As Boom Lures App Creators, Tough Part Is Making a Living
ROSEDALE, Md. — Shawn and Stephanie Grimes spent much of the last two years pursuing their dream of doing research and development for Apple, the world's most successful corporation. — But they did not actually have jobs at Apple.
Context & Ripple Effects
The 2009 land-grab for space on phones set off a wave of independent app development, and three years later the economics have caught up with it: Fast Company's 2011 reporting framed App Store success as 'more casino than gold mine,' and Ars Technica's May 2012 survey found 60% or more of iOS developers failing to break even. The Wall Street Journal had already named the coming shakeout for app makers in June 2012.
The Times' profile of Shawn and Stephanie Grimes — two years spent doing research and development aimed at Apple without ever holding jobs there — puts a human face on that gap between the boom and the paycheck. It lands as syndication and developer-community chatter spread the story widely, reinforcing what the trade press has been arguing since 2011.
First-order effects
- Independent developers like the Grimeses are absorbing the cost of the boom themselves — burning savings and time pursuing App Store work whose returns, per the Ars Technica survey, leave most below breakeven.
- Apple captures the upside either way: every new creator enlarges its ecosystem and catalog at no fixed cost to the company, whether or not that creator ever earns a living.
Second-order effects
- As the lottery odds sink in, marginal indie developers are pushed toward contract work, agency employment, or multi-platform strategies rather than betting on App Store hits alone.
- Rival platforms gain a recruiting argument: a developer base squeezed by Apple's economics is one that Android and other storefronts can court with better revenue terms.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the app economy consolidates from a hobbyist gold rush into a professionalized industry of studios and agencies, with solo creators as a shrinking, subsidized-by-day-jobs fringe.
- Sustained creator poverty on closed platforms raises the political and regulatory salience of platform take rates and gatekeeper control over distribution.
The trend: The mobile app economy is moving from gold-rush lottery to professionalized market, in which only a minority of independent developers can sustain a living on any single platform.