by Jason Snell
The App Store disconnect
Over at iMore, Rene Ritchie fears for the future of indie apps on the App Store:
There are many niches that the indie model continues to address and address well, especially businesses and interests where time and experience are more valuable than money. Canny developers are already moving in that direction.
But there’s no going back. Not in the face of Amazon, not in the shadow of Walmart, and not to the time before the App Store. There’s only going forward.
I feel like this has been true for a while now, and it’s not so much about capricious App Store rejections or a lack of paid upgrades as it is about the maturing of the smartphone into a mass market that plays by mass-market rules. As Rene writes, it’s a victory of pop music over indie rock, unsurprising given the iTunes roots of the entire App Store infrastructure.