Howdy, I'm MG Siegler. I’m a general partner at Google Ventures and a columnist for TechCrunch. This is where I collect things.
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Showing 4 posts tagged developers
A great run by a good friend. Ryan probably had one of the most under-appreciated roles in the startup ecosystem these past few years: managing developer relationships and expectations for a company constantly shifting their feelings on those relationships.
Speaking of the Goldman conference this morning, there was another nugget of information. Matthew Panzarino of The Next Web:
Apple CEO Tim Cook today announced that Apple had paid out $8B to developers, a number that displays an increase of $1B since the last time numbers were announced on January 13th. That displays a massive increase in acceleration for developer payouts.
That’s an insane increase in such a short amount of time. I wonder why.
Has Google ever announced this number for Android? It seems like a smart metric to play up if you want developers to focus on your platform…
Even as unemployment remained stubbornly high and the economy struggled to emerge from the recession’s shadow, the ranks of computer software engineers, including app writers, increased nearly 8 percent in 2010 to more than a million, according to the latest available government data for that category. These software engineers now outnumber farmers and have almost caught up with lawyers.
Amazon has been testing in-app purchases for a bit, but Kim-Mai Cutler picked up on the most interesting aspect of this — developers getting full price control:
So why do in-app purchases get a special exception?
Because in-game economies are very painstakingly designed and calibrated to make sure there is an even balance between currency sources and sinks. Developers have to make sure a user’s progression through a game seems natural and addictive at the same time.
Amazon’s commandeering of Android for their own with the Kindle Fire has gone very well except for their bad choice to insist on the option to set app prices. I get it — Amazon has thrived by undercutting prices, why should this be different? — but all it has really done is piss off developers.
With the in-app aspect, it looks like Amazon is wising up.
