Striking trendlet:
1. Mixel, the on-trend and clever app (social collaging — “Instagram meets remixes”) by high-laurel product designers…for iPad
Read this great interview where they basically say “we made something awesome and bet on iPad, but people don’t really use iPad in the right way to download tons of apps and experiment a bunch. So we killed it and are focusing on iPhone.”. The story.
Wild! They built for the tech phenomenon of the next decade, but had to retreat to the King of 2008, the App Store. So the iPad App Store does not work. Can you name a single phenomenally huge app driven by iPad? I can’t.
(My own take is the Mixel app had another problem, it wasn’t super interesting –> I don’t make collages presently. Their app doesn’t do anything I want. I *do* however share pictures, email friends, read news, etc. So it was one of those “a new behavior” problems.)
2. Retickr, who posted the tale of their RSS reader for Mac App Store on Hacker News recently
Here they basically say they did lots of things wrong but one key learning (since they are relaunching on iPhone) is that the Mac App Store does not work. If you have doubts, note how often they were a top 10 app in their category with a mere 100 downloads. The post.
Conclusion: only the iPhone app store works. The others suck. The reasons (my conjecture): insane growth of the platform + a lower attention span interaction model. For stuff you sink deeply into, I guess just a few deep, complex, rich experience apps are the ones you need –> the fabled “Office” and “Photoshop” and “Netflix” of that other big platform, the PC.