leemhoffman

The IOS Development process is outdated and kind of crappy, but there are simple tacitly accepted solutions that fix virtually all of the issues. Specifically:

- Hockey App For Pre Public Distribution - Auto Updates, One Click Link Install (no need to join a google group) - Enterprise account - no device ids, send the link to anyone

The dev cycle on mobile is slower, and more waterfall, but there is no excuse to not be iterating on anything more than 3-5 day cycles on either android or IOS.

I think this is the key question. I don't have an answer, but I'd love to hear other people's thoughts on it.

The problem, and I speak from first hand experience here, is that its increasingly hard to make a successful consumer product that does not leverage these apis. They are accelerants, and if our primary goal is to find product market fit and take the market before anyone else, not using those accelerants can be quite detrimental.

My suspicion is that App Store rank doesn't necessarily translate into highly used app. Many of the highly ranked apps get there by buying downloads. There definitely is a ton of open data on app success out there, though spotting an app with an organically fast growth rate and high DAU is probably much harder without access to quality data.

Thanks for expanding this out, I jotted this out as a quick thought, without probably giving context to people who haven't been following the story over the last couple days.