Something that’s cropped up in my Twitter feed a lot recently is the assignment of gender to items for purchase, notably magazines and children’s toys. I’m largely against this practice, and responses to that stance have roughly fallen into one of four categories: I’ve got a daughter, this seriously pisses me off, and I agree with you; I just agree with you anyway; I disagree and assigning items by gender in stores is necessary; it doesn’t matter and you are an idiot-face who should get a life.

I’d like to address the last two of those points. I strongly believe gender stereotyping does matter, because it leads to a prescriptive society, one where we’re conditioning both children and adults regarding what’s “not for you”. From a young age, we see a sea of pink for girls and blue for boys; girls are presented with saccharine kitchen equipment made from plastic, whereas boys are offered science kits. As for adults, I today saw a photo from Tesco that faced the following magazines in a section indented for men: The Economist; Private Eye; New Scientist. I’ve seen similar myself in a number of stores (and not just Tesco, although it’s a common offender, even in stores with plenty of shelf space), with the women’s section mostly including things to do with fashion, houses and gardens.

As noted, this kind of behaviour impacts on society, by aligning genders with certain tasks and expectations. The result leads to terribly sad stories: a girl who says she wishes she was a boy, so she could one day go into space; a designer recounting how when she visited a local school, none of the girls had considered going into a technical career, because it just hadn’t occurred to them—it was something boys did.

In stores, we should place more emphasis on listing by category and eliminate listing by gender unless absolutely necessary; the counterpoint I’ve heard to that from several parties is item assignment by gender is frequently necessary and, indeed, in direct response to consumer demands. I’d argue it’s in response to consumer habits, which isn’t quite the same thing, and habits are sometimes there to be broken. Sexism still exists in advertising, but not to the extent it once did (“Christmas morning, she’ll be happier with a Hoover”—without irony), and yet consumers still accept (and claim to want) an immediate gender split when searching for certain products, both in stores and online.

Offline, such categorisation makes little sense and also doesn’t expose someone to a full range. With toys, splitting your audience immediately by gender not only restricts said gender to whatever the seller has deemed appropriate for them, but also essentially eradicates happy accidents, where someone might pick something they’d not previously considered, but perhaps within a category that they enjoy. (For example, games and kits are often split by gender, regardless of whether a girl would, say, actually prefer something on a stereotypically male pursuit like football, or a boy would enjoy making jewellery.) With magazines for adults, such a split seems insulting rather than merely ill-considered, with the possible exception of magazines specifically targeted at a single gender—most style/fashion magazines, for example, although those could just as easily be grouped under that category.

Online, things are trickier, because you can’t just turn your head and see a large selection of products that are available—you instead have to start filtering immediately. With toys, most people would consider whether they’re shopping for a boy or a girl and immediately filter based on that. Online stores therefore cater for this, categorising toys accordingly, in order to maximise sales.

There’s an obvious point that people should really gift-search for a child based on the things that child enjoys rather than specifically aiming at its gender, but the biggest offender here remains assumptive categorisation—the aforementioned ‘pink plastic kitchen for girls’ and ‘science kit for boys’. Stores should by all means attempt to make recommendations by gender (or list top toys for boys/girls, based on actual sales figures) if they feel they’ve no option, but they should also take far more care to categorise items as appropriate for boys and girls. At least then, the result is a wider range for all children. This in combination with gender-based lists is imperfect, but it at least moves things on from the equivalent of a default barely different from those vintage sexist adverts and towards something more befitting of a modern and open society where children have equal opportunities, rather than being shoe-horned into whether they’re ‘pink’ or ‘blue’.

Further reading:

• Let Toys Be Toys campaign
• Gender Agenda, by Laura Kirsop
• Boys will be boys, by Christopher Phin
• How parents are battling sexism in toy shops (Independent, May 2013)
• Tesco keeps chemistry set as a boys’ toy despite protests (Independent, May 2013)
• At Boots, science is for boys and pink princess toys are for girls(Guardian, May 2013)
• Hamleys’ baby steps towards gender equality (Guardian, December 2011)

Freemium, free-to-play and IAP are now entrenched in gaming for the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. But is that a bad thing, or has the system just been too often abused? I ask developers whether micro- (and not-so-micro-) transactions are the future of the industry, and how that will affect the games that are made

Freemium iOS gaming is rarely far from the headlines. Recently, EA transformed console-like Real Racing from fixed-fee to freemium, irking long-time fans—the third entry in the series is packed with in-app purchases (IAP) to speed up enforced time-outs for car repairs. Things are no rosier in casual gaming, with newspapers regularly reporting on children getting hold of an iPad and blowing months of their parents wages on virtual in-game currency.

The Simpsons: Tapped Out made headlines after a child burned through thousands of disposable ‘boatload of donuts’ IAPs, each costing £69.99.

But with the App Store’s top-grossing chart dominated by free-to-play titles, is it any wonder developers find this payment model enticing? “Perhaps it would be a healthier world for game developers if the minimum price of all games was a fiver, but that world doesn’t exist and it’s pointless to pretend it does,” mulls Ste Pickford (Zee-3—Magnetic Billiards, Naked War). Like others, Pickford believes digital distribution led to an “inevitable” drift towards a purchase price of zero; he suggests developers “get on with working out how to make good games—and a living—within this landscape, rather than clinging to old business models”.

Those already immersed argue freemium can bring benefits. Bob Koon (Binary Hammer—ChuChu Rocket!) sees it as a way to combine a trial and full app: “This means the developer only has a single version to manage.” Richard Perrin (Locked Door Puzzle—Kairo) says it “removes the hurdle of getting someone to try your game,” which Erick Garayblas (Kuyi Mobile—Streetfood Tycoon) adds is particularly important when the App Store doesn’t allow demos of paid apps.

Drawing in more players is key. “If you’re not free, you’re competing against free, which is becoming a de-facto standard,” argues Stephen Morris (Greenfly Studios—Drop That Candy). “End users have a very binary choice: a small outlay or free—and we know how fickle users can be! But given the opportunity to try a game for free, they might be willing to reciprocate generosity down the line.”

This is an aspect of freemium that chimes with Pickford: “At its best, freemium contains the ability to allow your biggest fans to spend more money on a game they’re really enjoying than otherwise, and that can incentivise developers to make better games”. Tracey McGarrigan (Amuzo Games—LEGO Hero Factory) thinks similarly. She says Amuzo frequently has new ideas for existing games but no budget for implementation: “But a freemium title enables continual investment. Those who love it and want more can pay. We can add new content and optimise the game, meaning old and new players alike get a better experience.”

Pickford notes there are subtler benefits, too, not least eradicating the “worst aspect of console game development—the constant pressure for better visuals over gameplay”. He explains console games are often optimised to look fantastic in screen grabs and promotional videos, to justify a big-ticket entry price; but freemium games have to hook you with gameplay, which Pickford hopes will result in “developers focusing on engaging game mechanics rather than spectacular set pieces”. That said, he is concerned genres that can’t be smashed into a freemium model might disappear, and Dan Gray (ustwo—Whale Trail) admits freemium has forced changes to how games are designed: “We’re more competitive for a user’s attention in the opening stages—there aren’t slow-burn build-ups to later rewards, because there’s no up-front cost that will commit someone to seeing it through. Instead, freemium games offer bursts of player rewards that fit into spare moments.”

Freemium, though, also has a dark side. “I think in theory freemium can be done well, but it hasn’t been implemented well yet,” asserts Rami Ismail (Vlambeer—Super Crate Box, Ridiculous Fishing). The problem, he says, is for the IAP model to be viable, you need to attract as many people as possible, constantly nudging them towards purchases that have no maximum. One might argue developers should simply be more ethical, but Ismail draws attention to Gasketball: “It was a fun multiplayer game that tried to implement IAP in a non-evil way, with a low maximum spend, and the game wasn’t limited or rebalanced to force you to choose between ‘proper’ gameplay and not spending.” The game was downloaded hundreds of thousands of times but made barely any money. “They weren’t being evil enough,” proffers Ismail.

Gasketball tried to implement IAP in a non-evil way. Despite many downloads, it was a commercial flop. The problem: not being evil enough.

Punch Quest was a similar story: highly regarded and playable, and seemingly popular, but not profitable—to the point the game later ended up with a small price tag for a while in an attempt to recoup costs. More often, though, you hear about, as Ismail puts it, games specifically designed to be “less fun unless you pay, but just addictive enough that you want to play”. Money and research is poured into analytics, metrics, monetisation and behavioural targeting. “The difficulty for me is you’re then no longer designing the most engaging experience for a player, and are instead designing mechanics around getting people to drop money as often as possible,” says Perrin, who likens this system to the gambling industry. “Those games exploit addictive tendencies, while others aren’t so much pay-to-win or even pay-to-play but pay-to-not-play, with timers and resources you can buy your way out of, making the game shorter. What does it say about your game if people are paying to play less of it?”

The common conclusion is there’s potential in freemium, but it’s too often abused. Those we spoke to were especially critical of its use in children’s games. “Targeting kids—who might not appreciate the value of money—with £69.99 consumable IAP isn’t right,” asserts Pickford. Gray agrees: “I’m an advocate of a ‘dad mode’, basically ‘give me everything now’ for a reasonable fee! This should be an amount morally fair for your user and it’s certainly not £69.99! There’s a sweet spot where everyone wins.”

But with the industry often aiming for greed, the risks are great. McGarrigan hopes the industry will start taking IAP responsibility seriously and look into the issue in greater depth. Otherwise, she thinks there’s a danger of a “noticeable percentage of the prospective audience disabling IAP on family devices”. Others are more pessimistic: Perrin believes “sooner or later there’s going to be an incident so egregious that questions will be asked whether these games need regulation like the gambling industry has”. Without a shift in attitude from the industry as a whole, Kris Jones (Thunder Game Works—Trenches 2) warns “companies will be seen as predators and its gamers as victims,” and if mainstream companies—such as EA—are considered culpable, “the entire industry will be scrutinised”. Without change, Pickford adds the industry will end up “alienating gamers with inappropriate, anti-consumer monetisation”.

In turning Real Racing from premium to freemium and adding timers for car repairs (which can of course be skipped using real cash), EA alienated many iOS gamers.

So what’s the solution? Jones posits more companies could follow the lead of a game he worked on, Trenches 2; that title enables players to earn all unlockables without spending, and has reasonably priced IAP for those who don’t want to commit too much time to playing. As good examples of freemium, others cite Temple Run 2, which lacks artificial timers and again provides a basic grind/pay alternative, and fantasy board-game Hero Academy, which has no barriers at all and instead charges for new teams and player customisation. As Jones puts it: “If I want to spend £5 on a virtual car, let me—just don’t make me spend another fiver to fill up its gas tank and rotate its tires!”

For Morris, the key is for developers to recognise gamers are often buying experiences and feelings rather than content: “You don’t buy a Santa hat because it’s a hat, but to celebrate. If we can supply such experiences in an ethical manner, we’ll capture the best parts of what a freemium title can be.” Gray, though, thinks the solution is simpler, in being all about balance: “I’ve spent tons of money on certain freemium games, not because they’re ‘grindfests’ but because they’re good enough to spend money on. Make a game enticing enough and people will pay. Garner trust in your users by offering value and development in the free content, so trust is returned in the purchase of great new content.”

Garayblas agrees: “The focus should be on the product itself, its main essence and providing a great experience to the end user. Nail those aspects and money will come along easily.” And Perrin notes that this aspect of gaming is still in its infancy and so still has time to evolve into something better: “My hope is gamers will soon get wise to the cheap tactics many use and force developers to make better games. Also, although freemium will continue to be a part of the wide gaming tapestry, I don’t believe it will be the only valid model. I see the future as one of diversity, both in platforms and also in business models.”

This article originally appeared in Swipe magazine for iPhone

Marco Arment’s sold read-it-later service Instapaper to Betaworks. My first responses to this were “good for him,” swiftly followed by “I hope Betaworks don’t mess this up,” along with mulling over an investigation of Pocket. (I like both Instapaper and Pocket, but had largely stuck with Instapaper because I, where possible, support indies.)

For some reason, Chris Taylor over at Mashable had a massive bitch in his coverage of the sale, subtitled “why the big fuss?”

It really is an astonishing piece of… well, I want to say journalism, but it reads more like something you’d find on the Daily Mail website and turn your nose up at. Right away, the piece makes Taylor’s seeming distaste for Instapaper very clear:

Do you use Instapaper? No, me neither. But the $3.99 app, which lets you save stuff to read later when outside a wifi or 3G zone, has a small and highly devoted following. Which is why a small segment of Twitter went nuts at the news Thursday that Instapaper was being bought by Betaworks

Why the aggression? Why the not-so-subtle sneering at people who use and love an app? Why the immediate disconnect with the article’s own title, which asked “why the fuss?” and then noted the app’s “devoted following”? I would ask Taylor, but he’s probably busy making giant Instapaper logos that he can kick the shit out of in a murderous rage.

Arment has been spending an increasing amount of time on another project. He’s founder and editorial director of an online paid magazine devoted to mid-length features, brashly titled The Magazine. His enthusiasm for Instapaper appears to have been waning for some time. Reviews of the lastest version in the iTunes store suggest it got buggy and crashed a lot. [sic]

I read the reviews for the latest version (although not the lastest version, because I’m not sure what that means) on the US and UK stores. Oddly, the UK store reviews are generally people wanting to high-five Arment, or grumbling that Instapaper’s not Pocket. A few people were complaining about crashes. On the US store, there are admittedly quite a few people complaining about app stability, although many more going down the high-five route.

I’ve not witnessed any such problems myself (which, given my usual tech halos of doom is perhaps some kind of technology karma), but to argue this is down to Arment lacking enthusiasm is pretty low, not least because Taylor also quotes Arment as stating Instapaper

has simply grown far beyond what one person can do

Classy.

For good measure, there’s also a smattering of inaccuracy:

Two years ago, Apple stepped onto Instapaper’s turf in a major way by adding a “reading list” feature to its Safari app on iPhone and iPad. The reading list allowed users to save pages to read them later, rendering the paid iPhone app Instapaper largely irrelevant.

As anyone who’s used Reading List will know, although it has some similarities with Instapaper (and other read-it-later services), it’s a very different beast. In downloading entire web pages (design and all), it’s a hell of a lot slower, for one, and it also doesn’t just rip out the content from a page and give you that, using your preferred fonts and other settings. I don’t know anyone who checked out Reading List and stopped using Instapaper, Pocket or Readability.

Still, at least Taylor stopped there. Oh no, my mistake:

But Betaworks is building a reputation for turning around aggregation products thought to be lost causes, judging by the reception for the new Digg.

That’s my emphasis, there: Instapaper: thought to be a lost cause! That really needs the caveat “by Chris Taylor, who’s inexplicably angry about Instapaper, perhaps because he imagined it travelled back in time and gave him a massive wedgie in the playground, while yelling MARCO ARMENT IS YOUR GOD, PUNY FUTURE HACK”.

That is the only explanation.

For The Guardian, Juliette Garside writes Five ways Apple has lost its bite, but it’s more like five ways Apple journalism has lost its bite, namely: unfounded speculation, lack of insight, intentionally downplaying achievements, removing context, and rewriting Apple’s own history to suit.

Right from the off, the article sets out its agenda:

The breathtaking expansion of the world’s most successful technology company has skidded to a halt.

Had this been a fact, fair enough, but:

Tonight Apple is expected to post its worst financial results for a decade, with profits falling for the first time since 2003, and revenues flat on last year.

This article was written before Apple issued its financials. Also, “worst financial results” is a loaded statement without context. Worst in what manner? Certainly not revenue. And although profits are down on the previous year, they’re way higher than any previous Apple year. The context here is therefore “profits down compared to the same quarter last year,” which Garside failed to state, but then she didn’t even have the figures to hand when filing this piece.

It’s less than two years since Tim Cook took over from Steve Jobs, but Apple’s creative juices appear to have dried up.

Again, there’s no context here, and this also rewrites Apple’s history. The inference here is Apple having not disrupted a new industry recently, in the manner the company did with tablets and smartphones. Tech hacks seem to have a version of Apple in their heads that does something new and amazing at the very least once a quarter. In reality, Apple since its earliest days has only very slowly unveiled new products, and has slowly iterated on its successful (and sometimes less successful) lines.

Go right back to the Apple II and move forward from there. Since the late 1970s, how many truly revolutionary products has Apple released? You could argue the original Mac, the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad, certainly. How many more? If you can double that list, you’re still talking an average of something new and amazing every three or four years.

It continues:

For two decades the soft-spoken Alabaman has been very much part of the firm’s success, but Wall Street is now rife with (albeit not very credible) rumours that the search for his replacement has begun.

Unfounded speculation.

Cook’s tenure has had its positives: appalling working conditions at Apple’s Chinese factories have been tackled and a readiness to apologise for mistakes has helped the company appear less arrogant.

But the things that made Apple great – the innovation, the ability to make software and hardware that “just work”, and the faultless industrial design that created some of the best-looking consumer electronics ever made – appear to be slipping away.

Intentionally downplaying achievements.

Garside next moves on to the internet’s favourite thing: the numbered list. It’s a pity this wasn’t on Business Insider, whereupon it could have excitingly been presented across five separate slowly loading pages, for no reason at all. The numbered list in this case is the five ways Apple’s lost its bite, because presumably moaning about Cook wasn’t one of them. Here, Garside does have some decent points, but they’re too often buried under unfounded speculation, lack of insight, intentionally downplaying achievements, removing context, and rewriting Apple’s own history to suit.

1. Never making a television or getting Apple TV right

I’m still to hear a single credible argument why Apple should make its own television. Perhaps such a unit could be a success, but it strikes me as an extraordinarily difficult ask. People rarely upgrade televisions, and having a plug-in component that could be upgraded (as many have suggested) doesn’t seem very Apple. Also, the so-called second screen is rapidly becoming the first, and Apple already has a commanding lead in that field. So a low-cost conduit—the Apple TV—backed up by some decent content (iTunes, Apple TV ‘apps’ and iOS apps with AirPlay) seems a better bet.

Garside does get a nugget right, in that Apple needs to do more regarding content, but the assertion

Apple must work harder than it did shaking up a bloated and complacent music industry

suggests there’s something to work with, and it’s pretty clear the television and film industry is doing everything it can to repeatedly shoot itself in the foot and argue the customer guided the bullet by their evil psychic piracy powers.

2. iCloud being beset by syncing issues and instability

I’ve no complaints here. Although Garside moans about the expense of iCloud compared to its rivals and ignores the potential it offers in terms of integration, she’s spot on regarding its technical issues. Had the entire article been like this, I wouldn’t be writing mine. Still, in terms of arguing why Apple has lost its bite, iCloud isn’t a great example. It’s arguable in terms of web services Apple never really had any bite at all—it’s always been a gummy toothless wannabe trying and failing to grab hold.

3. Apple Maps being pretty rubbish, and not optional

Boom! And we’re back to good points buried under rubbish. Apple Maps was indeed sub-par, and Apple should have done better. Garside also says something I’ve long wondered not only about Apple but about big technology companies in general:

The faults were so glaring […] that one wonders how well the chief executive studied his own product before approving its release.

But Maps is now actually a fairly good app for certain tasks (turn-by-turn in the car, say), and the circumstances of why Apple dropped Google’s data have never (and will never) be revealed, but it’s pretty clear that prior to Apple’s own Maps app, the Google-backed one was woefully behind the equivalent on other platforms. Somewhat ironically, the mess of Apple Maps resulted in Apple’s mobile platform ending up extremely strong from a mapping standpoint, with the release of Google’s own app and others.

Again, though, is this a case of Apple losing its bite? It’s not like Apple hasn’t offered other high-profile disappointments in terms of software. Just recently, Siri and Final Cut X come to mind. Also, like Maps, they offer good foundations on which to build, but Apple’s never been that great at retaining interest in the long term over many of its software products. Look at the OS X versions of what were once the iLife and iWork apps…

4. Hiring a retail chief who didn’t realise Apple stores are showrooms

A first proper hit, and we’re only at the fourth of five reasons why Apple’s lost its bite. The hire of Browett was truly baffling to Brits who’d seen his previous work, although amusingly lost on any Americans who’d not visited a PC World and initially lapped up the PR rather than took notice of the screams of anguish from across the pond.

It’s perhaps too early to say Apple’s truly lost its bite when it comes to recruitment of major players, but this was at the very least a mis-step and so deserves to be on the list.

5. The iPhone 5 only really having a slightly bigger screen

And we crash back down to earth, with the wonderful:

It may be one of the fastest phones in the world, loading video and spinning through web pages at record speeds, but reviewers complain that the screen is too small

[citation required]

In reality, tech geek reviewers moan that every new iOS device isn’t an Android device, rather than weighing up whether or not it’s relevant for the target market. Even if Apple were to release an iPhone with a massive screen, reviewers would whine it’s not as big as the latest Samsung, which by that point would probably cover most of Wales.

Others have caught up too, with Nokia and Samsung making cheaper machines that work just as well.

Vague statements offering no insight are the best! It’d be like writing “The Guardian’s technology columns aren’t worth reading because others write far better content,” but that would just be mean, and so I sure hope no-one does that.

So really the numbers are all wrong. The Guardian’s piece is more like “One way Apple’s lost its bite and a bunch of unfounded speculation and link-bait,” and my piece is more like: *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk*.

Give it a year and there will be no facts at all in anything written about Apple. And I’ll need a new desk.

Further reading: Just How Did Apple “Journalism” Get This Bad? by the brilliant and wise Ian Betteridge.

Apple’s Q2 2013 earnings call is on its way later today. It doesn’t take a fortune-teller to know what’s going to happen: Apple’s going to get smacked. If the company’s sales have slumped, the stock will crash and the press will go nuts; if Apple doesn’t meet Wall Street’s loony demands (sorry, expectations), the stock will crash and the press will go nuts. The press will also go nuts if Tim Cook and chums don’t talk about a new Apple television, iWatch or iToasterFridge, despite Apple never talking about such things during earnings calls.

Roman Dillet’s latest TechCrunch article (which is surprisingly balanced for an article on Apple earnings) sums up the problem Apple has right now:

Even iPhone sales are now below analysts’ expectations. The company was supposed to sell between 6 million and 10 million iPhone 5 during opening weekend. In reality, it sold 5 million units.

That’s my emphasis, there. ‘Supposed to sell’, according to analysts, who, as I once said in a column for Macworld, are little more than guessers for the most part. Even if Apple’s grown since this point last year, it won’t be enough. Even if Apple announced it had in fact sold three iPhones to everyone in the world and a passing visitor from Alpha Centauri who will still be able to use the iPhone because the new antenna is now that good, analysts would grumble that, really, Apple should have sold four phones to everyone and is doomed for not securing the lucrative Proxima Centauri market.

So nuts to it. I’m going to ignore the baying mob and play Super Stickman Golf 2 instead, which will be fun on account of featuring 100 per cent fewer analysts and, despite it being a very silly game indeed, a significantly lower level of absurdity than exists in the current tech press.