Who pays for software development?
The iPhone App Store’s success is commonly taken for granted today, but it follows many years of failed attempts to successfully sell mobile software. Efforts by Palm, Microsoft, and Symbian to encourage the development of third party software for their mobile platforms, much like Apple’s early 90s attempt to market the original Newton MessagePad, largely just copied the desktop PC software model of letting developers ship retail boxes of software on their own. The result was less successful than the PC desktop, with generally poor quality and often unfinished software titles available at only relatively high prices. The reason: most consumers don’t recognize the value of software, whether the “software” is code, music, or video. This has resulted in a combination of widespread piracy and higher software prices designed to make the honest minority pay to fund development efforts. This problem has been particularly bad for mobile devices, where simpler software titles can rarely fetch a
