(2018-07-05) Eghbal Who Pays The Toolmakers

Nadia Eghbal: Who pays the toolmakers?

one-hour portrait of the people behind some of the App Store’s more popular apps. Watching it, I couldn’t help but compare them to the stories of open source developers, who make the tools that everybody uses to build software today.

The challenges discussed were quite similar: 1) low revenue despite high user adoption, 2) entitled users demanding free work, and 3) belief that platforms could improve the situation via better policies.

these platforms don’t have existing deep relationships with their power users, nor have they taken time to understand them.

Another recurring topic between open source and app developers is the extent to which platforms are responsible for creating the undesirable incentives and business models we see today. As one developer put it: “You could make the excuse that it’s a free market and it’s just becoming what it will, but it’s not actually a free market. It’s Apple’s App Store, and there seems to be a loss there.”

Ben Thompson’s aforementioned analysis supports this thesis, noting that productivity apps, for example, make money just fine elsewhere…via trials, paid updates, and built-in subscriptions, none of which the App Store supports.

Poor pricing models also mean that users don’t adequately value the product, which leads to the entitlement observed by both app and open source developers

the endgame for successful app developers vs. open source developers are different. Successful open source developers get “acquihired” by a company who values their reputation and skills, which has the perverse effect of making them less noisy about how to make a living off of open source. Oftentimes, they slow or stop working on the projects that made them popular in the first place.

Despite these differences, I’d consider both groups to be under the umbrella of toolmakers: people who make software that enables others to do more