Why Publishers Don't Like Apps

http://www.technologyreview.com/business/40319/?p1=BI

by oliverdamian • 14 years ago

35 19 14 years ago

cageface3• 14 years ago

My strong intuition is that the era of apps as centers of profit themselves is going to be short lived.

People are going to get tired of the gimmicky games. Content-oriented apps are going to be easier to code as HTML5. Big companies like Facebook will probably still find value in building native UIs but the number of apps actually making money via sales in the app store is going to dwindle off.

manmal3• 14 years ago

Facebook ironically does not build real native apps, they are just beautiful HTML wrappers. FB apps are an example of user experience regressions, as they were by far snappier two years ago.

cageface3• 14 years ago

Yeah I'm aware of that but from what I hear they have native apps in the works.

Of course, if even Facebook prefers to build HTML apps what are the odds that smaller companies are going to go to the extra trouble and expense of native?

danssig3• 14 years ago

I don't know, things actually seem to be trending the opposite. Who would have thought that people would spend so much time in facebook playing games that have seemingly no point.

I also disagree that HTML5 is any easier. After over 20 years of trying, it seems unlikely that browsers are ever going to converge on any kind of standard and even if they did there will probably always be people on a bad version.

Personally, I'm betting on a world with native front ends to REST web applications.

cageface3• 14 years ago

You may not be old enough to remember this, but this isn't the first time that games have been so dominant in popular culture:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_video_game_crash...

There were several reasons for the crash, but the main cause was supersaturation of the market with hundreds of mostly low-quality games which resulted in the loss of consumer confidence.

Sound familiar?

joe_the_user• 14 years ago

Wow,

This seems like a pretty big correction to claims the wall-gardens are going to replace the Internet.

A single, free, multi-linked information space does seem inherently better than a series of print reproductions.

ralfd• 14 years ago

> But the real problem with apps was more profound. When people read news and features on electronic media, they expect stories to possess the linky-ness of the Web.

But why not simply embed a web view? I like to use the App "Alien blue" to visit reddit.com. This sites purpose is to link outside and it works fine as an app.

There is nothing wrong with apps, or even walled gardens, but the implementations of digital magazines shortly after the iPad release was a giant WTF: Glorified PDF Viewers, slow, non-hypertext-linky, non-zoomable, non-Retina-ready, crashy, 500MB - 1 Gigabyte an issue.

officialchicken• 14 years ago

You have to also "simply" embed a download/update mechanism, "simply" test various restore scenarios (Consumable vs non-consumable receipts), "simply" make sure it works in various orientations, and "simply" modify the way the entire organization works to suit Apple.

The content is also different, taking a bunch of webdevs and telling them make this work on iOS does not result in compelling content layout, design, or navigation. There are subtleties in pinch&zoom, dragging, etc. that most webdevs have not had the pleasure? of dealing with.

On top of that, UIWebView bridging js+objc is a PITA for iOS, and its a major problem for android where the 2 solutions are not even close to similar. So there is little code reuse between the viewers, and the content itself must be slightly different for the 2 platforms.

Bxstraz2• 14 years ago

Yep, sounds like 'work' and these people don't 'work'.

Bxstraz2• 14 years ago

What a troll! The problem is we have pedantic editors that do not want the text to flow fluidly. They want to control every extra dash like it is print. They need to realize that to work on landscape/portrait mode, you have to program the text to flow fluidly, you can't use 'screenshots of text'. Simple fact: the publishers are stupid.

HTML5 works the same in an App's Web View as it does in Safari, so the lies at the end of this article are particularly grating.

marcusf• 14 years ago

What most people don't realize is the massive disconnect present in any current newsroom. In one corner, there's the print staff, in another the web staff. They work in separate systems, follow different workflows and are treated like different P&L centers. Couple that with the very conservative organizations that print papers are and you have a recipe for infighting and 'Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy'-like power games.

There's currently a major push in the industry towards what's generally called the 'convergent newsroom', bringing print and web together under one roof, so you have a 'Sports' department that's in charge of sports regardless of channel. The tablet has in many ways acted as an accelerator in this process, in a roundabout way. When the tablet arrived, as the author noted, the print people relished the opportunity to find a digital way to go back to olden times. On the other hand, the web people saw it as a natural extension to the website. So massive infighting will have occurred at most newsdesks around the world. Since the print people have the most clout in most newsrooms around the globe, they generally won the initial round, which pushed the print people closer to digital. With the failure of early tablet papers (distributing massive, perfectly kerned pdf's to devices), the web people have gotten a shot at it, thus pushing the organizations closer to each other.

At the same time, the systems vendors, harrowed by the competition from open source sees the convergent newsroom as the strategy to win; None of Wordpress, Drupal etc can easily produce a website and a printed paper. The tablet has in many ways been a spearhead in getting newspapers to look at buying new systems and redesigning their organization around them, producing tablet, mobile, web and print in one system. So every enterprise sales force in the industry is out there pushing tablet systems like it's the second coming.

Newspapers aren't stupid, they're just (1) stuck in old organizational structures, (2) using software that treats different channels as silos, and (3) fraught with unionized contracts that make any change insanely difficult (some contracts stipulate that the editors can only work in specific versions of InDesign, for example). At the same time, they're very clearly on the losing end of the digital disruption as the ad buy withers away from them with nothing to replace it. No wonder they act like a deer in headlights.

tomrod• 14 years ago

I disagree, but only based on personal observation. Publishers clearly love apps--hence the reason when I go to nearly any newspaper from the NYT to small town USA news asks me to add their iPad apps.

cmoscoso• 14 years ago

tl;dr

publisher outsourced development and got garbage, puts the blame on "Apps"

lesson learned: Don't outsource your core business.

gdubs• 14 years ago

Okay, couple of things here:

1) Just about every magazine app out there, that I've tried, is shit. I was happy to pay for Wired, because I love Wired, but the app was terrible. 500MB for a mobile app, with 'interactive' features that belong on a 1990's giveaway CD-ROM from RadioShack.

2) 19% of ALL tablet and smart-phone users paying for news apps in the past 30 days is still a LOT of paying customers.

Magazines are known to throw stupid amounts of money at things, yet when presented with a new platform that could be the saving grace of their entire industry they said, "The guys who make our web banners could whip something up for us, right?"

It sounds like they're giving up without ever having really tried. And by having tried, I mean developed something that really embraces the medium and isn't just a dump from In-Design into some pre-fab 'app' engine.

Why Publishers Don't Like Apps

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