Worrying times for iOS indie devs:

James Thomson (PCalc, DragThing):

Just got hit by very worrying threat of patent infringement lawsuit for using in-app purchase in PCalc Lite. Legal docs arrived via fedex.

To be clear, I haven’t been sued yet – I’ve been told that I am infringing their patent, they want me to license it, and I have 21 days.

Patrick McCarron:

Anyone else get a patent threat via FedEx for in-app purchase use in their iOS app? So far @jamesthomson and I got hit.

I think it’s safe to say that these won’t be isolated incidents and some fuckwit patent troll is now going after indie devs, hoping they’ll cough up money rather than risk their business. Of course, going after the enabler of in-app purchases—Apple—is a bit riskier for a troll; it’s much better to threaten guys who can’t afford to fight back.

This reminds me of when muppet ex-games dev Tim Langdell smacked down any iOS developer who had the audacity to use ‘edge’ in a game’s title. (Full story: ChaosEdge.) In that case, EA decided to use its powers for good, ‘protected’ indie devs and fought in part on their behalf (EA itself was also threatened, due to its Mirror’s Edge game, but nonetheless assisted Mobigame and others), eventually winning the day by getting Langell’s marks removed.

For IAP, another champion is needed, who will immediately state they will fight the case on everyone’s behalf. Whether that’s Apple (which would make most sense) or some other huge company with a vested interest in IAPs doesn’t matter: what matters is someone fights this, or it’s game over for a massive chunk of iOS development and its thriving indie community.

Update: The nature of this threat is, according to sources, “wide ranging”, and there’s speculation it could target more than just Apple, but any platform with content downloaded in the same manner as IAP.

Update 2: Cult of Mac claims Lodsys, LLC is the company threatening indie devs, by way of a 2003 patent. MacRumors adds that further developers are revealing that they’ve been threatened.

Update 3: Wired reports that Lodsys are also suing the Pocket God developers.

Gary Marshall over at TechRadar, echoing my thoughts on Google’s Chromebooks:

Given the choice between a netbook that runs Chrome and nothing else and a netbook that costs less, runs Windows 7 and will happily run the Chrome browser—which, so far, seems faster than the Chrome OS does—I’d go for the netbook.

And for people going, “AHA! But the Chromebook is light, quick, with solid-state storage and decent battery life, idiot-face”:

Unfortunately I’ve already dropped four hundred quid on something that boots instantly, is easy to use, delivers better battery life than a Chromebook, looks better than a Chromebook, is more portable than a Chromebook, has solid state storage like a Chromebook and that can, with the right software, take full advantage of the cloud. It’s a tablet.

This.

On the App Store, Apple initially provided two charts for whatever section you were in: top paid apps and top free apps. This was a sensible decision rather than just tallying downloads in a single chart, and ensured great paid apps didn’t get lost in the crowd.

Unfortunately, the best apps subsequently did find themselves buried—under a deluge of 59p/$0.99 specials as users grabbed only the cheapest apps, regardless of quality (bar a few exceptions). Apple’s response to this was the Top Grossing chart, listing apps and games that had made the most money, not merely those that had shifted the most units.

Initially, this chart, while oddly named for some, was actually very useful, providing a means to find the best apps. Higher-priced apps that sold well nested with the true breakout cheapo hits, and all was well in the world. But things haven’t lasted. The Brooks Review offers a quickfire post that links to Neven Mrgan’s summation: Top Grossest Apps. He says that the top-grossing apps are increasingly those that get people hooked on buying in-game currency—games like Texas Poker and Tap Zoo. There’s nothing creative here, and it’s not something that should be rewarded and yet this is entirely Apple’s fault:

Apple added in-app purchases and decided to include those when calculating apps’ earnings for the Top Grossing list. The result? The list is completely dominated by fake-money compulsion engines. The very fact that these are the top grossing apps signals just how good they are at vacuuming money out of pockets. “Games” of this sort make me embarrassed for games as a medium. You can buy a $99.99 dose of fake money in Texas Poker (with no possibility of, uh, winning any money back.) For shame.

Brooks adds:

This change really irks me since Top Grossing used to be where one could easily find excellent apps. Now it is just an extension of the Top 25 Free apps category.

I’d go further than that: the Top Grossing chart is worse than the free apps one. Often, the free apps chart is populated with great titles that are either temporarily free or that have been created by devs that aren’t concerned with making money. By comparison, the top grossing chart always has a layer of shit on the surface, which is getting thicker by the day and suffocating the great apps that once shone in this list.

Mrgan:

You will not see Apple promote these apps; they know very well what the score is. So if Apple wants the Top Grossing list to be at all useful, they’ll change how it’s calculated.

Knowing Apple, that’s a big ‘if’, even more so when you consider that the company would have to find a way to block money-churners but not penalise freemium apps where developers offer a free game but paid-for add-ons in the shape of extra levels.

iFlowReader is closing and in a candid open letter, the service blames Apple for “changing the rules in the middle of the game”.

Facebook Indie Games argues:

If you are an iOS developer then no matter how much money you’re making diversify now. If iFlowReader had put out HTML5, Flash, and Android apps while times were good they may be in a different position now. Still painful but at least sustainable.

It’d be great to have some figures to back this up across a number of app/game types. I agree that, in theory, diversification is a good thing, and—from a business standpoint—a platform-agnostic approach (even if you build specific delivery mechanisms for each platform) enables you to cast a wider net.

But all we hear about these days is that iOS device owners have been trained to buy content and so they do so, but Android owners want free, and desktop/laptop users often also moan when presented with firewalls and paid content, preferring the free route as well.

So while it’s great to argue that iFlowReader would still be in a sustainable position had it also created an Android app and an HTML5/Flash version of its offering, there’s absolutely no guarantee that’s the case, just as there’s no guarantee even the most popular iOS app and game offerings could survive if Apple saw fit to ‘force’ them off the platform.

As reported here before, Henry Blodget has argued a number of times that the iPhone is dead in the water. His main reason is that there can only be one winner in any single tech field:

Technology platform markets tend to standardize around a single dominant platform (see Windows in PCs, Facebook in social, Google in search).

Given that even the ageing iPhone 3GS is still outselling many new Android devices in the USA (All Things Digital), it’s increasingly clear (if it wasn’t before) that Blodget is talking crap.

Microsoft’s purchase of Skype has ushered in similar comments, with people calling Microsoft bonkers to splash out $8.5 billion on a service that’s clearly going to be crushed by Google at some point. But Ben Horowitz offers a different take in his article that provides background on Andreessen Horowitz’s acquisition, 18 months ago, of the service from eBay.

Many observers believed that as the world inevitably transitioned to mobile and web, Skype would be left in the dust [and we] soon faced full frontal assaults from the both Google and Apple.

These attacks were Google’s free competitor to Skype, aggressively marketed to Gmail users, and Apple’s FaceTime, heavily advertised and baked into iOS devices and Macs.

Horowitz reveals the result of these two titans attacking Skype:

Skype new users and usage growth has accelerated since Google’s launch, culminating in:

500,000 new registered users per day

170 million connected users

30 million users communicating on the Skype platform concurrently

209 billion voice and video minutes in 2010

[And] 50 million users have downloaded Skype’s iPhone product since the release of Apple’s Facetime.

But, yeah, technology platform markets tend to standardise around a single dominant platform.