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John Gruber Has Some Career Advice For Developers
- andrewfelix 15y agoI usually find Gruber's tone to be arrogant and unnecessarily facetious. But I think his analogy is great.."This is like being a Rock and roll musician in the late sixties. This is like being a film maker in the seventies..."
- barumrho 15y agoI don't think that analogy really works because there is not much distinction between "Apple developers" and other developers. There is no barrier to start developing on Apple platforms and there probably won't be for the next big platform. Low barrier to entry is one key factor of a platform's success.
- ryanhuff 15y agoSure there are barriers. A few that come to mind include the $99 per year Apple developer program fee, which is necessary to distribute apps, the Mac OS requirement, and the objective c hurdle. These may seem more like inconvenience barriers, but they do keep people away from the development pool.
- steve-howard 15y agoI'm sure as hell not buying a Mac just to write for Apple's walled gardens. Inconvenience is an understatement.
- ryanhuff 15y agoWhile not ideal, some people have been able to run mac os on other operating systems using virtualization.
- mcantelon 15y agoDo you also like job postings looking for "rock stars" and "ninjas"?
- andrewfelix 15y agoI should probably clarify why I think the analogy works; It's an exciting time, it's changing rapidly, there's a lot of opportunity and developers are garnering a lot of focus from a lot of different areas.
- strait 15y agoIt's a long way to the top if you wanna Rock 'n' Roll. Won't get fooled again.
- jonhendry 15y agoA rock and roll musician in the late sixties? Looking back at the music of the 70s, I'm not sure that bodes well.
- MatthewPhillips 15y agotldr; John Gruber endorses iOS.
- josephcooney 15y agoI don't want to under-estimate the importance of movable type...but what has Gruber developed? Looking at the list at http://daringfireball.net/projects/ http://daringfireball.net/projects/ doesn't exactly fill me with shock and awe. I'd imagine with his huge following in the apple community he could put almost anything on the app store and it would sell. Can someone enlighten me? I guess my meta-point is, why am I reading software development career advice from someone who doesn't seem to be a developer?
- puls 15y agoHe's a pundit, but he's really close with all of the influential developers in the community. He's more in tune with the Apple community than perhaps any one other person, and his track record of being right is unmatched in the last several years.
- steele 15y agohmm, who are the influential developers in the iOS community?
- msbarnett 15y agoSome names that spring to mind, off the top of my head and in no particular order: Loren Brichter, Marco Arment, Matt Gemmel, Matt Gallagher, and Steven Frank.
- jonhendry 15y agoWil Shipley
- freemarketteddy 15y agoand also some notable young ones like Joe Hewitt,Jeff Verkoeyen,Peter Steinberger,Mugunth Kumar!
- SquareWheel 15y ago
- goodside 15y ago"One simple way to look at it is that there are far more people who've never bought an iPhone and who've never bought an iPad, who will in the next five years than all of us who've already bought at least one to this point." That's one simple way to look at it. Another slightly less simple way is that the ones that already have Apple devices are the savviest, hippest, and spendiest consumers around, and you can't possibly hope to milk as much money per person from the ones that adopt later.
- bluekeybox 15y agoYour comment rests on the assumption that the savviest ones are also the spendiest ones, which most would probably disagree with.
- comedian 15y agoNow that I think about it, Android has 3X (or whatever) the market share of iOS, and no one seems to be making a ton of money from Android (except Google), the future for Android developers is pretty grim if you ask me.
- sipefree 15y agoI disagree, though based on the attitude of your comment I'm not sure if you'll take my point. Here in Dublin, at least, iPhones are becoming extremely popular, even with the losertechnicians of the world. Businessmen with no tech skills are replacing Blackberries with them, teenagers are flocking to get them, and there are even dodgy-looking iPhone accessory shops in bad neighbourhoods. Over here, since around the start of this summer, the iPhone 4 has been available for free on a 40 euro per month contract with unlimited data and enough minutes/texts for the vast majority of people, on pretty much every network. That's a really good deal, and a huge number of people bought into it, figuring that they spend at least that on credit anyway. When the iPad 2 launched over here, there was a period of 8 months where you could not find ANY, at all, even in the authorized resellers that Apple likes the most. At any one time there might have been one for sale in the whole city. Android is gaining momentum here too, and I don't know figures for any of this, but I definitely haven't seem them on as many non-hackers as I have iPhones. In conclusion, no, the people who have iPhones are not the Apple-savvy hipsters. At least in this city.
- jerguismi 15y agoIt would be interesting to know, why being an Apple developer is favourable to being any other type of a developer? For example, android market share is already larger than Apple devices, and people still spend lots of time in front of traditional web browsers. You can still make fortunes and/or have an interesting career with other platforms and technologies too.
- tikhonj 15y agoIn a word: Gruber. His bias towards Apple is unmatched.
- gbog 15y agoHe is completely out of his mind. George Lucas, a Saint? Along with Saint Thomas, Saint John, etc.? Words have no meaning anymore... Even Confucius would be pissed of. (When asked what he would do first if given a prime minister position, he say he would rectify the words.)
- guywithabike 15y agoWoah there, Nelly. Gruber said, "When George Lucas was still sane." Don't worry. Your words still have their meaning. All is well.
- gbog 15y agoFrom the article: "George Lucas (when he was a saint)" Did I miss something?
- tambourine_man 15y agoThe guy misheard it and transcribed it wrong. It's when he was sane.
- gbog 15y ago
- mcantelon 15y ago>This is like being a Rock and roll musician in the late sixties. This is like being a film maker in the seventies following Scorsese, Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas (when he was a saint). That's a hilarious sell. Better not mention the bigger, even faster growing Android market.
- ricardobeat 15y agoFaster growing, copycat infested, low paying market? Not that you shouldn't develop for it (hell, >1 million activations/day), but the climate over there is very different.
- mcantelon 15y agoMuch bigger in the developing world which is where the economic center of gravity is shifting to. So better long-term prospects unless trends reverse. But, yes, copycats are likely a bigger problem in Androidland.
- ricardobeat 15y agoIt's bigger in all "first-world" countries too.
- tintin 15y agoThere is a lot of that 'climate' that you will never see. We are developing Android apps that will never see a Market Place. We just put them on the devices directly. Those apps are used by big companies. They are very specialized apps. Why Android? Because we don't need Apple to install the apps. And a lot of developers already know Java. So, don't believe the hype.
- jonhendry 15y agoThere are also iOS developers whose apps will be directly installed by large companies, rather than going through an app store.
- 15y ago
- steele 15y agoBy that logic, it's a much better time to be an Android developer as long as you support 2.2 and up. You bring the dynamite, I'll bring the pickaxe & canary, let's gold rush!
- tikhonj 15y agoThis might be true of Apple, but it is definitely true of both the software industry and theoretical CS. The industry is expanding--computers are getting cheaper and more plentiful so we need more and more software. Since we also have more computational power in our hands, we can do more and more interesting things with computers. Theoretical computer science is also in an exciting time--it is a nascent field with many exciting discoveries and inventions to be made even without gigantic budgets. I think it's something like physics in the early 20th century, before they started needing gigantic particle accelerators and the like (I'm sure physics is still exciting and I'm just showing my ignorance, but I think there's a parallel nonetheless). Right now is a perfect time to be a developer or computer scientist anywhere, not just at Apple.
- possibilistic 15y agoI'm just curious (and hope I don't come off as being ignorant), but what kind of exciting theoretical CS developments have occurred in the last few years? If you can list some really groundbreaking papers that aren't too advanced, I'd love to read them. Most of the stuff I see in academia is incremental improvement. Not that this should ever be downplayed.
- snotrockets 15y agoAll of academic output is an incremental improvement (it may differ for the social sciences. I don't have experience with that.) Newton famously acknowledged it in his letter to Hooke. We also have the misfortune of struggling with the deep unknowns, as all of the trivial theorems have already been proven before (consider Feynman's definition of trivial in 'Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!', New York: W. W. Norton, pp. 69-72, 1997.) But some improvements are greater than others. The question is where you draw the line. And I hold that most researchers' line encompass more then yours. Consider, for example, Jiří Matoušek's opinion of Computational Geometry in 2010 (to save you the reading, he called it no less than an annus mirabilis. You can read his reasoning here: http://kam.mff.cuni.cz/~matousek/mor.pdf http://kam.mff.cuni.cz/~matousek/mor.pdf)
- daenz 15y agotldr; Develop for the App Store and you could be famous and make loads of money like <insert cultural icon>, or don't and you might just regret your entire life.
- gcl2 15y agoGruber is like a person who really enjoys eating cupcakes. He knows all about cupcakes, and even goes so far as to think he knows how to make them. He's probably baked a few things here and there. Sadly, he also thinks his 'expertise' on all things cupcakes makes him an all round bonafide chef.
- tikhonj 15y agoHe is more like a person who likes cupcakes from exclusively one cupcake company and thinks cupcakes made by anybody else are dross.
- postfuturist 15y agoSomeone who calls themselves an Apple developer and who doesn't work for Apple needs to consider expanding their horizons. Mobile developer? That's a little better. Or just, developer. It's a great time to be a developer.
- danilocampos 15y agoYou've missed, entirely, the point. What Gruber is saying is that anyone who is developing for Apple's platforms is about to enjoy an enormous surge of opportunity. As these platforms see even further adoption, their capability will only increase. So if you're in Apple's playground, you're watching it turn into Disneyworld in a way that will never come again once these devices are baked into people's assumptions about how the world works.
- coderdude 15y ago>>What Gruber is saying is that anyone who is developing for Apple's platforms is about to enjoy an enormous surge of opportunity. [etc] Of course he is. That's all he ever does. Everything he says is worthless because you already know how lacking in substance the man is. Damn the Apple users who keep upvoting his garbage.
- steve-howard 15y agoI wouldn't have put it so harshly myself, but I did see the article and immediately think "John Gruber is going to tell me to write software for Apple products." I would have been mildly interested to have been wrong.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- mmaunder 15y agoThe pool of revenue is still small: Since the creation of the app store in July 2008 to July this year, Apple has paid out $2.5 billion to developers and my projected payout for 2011 is $1.995B. Even so, competition is fierce. In May this year there were 85,560 unique developers writing apps for the store. Having said that, gold rushes are how big cities are built.
- Kylekramer 15y agoAt the risk of being a cynical ass, let's not forget that this is basically Gruber playing the modern day equivalent of Levi Strauss: "Come to California/the App Store, you'll get amazingly rich! And while you're here, I am sure you would be interested in some clothing and dry goods/a $6,500 ad on the most influential Apple blog."
- ZeroGravitas 15y agoOr to put it in words that you might have heard repeatedly from the man himself, "You are not his customer, the people buying ads are his customer".
- hellotoby 15y agoI feel this way too just not about Apple products, but about HTML. These surely are great days to be a web developer. HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript coupled with great browser support. It feels like there is so much that can be achieved!
- robmcm 15y agoBrowser support is still a huge issue that people tend to gloss over. It's a problem any standards based environment will face. Native will always develope faster and be more consistent.
- bgarbiak 15y agoWell, one coud argue that developing one web app for a selected browsers is faster than developing a few native apps, each for different OS. Especially when you consider the fact that on mobile devices Webkit is a de facto standard and that issues like Android fragmentation doesn't make developing native apps any easier. In my opinion, the real issues about web apps are: performance, lack of the Device API and a lack of matured tools. Solving first two is, luckily, a question of "when", not "if". The latest phones are already fast enough to handle even the heaviest jQuery monsters; LTE and 4G are getting traction and Device API is a work in progress (eventually, there's a PhoneGap). Lack of tools is harder to solve though. JavaScript grew big lately, yet in this field it's still very far from being mature. If you are doing anything non-standard in JS (like Backbone.js classes) the best you can get from IDEs, etc. is syntax highlighting. Hopefully, with more and more big players (like Adobe) hopping onto HTML5 bandwagon things in this matter will soon improve too.
- billybob 15y agoIf you're shooting for the mobile market, writing a web app that works in the 5 most popular mobile browsers is a lot easier than rewriting your native app for each platform you want to target.
- robmcm 15y agoIsn't there huge fragmentation in Android webkit? Plus focusing on iOS and Android covers most 'mobile' cases. Other platforms hold a harder justification. Perhaps the route forward is a simple web app to cover everyone, then focus on the top platforms for native.
- cooldeal 15y agoThe bottom 80% of apps split just 3% of the revenue. From http://www.fastcompany.com/1792313/striking-it-rich-in-the-app-store-for-developers-its-more-casino-than-gold-mine http://www.fastcompany.com/1792313/striking-it-rich-in-the-a... Developer Daniel Markham calls iPhone development “App Store Roulette,” and Andy Finnell of the software studio Fortunate Bear cautions against hoping for App Store success. “You’re betting a lot of this on luck, and the odds are stacked against you," Finnell says. "You’d have better odds playing slots at a casino.” Indeed, as much as app development has been called a gold rush, there is an equally loud theory that it operates more like a casino. “The closest thing I’ve seen to a ‘business model’ for marketing iPhone apps is to advertise like crazy until you get into the top 50,” says David Barnard of AppCubby. “Once you’re there, the top 50 list will start generating its own buzz...But that’s not a business model, that’s like rolling the dice at a casino.”
- rglover 15y agoIt may sound incredibly frivolous now, but he's right. Irrespective of Apple or iOS, this is the time to be doing something more. I think the message here goes beyond just developing for iOS, but rather, for everything. Build something that you love, work for a company where you feel like you're doing something worthwhile. Whatever you do, make sure you're working on something that makes you say "fuck yeah." Don't neglect what's about to happen. We're about to see a major shift in technology and for those who are truly passionate about it, you'll want to be a part of it.
- wavephorm 15y agoThis sounds like an advertisement to come panning for gold in 1854, years after the gold rush had begun. I think the iTunes app store story is practically over by this point. The app store is long-since saturated with useless gimmicky fart apps, and Apple's force grip on the development process will stifle innovation which is already spilling back into the web via HTML5 and WebGL.
- Joeri 15y agoBut the gold rush in the mac app store is just beginning. It will be interesting to see whether the mac app store will have a price race to the bottom like te iOS store, or whether prices will remain at 10x the level. What would be really interesting is microsoft getting in the desktop app store game with windows 8. There's a gigantic potential market, if they manage to unlock it. I doubt they will, but still ... interesting.
- rimantas 15y agoYou should check your facts because your view seems to be outdated by a couple of years at least.
- georgieporgie 15y agoEverything he said can pretty much be said about the web, too. Along with that comes the fact that of these millions of news users, hardly anyone will want to pay a dime for anything. That was the beautiful thing about developing software in the 90's: people were still willing to pay for stuff, you just had to figure out the (often insurmountable) distribution. Now, it seems like the only way to make a meaningful income is to insert yourself between layers of large business.
- cppsnob 15y agoI was sad to see that Gruber couldn't step out of his Apple bubble to tackle this topic (or any topic, ever), so I will: Everyone who thinks "I should be developing for platform X" is thinking far too small. Take a look around you.. how many of the great companies were formed developing for a particular platform (unless it's their own)? Almost none. In 10 years, do you want to be the old and busted equivalent of the MFC expert whose software was hot in year 2000? You don't make the Googles, Facebooks, Twitters, of the world by developing just for iOS. Or just for Android. If that's your business plan, tear it up and start over. Because $0.99 a pop doesn't amount to jack-all unless you're Angry Birds. And even they, if they got $1 for each of their 500MM downloads, have still not made as much as Modern Warfare 3 made last week ($738MM in revenue). Go create a market. Stop being part of Apple's/Google's market for drumming up hardware sales and/or serving ads.
- tjogin 15y agoWhy would he step out of the Apple bubble? His crowd were Apple developers, that's the one thing they have in common.
- wahnfrieden 15y agoIt's also his moneymaker.
- pacomerh 15y agoI absolutely agree, I think Grubber has gotten very comfortable in the so called apple bubble environment, I don't blame him though. But you gotta take his advice considering where he's at, and to be honest his advice is informative at least.
- jakobe 15y agoThere are two reasons why the platform matters: 1) You might not want to build the next Facebook. Many developers don't actually plan to start multi-billion-dollar companies. If you are an individual developer, or a small team, you cannot cater to everyone, you must pick the one platform most suitable for you. And then you can go create a niche app and make a decent living from it. 2) Even big and successful companies started on a single platform. A classic example would be Adobe: Photoshop was initially a Macintosh-only application, and has been ported only when it was already hugely successful. But actually Rovio is the best example that the choice of platform is extremely important: They have been hugely successful only when they started selling their iPhone app, and started porting to other platforms only when they were already extremely successful. Hell, even Facebook, Twitter, Google started on a single platform: the web.
- tzury 15y agoI am trying to figure out why don't Gruber himself listen to his own advice and develop iPhone/iPad app already. I mean, writing good technical reviews and opinions about iOS is a very nice thing. But give advise to mass developers should be done from experience, rather than theory. As for the advice itself, it is right that in five years from now, mobile devices will be all over the place and today's sales volumes are just the iceberg's tip, yet, a developer should think about the opportunity of "mobile-computing" rather than a particular "mobile device". For me, it is a web developer who decide his web apps are to be working with chrome browsers only, since the number of chrome installations today is nothing comparing to what it will be in 5 years from now, and simply ignoring safari, firefox (and even ie, oops).
- mmahemoff 15y agoGiven that he's a writer, he is following his advice by focusing on Apple/iOS.
- rkudeshi 15y agoFor me, it is a web developer who decide his web apps are to be working with chrome browsers only, since the number of chrome installations today is nothing comparing to what it will be in 5 years from now, and simply ignoring safari, firefox (and even ie, oops). Five years ago, when Chrome didn't even exist, someone could've said the same thing about Firefox. Funny how fast things change, eh?
- MicahWedemeyer 15y agoYou could substitute Facebook App in there and moved the clock back about 3-4 years and it would read pretty much identical to blog posts back then.
- chalst 15y agoThis is like being a Bee Gees clone in the late 1970s! No disrespect intended to the kings of disco, but being a successful in a fashion bubble doesn't make you cool or give you shelf-life. I hate this sort of talking up. Gruber has been really hard to stomach since iOS took off. "unless something unbelievable, dramatic changes" - You should expect surprise and drama in a walled garden. Facebook apps have been a lasting source of substantial revenue for only a few companies. Why has this story got 118 points?
- brudgers 15y ago>"This is like being a Rock and roll musician in the late sixties." In the mid 80's I used to see into Bobby Peterson of The McCoys at various parties around Gainesville. Hopefully, it is a poor simile. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_McCoys http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_McCoys]