An Alternate To The App Store Without Jailbreaking

Visualize the population of iPhone owners. There’s a lot of them, so you’ll need an abstraction: picture them filling the seats of a sports arena. You’re at the center of the playing field looking out at them.

This is a high-tech stadium: you can arbitrarily move seats and arrange the people without any hassle or inconvenience. Let’s arrange the folks according to some criteria: cluster everyone running a jailbroken phone into one section.

How big a slice of the sportsplex do the jailbroken iPhone owners occupy? Now subtract out those in that subset that would pay for apps. What’s left? Well, it’s large enough that when alternate App Stores that required jailbroken phones started appearing they were deemed worthy of coverage by the Wall Street Journal.

Re-arrange the attendees: put everyone who’s joined Apple’s iPhone Developer Program together. There are a lot of butts in those seats. I’m writing this from an airplane, so I don’t have current numbers handy, but in order-of-magnitude terms it’s in the million range.

I’d place odds that the developer number is at or above the jailbreakers subset that would pay for apps. If that’s the case, and jailbreak App Stores constitute a sizable enough market to catch the attention of the Journal, then there’s a market in the form of people who can can run development code on their phones.

Skeptical? Linux was a market well before it has this number of users. Heck, the New York Times reported that non-developers joined the program just to get early access to 3.0.

So let’s talk about getting these folks apps that they can run without going through the App Store or an ad-hoc distribution:

There are popular open source applications. Developers pull the source, build and go. Video game emulators — which pose problems for App Store approval — form a whole category of examples.

How about commercial source based products? One notable example is Oliver Drobnik’s My App Sales, an app sales reporting app was rejecting from the store because it crawls iTunes Connect. It’s now available in try-and-buy source form.

Odds are that you’re not gaga about distributing a source based application. Probably makes you feel a bit discomforted; lack of control and all that; so you might be tempted to write off this market.

Before you write off this market, consider for a second the applications you could build without the restrictions imposed in the App Store.

You’ll naturally think of edgy apps that the carriers oppose: Skype clients that work over the cellular network, off the radar tethering, Google Voice applications, etc. There is value on the edge; look at how Netshare sold before it got yanked.

There’s also the class of apps that Apple rejects because they duplicate Apple-provided functionality. Podcaster is the famous example; it’s now available in a cropped-to-fit form in the App Store. But why leave behind all the goodies? The circles in the Venn Diagram of Podcaster’s customers and iPhone devs probably overlap enough to make this a real market.

Another legit example to consider is browsers. Sure, alternate browsers are allowed. But, Google analytics tells me that a giant majority of you reading this will do so from Firefox. Those cherished Firefox extensions — code that isn’t bundled with the app — would be verboten in an iPhone app.

Finally, developer audience apps like Vimov’s iSimulate — an app that improves the processes of creating app videos by proxying device location, accelerometer and touch events to the simulator — could be sourced this way. Vimov could avoid a significant chunk of the transactional costs by going it alone.

Build and go apps fit in a space between the restriction of the App Store and the jailbreak free-for-all. They’d run in the regular app sandbox; should keep them well behaved, or at least contained.

So let’s go back to that feeling of discomfort. The loss of control associated with giving your source code out is worrisome. And, to a large extent, it’s avoidable:

By moving the bulk of your application’s code into a static library you can distribute you app with only a tiny bit of boilerplate bootstrap code. In the next article in this series I’ll walk you through it. Future articles will flesh out the build and go ecosystem.