Many developers have been fuming and insulting the hell out of Andy Weekes (on twitter as @aweekes) over his continuous and ignorant marketing tactics. (When I say ignorant, I’m not being offensive, I’m using the word literally, please bear this in mind.) Personally, I think many of the reactions from these developers were excessively harsh and uncalled for.
Yes, Andy Weekes was, essentially, trying to get some really quick sales from disgruntled Twitterrific users. Yes, this is a tactic most of us would consider foul play. Even when the author of Twitterrific himself asked Andy to stop and gave his reasoning peacefully, Andy didn’t cease or desist. Thus started developers rallying spewing hateful text against him in excessive amounts for reasons I still don’t fully understand.
First of all, when you attack someone, it’s almost guaranteed to put them on the defense immediately. Thus, using hateful words or cruel suggestions are not going to actually get any kind of point through to them, regardless of how “good” your intentions are. This goes for anyone in any situation, as far as I know.
Secondly, everyone makes mistakes. Hopefully we learn from our mistakes and don’t repeat them, but there’s no rule that says this has to happen on the same day that the mistake was made, or even the same week. I know from experience that it may take longer than even a week or two to come to see someone else’s point of view, especially when you’re a young adult or teenager. (Does anyone know how old Andy is, by the way?) So look, let’s give him a break, and the benefit of the doubt.
Lastly but most importantly, if we’re going to convince someone like Andy to not “market” using these tactics, we need to actually explain why. I don’t think this has been done yet, save for @chockenberry’s two (potentially vague) tweets.
I’m pretty new to this community of Mac and iPhone developers. Obviously many of the traditions and customs are lost on me. I’m not even claiming I fully understand exactly why what Andy did was considered “douchebaggery” by so many. But I’ll take my best guess:
We’re a community of developers who rely on one another for help, support, friendship, and occasionally, beer money if we forgot our wallet in our other pants (or so we claim). Without the help of one another, we would not have wonderful code released on BSD-like (or other non-viral) licenses, and things like MGTwitterEngine wouldn’t even be released in the first place by experienced developers. But most importantly, we all want ourselves, each other, and Apple, to succeed, because this helps to cultivate a kind of lifestyle that so many of us are fortunate and grateful to live. Think about it for a second… how many people get to do exactly what they love for 8 or so hours a day, and get paid for it, and can live moderately comfortably from it? We’re damn lucky. And it’s all because Apple is succeeding, and that’s all because we’re creating great software, and that’s all because we help one another in countless ways. Point in case: Craig Hockenberry is one of the contributers of MGTwitterEngine, which is a driving source of code behind countless Twitter apps for the Mac and iPhone, both free and commercial. He contributes to this code for the better of the community, which ultimately does help himself, but more vitally, it creates an amazing and wonderful environment in which we can work every day, if we try hard enough. And trying hard enough usually does not include “stealing” customers from other hard-working developers. Most would consider that a very lazy way of marketing, if marketing at all.
Okay, my rhetoric does kind of suck. But I think my point was pretty clear: we don’t just rely on one another, we help one another to succeed.
Like I said before, though, I could have gotten this completely wrong. I’m pretty damn new here, too, so please, readers, feel free to correct me if I am mistaken.
You’re talking about someone who told me I was a lunatic that needs to “go outside” when I called him out on his wrong-doing. You’re saying we help one another to succeed, but I wouldn’t dream of applying the latter to this guy.
He is clearly ignorant, childish, and his only goal is to make money out of this current crisis. He’s no developer at heart, and from what I’ve seen, definitely doesn’t deserve a place in this community. So you’ll have to forgive me if I have absolutely no sympathy for the guy. He had this coming all long.
Mitch
I agree that the typical rule of thumb doesn’t apply 100% here. All I’m saying is, it’s got to be somewhere in the middle. Sure, his stopping this mass-spamming and even posting a public apology may seem a little insincere, and maybe it is. But, everyone deserves a second chance, right? My whole point is, this guy doesn’t deserve to be told to go to hell, and the like. That’s extreme and isn’t going to solve any problems except “how do you piss someone off and make them feel bad” (which isn’t really a problem that needs to be solved, by the way).
I have no problem with what he did. His app worked, others didn’t. He was trying to seize customers. THAT’S WHAT MARKETING IS ABOUT. Its too bad that Twitteriffic (which I like) and others stopped working with the Twitapocalypse. He did nothing wrong. The other developers should’ve coded better. If my app failed and another app worked, and that app’s developer was twittering my customers- that’s my own fault for not being ready. And “community” has nothing to do with. They are competitors, and anything is fair game short from lying.
@Matthew Butch:
From what I understand, this idea of ruthless competition is frowned upon in the Mac/iPhone Developer Community. That’s one of the points I tried to make in this post. Perhaps someone else could explain it better than me, maybe more accurately too?
How is what @aweekes did any different from Apple’s own “I’m a Mac” ads where they take advantage of and often exaggerate shortcomings in their competitor’s product? Those ads are often opportunistic, spiteful and mean-spirited and yet the Mac “developer community” loves them. This “community” seem to be a pretty self-righteous and hypocritical bunch.
As more or less an outsider to it: I don’t quite get the whole uproar.
As Matthew said, marketing is about exploiting your competitions weakness. Yes, that’s not what the Mac community usually is about. But there are a couple of things to note:
a) The Mac community of today is not the Mac community “of yore”. It’s an expanding market, and it will attract people who have grown up in other communities, with different cultures. Some of those cultures are deeply ingrained with a competitive “take-no-prisoners” attitude. Name-calling is not going to integrate them. And as for people complaining that those guys “have no place in the community” – you don’t exactly get to pick who joins a community that prides itself on sharing openly. So you can stomp your feet, or you can try explaining to them what went wrong, like Steven did. (Thank you for taking the time to write the article!)
Me, I’d rather be part of a community that is forgiving to newcomers’ mistakes than an old boys club that just complains how all of this didn’t happen in the olden days.
b) The iPhone market is a race to the bottom. The way the AppStore is structured, the only way to make decent amount is ruthless marketing – that’s Apple’s fault, and if they don’t fix it soon, it will break the community.
I think the biggest problem, the one which makes this ‘unfair’, is that Twitterrific had already been fixed and re-uploaded to the App Store, but Apple hadn’t yet approved it. By aggressively marketing against that backdrop, you’re essentially kicking another man when he’s down and then dancing on his grave. In the Mac Vs PC ads from Apple, Apple are criticising the PC for the fact that Microsoft make poor software – it’s Microsoft’s own fault. Here, someone’s simply taking advantage of the misfortune of somebody who has done nothing wrong and can’t actually do anything more to rectify the situation.
It isn’t a problem with marketing, it’s long-term strategy. All the Mac developers help each other out when they have problems. Taking advantage now might get you one or two more customers, but you’ll have real trouble getting help and support on the dev forums from the other guys who know way more than you do.
So, the excessive anger was unjustified, but Craig Hockenberry’s advice was perfectly correct.
Yeah, what he did was somewhat similar to what Apple does in the Mac/PC ads, but Mac and iPhone developers are not Apple. They already have enough problems they can’t affect, such as Apple’s unpredictable behaviour or the small market share of the Mac (and yes, the iPhone). The very last thing they need is to antagonize each other with “ruthless marketing”. The only thing this will achieve is even more problems for developers, and customers who can’t trust them anymore.
What @aweekes did may have been legitimate marketing, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a bad idea and hurtful to the already fragile iPhone software eco system.
@Odie: I can see some resemblance between the light-hearted Get a Mac ads and someone trying to get a few quick, easy customers due to a technicality in the app of a “competitor”. However, I think there’s a significant difference in attitude and tone, between these. Mainly, the Get a Mac ads are meant to bring awareness of the Mac platform to PC users in a cute, entertaining way, whereas what Andy did was borderline tactless and done simply for the sake of a few bucks. There’s a fine line there, but I think it’s a real line and I think that many people think Andy crossed it very early on when he started spamming and ignoring peoples’ requests for him to stop.
@Rachel Blum: You bring up some very interesting points. Having a background unrelated to Macs or this Mac Dev community, it was definitely a culture shock for me when I joined. I ended up making a ton of mistakes (much more than the one Andy made 2 days ago) and a dozen or so people claim they will never forgive me and I’m essentially dead in their book. Some of those people, however, have been super kind and forgiving and have accepted the fact that it just took me some getting used to this community, and today, I can fortunately call many of those people my friends and I talk to a lot of them every day.
So, I can definitely understand your perspective about wanting to be in a forgiving community. It’s difficult to go by each day remembering that many people (some of them very key) in this community will never work with me again, and there’s nothing I can do to change that.
About your App Store point, I disagree to some extent. I think a huge factor in the “Race to the bottom” as you described it, was the non-serious developers trying to “compete” with the serious ones, and charging 99ยข for apps that should have been worth more. Another developer (summed this up really well)[http://www.losingfight.com/blog/2008/11/15/how-to-price-your-iphone-app-out-of-existence/] in his blog.
@LKM: Well said!
@Steven Degutis: I think Andy’s piece also lies the blame (mostly) at the feet of the AppStore. The way it is set up, it almost requires the developers to be cheap, just to be listed in the top 100.
(In general, it’s an abysmal piece of work from a company that prides itself on well-designed UIs)
While the non-serious developers are an issue, they are encouraged by a model that rewards number of sales only. Quality doesn’t really matter, customer support doesn’t really matter. (How would you tell if you actually get that from a company – dig through hundreds of reviews?).
There’s not even that much of a penalty if you continually release shoddy work – as a consumer, I have no way to look at the company/author behind an app and their track record – and it would be easy for Apple to provide that.
Another source of competition to serious developers that seems widely ignored is that the iPhone is becoming a marketing platform. Big TV shows? Get their own, free, app. Have a web app business? Release a free support app. Make your money on other platforms? Release a free or cheap app that’s below what an iPhone-only company could sustain.
But the biggest point is that Apple has no incentive to improve that situation. After all, consumers get a steady flood of app at prices that make them quite unlikely to complain, and most of them are actually decent enough. That keeps the iPhone fandom flames fanned, and more hardware is sold.