With predictable regularity, debate has come up again on the viability of indie business in the modern App Store. Brent Simmons got the ball rolling in a post called ’Love’. What followed were more blog posts about how the App Store is rigged against us.

A comparison was made with the prototypical starving artist; if we are producing art, we have to come to terms with our poor prospects. This analogy makes us forget however that when customers buy our software, they do so because it fulfils a need, not because they’re acquiring a piece of art.* The comparison might flatter us, but it is an unhelpful one.

Which brings me back to what started this debate. Vesper famously launched with raving reviews, but as an iPhone-only app without sync in a very crowded market, it failed to succeed in the long run. Probably because it lacked features that its competitors already had. We cannot conclude it failed because the App Store is fundamentally broken.

Maybe this should teach us that superfluous polish and marketing muscle cannot make up for solid features. This is a tale that should inspire us all, not throw us in periodic fits of depression. Faced with bigger competitors we actually have a chance, when we focus on what matters.

Sometimes we fancy ourselves artists; crafting beautiful user experiences to delight our users. But in the end, people are not buying art, but software to fulfil a need they have. Therein lies our chance.

• I’m talking here about apps. Games are a whole other story.

I have a confession to make: I don’t want Apple to make an iWatch.

Ever since Apple released the iPad, the hype-oriented press has been clamouring for the next big thing. At first we were to believe Apple would conquer the living room. Suddenly the focus shifted to wearables and now we are to believe they are close to release the iWatch. Countless analysts expounded their wisdom and my podcast feed was slowly filled up with people speculating wildly about a device nobody knew anything about. And here I was, hoping nothing would happen.

I was there Gandalf, three thousand years ago, when Isildur took the ring

Well, sort of at least. As a Mac developer, I was there though when Apple introduced the iPhone, and when they took most engineers off 10.5 Leopard to finish the iPhone. I was there during years of neglect on iWork and Aperture and where every release of iPhoto seemed to be worse than the previous one. I was still there when Apple went back to the Mac with faux leather in Lion and with 10.9 had finally had grown to such a size that they could work on both Mac and iOS system updates in parallel.

Now we have Yosemite scheduled to be released together with iOS8, and amazing features like Continuity and Handoff being developed on both OSes simultaneously. And even better; iWork has been revived, Aperture and iPhoto will be killed and be replaced by a new Photos app.

So you will understand that I do not want to see an iTV or an iWatch. I really don’t want to see a third platform taking away precious engineering resources again from both the Mac and the iPad to chase the next big thing. These years may be boring to the press, but stability and solid improvements produce great platforms in the long term.

This is the Apple I love; please keep doing this for a while.

After reading about struggling Indie developers for basically all week, I should try to get something written down into more than a 140 characters. (In case you missed it, read the last week of posts on inessential.com)

I was sorry to see the disappointing sales numbers for Unread (bravely shared by the developer himself), but not altogether surprised. I had not bought the app before because Reeder does exactly what I want; it’s available on iPhone and iPad, it syncs with FeedWrangler and has never failed me.

(This is not meant as a criticism of Unread, but just what I think might have been a problem with it.)

I have tried Unread since but I haven’t found a single differentiating feature. It looks a different, yes, has a nice font and might have some neat gestures that I haven’t discovered yet, but that is my point: why would I use this over Reeder?

Now keep in mind that RSS is a relatively small niche, and if you have no idea what RSS is; good luck figuring out why you would want it. If you do know what it is and you have a competing app already installed; why would you spend $5 to try an app that looks like a different skin on basically the same app?

This goes to the heart of what I’m trying to say; differentiation by ‘design’; differentiating by skins, gestures and transitions is not enough.

A similar thing got me worked up yesterday when my friend @Jonnotie put the following thing on Instagram: “What about a dark email client?”. It reminded me of something I’ve seen a few times too often; products that are driven by superfluous design details.

I realise I’m setting up a straw man here (sorry Jonno), but simply said, I don’t give a shit about the skin of my email client. An email app is supposed to have good integration with Gmail or IMAP, help me process my emails faster, make sure I don’t forget important emails, help me keep track of threads, context, contacts, and much more. The color of the UI is of absolute indifference to me.

Doing all the essentials right is an enormous task and many apps never even make it that far. So let’s focus on that first, okay? (In the photography segment, Lightroom vs Aperture comes to mind)

When an app solves a real problem it is much easier to get people to spend money on it, even money that is by iOS standards considered crazy expensive; The example Ben Thompson shows is fascinating; in-app purchases of up to $150 and people actually buying those. The design of this app would be considered by most to be unforgivably ugly, but it solves a real need that people have. Good on them.

The unfortunate (for designers) fact of life is that most people don’t give a shit about how well something is designed. If their jobs don’t depend on it, and it works on a basic level, and its cheaper, more convenient, (or maybe even more fun); they’ll go with that (2048 anyone?). Or maybe it’s not quite as pretty but it makes them productive (Microsoft Excel?). What I mean to say is that the shape of your buttons, or the bounciness of your animations are details, not selling points.

If you’ve got no selling points, you won’t be successful. You’re running a business, not doing the adult version of playing with Lego.

I know I’m late to the entire Sparrow debate, but I do have one or two things to add that I didn’t have time to write down before.

It concerns a few things that David Barnard of AppCubby wrote in his blog post The Sparrow Problem:

Sparrow did everything right. They built an incredible email app with broad appeal and released it into the hottest software market the world has ever seen. And yet it was a financial flop.

I strongly disagree with this statement. Yes, they built a great app but no, alternative email clients do not have broad appeal - despite what us geeks may think. The default Mac and iOS mail apps are very good, and as a result almost nobody will consider switching. (Remember that development of Thunderbird was also recently discontinued.)

To really provide something that’s better than those default apps requires a lot of work and even then, you’ll still only appeal to a small fraction of the market. Yet, they only charged $10 for the Mac version and $1.99 for the iOS one.

What do you do when you’re selling a complex, but relatively niche product? Because you can’t make it up in volume you charge more. Elementary, my dear Watson. This is not what the Sparrow team did and I’m not surprised to hear now that their pricing strategy doesn’t seem to have worked out.

Later on in “The Sparrow Problem” we read:

The age of selling software to users at a fixed, one-time price is coming to an end. It’s just not sustainable at the absurdly low prices users have come to expect.

But the obvious question is; why couldn’t the Sparrow team just have charged more than this “absurdly low price”? Maybe that would have made their 5-person company more profitable.

Thing is, some ideas are just not viable products and not every good idea can be sufficiently profitable for the team that’s behind it, however disappointing that may be. Whatever Sparrow’s fate could have been, this does not mean anything for the app market at large. Just because they couldn’t turn a good profit with their $1.99 app doesn’t mean that charging a fixed price is suddenly not viable anymore. I for one make a living selling niche apps for considerably more money.

Maybe there’s just no market for an app like this. Maybe they should have charged more. One thing we do know: Lucky for them Google made a mess of their own native iOS client.

This post is about PCs in a post-PC and sandboxed world. To start it off, let’s revisit an often-repeated analogy:

I’m trying to think of a good analogy. When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks. But as people moved more towards urban centers, people started to get into cars. I think PCs are going to be like trucks. Less people will need them - Steve Jobs, at D8

Notwithstanding the fact that automobiles started out as cars, not trucks, I think he was mostly right about the future of the PC, so let’s explore this analogy a bit.

As of June 1st, Apple now requires all apps in the Mac App Store to be sandboxed. Now there are many reasons why I do not like the sandbox, but in this post I just want to discuss one of them.

A certain class of apps are now running into the rather strict limitations that Apple has set. This includes apps like TextExpander, Coda, BBEdit and Alfred, each of them the kind of pro apps that no self-respecting trucker can go without. These apps either have to cut significant features or leave the Mac App Store altogether.

I have a problem with the fundamental choice that Apple seems to make here. Why is Apple turning the Mac into a different flavour of iOS instead of embracing the fact that this platform needs apps that do more? What has Apple to gain by pushing these apps willingly out of the store? What is the purpose of a truck if it’s forbidden by law to do anything that a normal car can’t do? Depressing, isn’t it?