michaelone's comments

There is a really cool 360 video of this actually by Discovery VR. Just watched it a couple days ago in my headset and learned about synesthesia. Is this what you have maybe? Seems like a pretty cool super power! ;) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obrBAysVef0

It's interesting how we're basically seeing networks reborn in a new way. It'll be especially funny if Apple, Google or some startup is able to bundle different streaming services together for a discounted rate and we're back at square one.

I did the same at UBC and nobody should go in expecting it will be valuable no matter what just by signing up (depends so much on what you end up doing and what you personally enjoy and are good at), but I think there is a lot of value in doing internships before graduating for the experience and knowledge of what is out there. Helps bring more relevance to school work and you get to test out what you may or may not like in a 3-4 month period before having to commit full time.

I met a really interesting Lyft driver who drives 2 hours to San Francisco every weekend to drive 3 days of 12 hour shifts and then returns to her hometown to be a stay-at-home mom for the rest of the week days. Her husband also drives for Lyft part time and according to her, together they're making $100k more per year than they used to be and for the first time not living paycheck to paycheck anymore. It's inspiring stuff, but at the same time you have to consider that these people get no benefits, even if they were to drive full time, and have to front the costs of insurance, gas, and hotels in San Francisco to do what they're doing (because Uber etc. don't have enough volume in their small town). Providing people the opportunity to change their own lives like this just by working hard on their own schedule is huge, but also sounds like an opportunity for another startup (freebie!) to figure out how you provide these people with all the same benefits that they still need and make that as easy and affordable as it was when a company was providing it.

Agreed, and it's shocking that this Washington Post article does not raise these points at all, or consult an "expert" that is not repeating the same PR rhetoric. For normal people to understand the issue and take a stance on it both sides should be illuminated. It could have been as simple as including Apple's or Google's original statements as to why they are taking this stance.

Web developers have been claiming forever that the web will take over and nobody will need apps or software outside of a browser, but is not close to becoming true yet on mobile. If you're considering making a poor web app or a poor native app, your time is probably better spent on the web app. Even if you're crafting an average app, it's probably a better use of your time to just get it working on the web. But the UX and speed that is possible in an exceptional native app is just not possible on the web today.

Airbnb absolutely benefits from having a fantastic app experience. Facebook and Twitter absolutely benefit from having exceptional apps. Google's iOS Gmail app isn't even a very good app (slow performance from being a web wrapper?) but it's still way better than using the web app in Safari. Basically if user experience and speed are a high priority and you are capable of making a decent app, the web is not a substitute for a native app.

PewDiePie posted the video to his YouTube channel on January 27th, but Flappy Bird was already #1 as of January 17th. By the time it went viral with all this word of mouth and news coverage it was already #1. So the most fascinating part (especially on the App Store where a sudden rise like this is so anomalous) is how it took off to the #1 spot in the first place when it had been on the store since May. It might have needed to have all the other ingredients (addictive gameplay, nostalgic art, etc.) to do what it did, but those aren't what triggered it shooting from zero to #1 in a couple weeks.

Outliers is a fun book about this type of stuff. It's not that the creator "hacked" the system for Flappy Bird -- all signs point to him being a super authentic game designer who just made his game, and for lack of a better word "lucked" into all the right circumstances. However, it's still interesting to try to determine which factors played a role in something that clearly had such a non-standard trajectory. Everything that goes "viral" has to have some catalyst that created the opportunity to go viral. Nobody knew about Flappy Bird in May, hence it could not go viral. Something changed in December and that is what is so fascinating.

Interesting, do you have data on Flappy Bird itself? Apple might normalize their data for those kinds of anomalies like Modern War's blip, but your Magic Piano example does show a rise in ranking both of the times they had an upswing in reviews.

Apple does seem to weight installs over time, so I wouldn't be surprised if they also weight reviews over time to catch those kinds of push notification strategies. Zach Williams's data showed something quite different than Modern War's: more of a snowballing after the initial climb, so maybe the consistent influx of reviews from the in-game button was a "normal" enough data point to get past Apple. Nobody obviously knows for sure all of the details of Apple's current algorithm.

Definitely: I think the only real solution for the industry at this point is finding better ways to monetize with IAP that don't mix so heavily with the gameplay. And League of Legends is a great example of keeping the gameplay separate from the monetization.

No pay to win, no timers, no paywalls that ruin the experience: we need to go back to building games as entertainment experiences, and find ways to monetize with things like skins (purely aesthetic so they don't disrupt gameplay, but can make you look cool when you play with your friends).

Unfortunately the sad truth is that for the majority of mobile games if you charge up front you will not have enough sales volume. And a single $1.99 IAP has the same problem because while you might get 10x downloads from being free initially, you'll still only get your $2 from <10% of them, and $2 LTV is not nearly enough to support a game (+ some gamers like those here might be willing to support a great game with more than $2 but won't have the option to do so in this setup).

At the end of the day, when people invest in an entertainment experience they want to be entertained. And thinking about money and waiting for timers during the experience only reduces the amount of entertainment we get out of it. So we need to find ways to design IAP that is separate enough from the core experience, and yet still works well enough to fund the games we want to play.