The Ledger
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Acharya: Consumer AI resembles Web 2.0 distribution, not mobile app stores
“There's no app store for AI. So this actual product cycle for consumer looks more like Web two point O, where you have to kind of build the channel alongside the product and less like mobile, where you actually have the central point of distribution for the en…”
Evans: Apple's App Store exists to drive high-margin iPhone sales
“The classic thing that drives me crazy, people talking about Apple, thinking that the app store is like a primary revenue driver for Apple, when the whole purpose of the app store is to drive sales of a 700 dollar iPhone every two years at a 50% gross margin.”
Khalaf: Cash App is sole financial app in App Store top 25 for three years
“You look at Cash App as an example. It's the only financial services product that's been in the top 25 on the App Store the last three years.”
Multiple top mobile AI apps are copycat wrappers arbitraging OpenAI's models
“So there are quite a few apps on our mobile app list that are essentially copycat products and using OpenAI's own model, but are named slightly differently, and are just kind of playing this, like, maybe short to medium term arbitrage on App Store optimization…”
McAfee: Steve Jobs fought opening the App Store to developers for a year
“The compliments are so tricky that they actually tripped up Steve Jobs really badly. This is not lore. This is fact. He did not want to open up the app store to any outside developers. He thought he had to maintain super tight control over that digital environ…”
Alex Rampell: Apple threatens Amazon with App Store removal over in-app purchases
“And Apple is saying, hey, you want to go buy this streaming video from Amazon? Uh-uh. Can't do it on an Apple phone. The Amazon app will not let you buy certain types of things because otherwise Apple would remove it from the app store.”
Evans: Creating an app store inside Messenger just shifts discovery problems
“It's like, problem, the app store has two million things in it. Solution, create an app store inside Messenger. Problem, the Messenger app store has two million things inside it. Like, if you haven't actually done something, you have to do some other thing. Al…”
Evans: Apple Has 700-750 Million Active Devices and 66% App Revenue
“The Apple ecosystem has 700 to seven hundred and fifty million active devices at the moment, and it has two thirds of app store revenue, and it has roughly half of web traffic, so it has sufficient scale to attract developers.”
Benedict Evans: Modern mobile app stores are like Yahoo in 1995
“When you look at an app store today, it's like looking at Yahoo in 95. You know, you can browse a million apps. You could browse a 100,000 websites, but it doesn't scale. And there's no way for you to find the right things that you want to use on that device.”
Rampell: Digital wallets will develop dedicated app store ecosystems
“If the app store exists for the digital wallet, which I believe it will”
Kuyda: Early Wabi users build niche apps unviable on App Stores
“Right now we're already seeing tons of, you know, some of our first users building very specific apps that would never exist in On the App Store. They're just too small. They're too personalized, too niche.”
Kuyda: Apple App Store will never become social due to privacy focus
“If today the app store is very much not social and it probably won't ever be social because of Apple's mandate for privacy and how important that is for them”
Acharya: App stores will become chaotic as AI lowers creation costs
“The app store is going to be chaos.”
OpenAI's delayed mobile launch cost ChatGPT crucial App Store optimization ground
“The one other interesting thing about mobile was ChatGPT was so slow to launch an app, they lost a little bit of ground just from, like, an, App Store keyword and optimization perspective.”
Moore: No paid-download app has hit #1 on the App Store
“I still think we've yet to see an app hit number one that charges for a download.”
Sinofsky: Apple has roughly 360 million worldwide subscribers
“And so one thing that's super interesting, just out of the gate, is Apple has three hundred and sixty million or so subscribers worldwide. That's a sort of a vanity number because it includes subscriptions to apps in the App Store, but because Apple gets a cut…”
Evans: Apple has 800M iPhones and 500M weekly App Store visitors
“Except there's now eight hundred million iPhones and over a billion iOS devices, and I think Apple said five hundred million people open the App Store every week, and so 30% of those purchases has become a real number.”
Evans: App Store subscriptions unlock sustainable economics for productivity software
“The introduction of new subscription pricing options last week, potentially changes the economics for a developer, because now if you're going to make a really interesting productivity app, instead of having to charge 50 dollars for it, or give it away for fre…”
Evans: Mobile app stores remain in a pre-PageRank discovery phase
“We're kind of in a pre-pagerank phase for how people discover and engage stuff online. That's to say an app store now looks a lot like it looks a lot like Yahoo, right, two years ago.”
Kim: Five of top 10 iOS productivity apps are Google, ChatGPT #1
“If you go to app store today, top five out of top 10 productivity apps are all Google. It's insane. And Chachi B is number one.”
Acharya: Apple had 6M iPhones distributed when App Store launched
“When the App Store came out, there were six million iPhones in distribution, right?”
Moore: 7-Eleven app consistently tops App Store on Free Slurpee Day
“Another one that I think a lot of people were surprised to see hit number one this year was the seven-eleven app for the convenience store chain, but that almost always hits number one on free Slurpee day, July, every year, because you have to have the app to …”