Some eye-openers for independent developers

In this episode of the Mobile App Chat podcast, Freemium economics expert Eric Seufert reveals some eye-watering statistics for independent developers. In his opinion, a paid-acquisiton campaign is pointless with a budget of $50K, while many outfits with freemium apps at the top of the charts are spending in the order of $500K/day on acquisition. Yes, you heard that right: per day! It's a good job that cases such as Flappy Bird exist to give us some glimmer of hope!

Steve Wozniak on patents

In this clip from last week's Apps World conference, Steve Wozniak expresses his views on technology patents, explaining how he encountered patent-related issues in the early days of Apple. In his opinion, it is difficult to determine "which parties are to blame" for patent wars and he sympathises with the issues that the patent system causes for small developers. I'm sure his sentiment that "sometimes it boggles my mind that it can even be patentable" will be shared by many programmers in particular...!

DRM and copyright law

Cory Doctorow has an interesting article on the Guardian Technology Blog this week exploring some of the issues with Digital Rights Management (DRM). He highlights the issue of what I see as "mission creep". Various countries, including US and Europe generally, have laws on what is generally termed "non-circumvention", making it illegal to reverse engineer and tamper with a protection system designed to uphold a copyright-holder's rights. But in practice, this law is apparently being applied to the protection of "rights" that it is not clear the copyright holder actually held in the first place. In other words, inventors of DRM systems can effectively make up laws as they go along.

On this point, it is worth remembering that the broader issue of "what rights we actually want copyright holders to have in the digital era" predates current DRM systems and laws such as the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Before the millenium, developers were already battling with issues around the legality of reverse engineering under different circumstances.

He also raises the issue that a stifling of public information on the security of DRM systems can lead to less security for end users (he cites the infamous case of Sony installing malware on users' machines which, because of how it modified the filing system, in turn made it easier for other viruses to proliferate undetected). Unfortunately, this appears to be another case of the law being misused: in principle, exceptions should be allowed to the "non-circumvention" law for the purposes of security research. Clearly, this provision isn't filtering down to the security community in practice...

A reminder that cryptography researchers are not immune from cryberattacks

A hacking incident involving Belgian cryptographer Jean-Jacques Quisquater has been widely reported in various media. Some details of the methodology behind the hack have been revealed and are a reminder that even those highly tuned into the world of security technology are (a) not immune to social engineering attacks; and (b) still subject to the limitations of standard technology such as commercial antivirus products to a large extent.

I'm personally skeptical about the opinion that a university researcher really represents a "juicy target" (as The Register puts it) for such attacks: academic research isn't generally terribly secret and anything "juicy" to an academic is precisely what they are looking to publish as widely as possible in conference presentations, working papers and journals.

However, I do like Bruce Schneier's comment that "stranger things have happened" and this is a timely reminder that nobody is immune to attack and that we should not let our antivirus software lull us into a false sense of security.

Flappy Bird: Opinions from indie developers

My current high score at Flappy Bird

The Flappy Bird game has caused quite a stir over the past couple of weeks among developers and commentators. As what is programmatically pretty much the simplest game that you could possibly write while still legitimately calling it a "game" and having a chance of it being accepted on the App Store in the first place, there has been much speculation (pure accident, good marketing or more devious tactics...?) as to how this "bedroom production" by a lone Vietnamese programmer managed to reach the number 1 spot in the App Store. To add to the rumour mill, it is now left to speculation as to why the app, reportedly earning $50K per day in advertising revenue, was suddenly pulled from the App Store by the developer. (Publicity stunt for his next game? Legal issues with Nintendo due to the alleged similarity between the game's graphics and graphics from early Mario games?)

In this clip from the Apps World conference in San Francisco last week, various indie developers give their reactions and reflect on what can be learnt from the sudden and surprising success of Flappy Bird.



P.S. If the game was making $50K/day from advertising, then my solution to "not being able to handle it" would probably be to take a flight to the beach and leave my phone off the hook for a couple of weeks rather than pulling the game from the App Store... :)

On the history of how to waste CPU cycles

If you've ever sat in front of a Windows machine thinking "stop animating the fucking dog and just tell me where the fucking file is", it turns out that operating system developers' penchant for wasting as much computing power as possible on computationally spurious activities at the expense of making useful functions instantaneous has a longer history than you might think.

Wired Magazine has recently published a talk by Steve Jobs from way back in 1980 (courtesy of the Compter History Museum archives) where, even at that time, he expressed the opinion that computers essentially had the raw processing power to meet the needs of many users' tasks and that he envisaged a future where latent processing would be spent on what we might term "user friendliness". Of course, by today's standards, he was surely setting quite a low bar in terms of the tasks that users expected to complete: on a spectrum going from "text editing on a green screen monitor" to "editing HD video in real time", people's expectations were generally towards the former end of the scale... But three decades on, it's interesting to note that much of Jobs' projections are true: a modern OS dedicates much of its code base and resources to essentially UI sugar.

What apparently wasn't envisaged by Jobs in the early 1980s (and indeed by those designing many of the fundamental communications protocols that still underly much of the Internet) was the proportion of resources that would need to be dedicated to security. How times have changed...

Playing the game dev game

For those wishing to get a flavour of what it's like battling in the computer game industry without actually developing a game, check out Game Dev Story. This mobile game gives players a flavour of hiring, firing and training developers and being subject to the whims and volatility of the console market.