Photo credit: Andrea_44 at Flickr.
Disclaimer: Drupal is used by different people in different contexts in a variety of ways and the following mind dump is rooted in the specific circumstance that I find myself. My fickle ramblings follow herein.
The first time I learnt about the idea of a reusable, discrete chunk of Drupal functionality was probably when I watched a recording of a Drupalcon session called A Paradigm for Reusable Drupal Features which I encountered early last year when I was trying to wrap my head around using the features module for deployment. The vision outlined in the presentation really articulates well the concept of Drupal as a platform which is an idea that has been snowballing recently.
If you want to build a blog, use WordPress. If you want to build a WordPress, use Drupal.
- paraphrased from a tweet by Steve Purkiss.
Combined with installation profiles and Drupal distributions (not to mention adding drush make to the mix) your average Drupal developer has got some powerful tools and effective strategies for building everything from brochureware to large scale web applications. This existing toolset also provides much of the foundation for Drupal apps which could be downloaded remotely to a working site and installed. It seems like an app store or a number of different app stores are not far away. There’s a Lullabot podcast where the idea is raised and also a Drupal Voices episode where Robert Douglas talks about an Drupal app store (the Lullabot website has a great link round-up).
The two Drupal shops who seem to be breaking ground on the concept are LevelTen and Phase2 Technology (Phase2 is the shop that purchased all of the Drupal IP from Development Seed) . Both have Drupal distributions (OpenEnterprise for Level Ten and OpenPublic for Phase2) that seem to be core to their commercial offerings. I recently watched this video of Randall Knutson from LevelTen breaking down how their app store might work:
I think Randall does a great job of explaining the concept and there’s also a blog post on the Phase2 website which breaks it down in a practical way.
There’s a number of issues that this app store concept brings with it and I think all of the concerns fall into 2 categories:
- How an app store affects the Drupal community
- How an app store changes the way Drupal sites are produced
I’m not going to write about the Drupal community concerns except to say that addressing those issues will be the biggest challenge to make this idea a reality. The debate is potential mine-field of divisive arguments over the GPL, contributed modules, and the economics behind the Drupal community. Despite the controversy I think what makes the idea of an app store so appealing to developers is the potential to decouple income from time. Most Drupal websites are costed on a time basis no matter how popular or valuable the final outcome is, so the possibility of a business model based on products (apps) seems like the promised land to any developer tired of bug reports and client feature requests. Unfortunately the grass might not be greener on the other side of the billable hour fence. The truth is that a product based business model for development might pose it’s own economic challenges to the Drupal community. Financial analysis from the iPhone app store make for some sobering numbers:
average annual income for a paid iPhone app (after the App store 30%): $3,050
median annual income for a paid iPhone app (after the App store 30%): $682
Those numbers aren’t great but the issues I’m more concerned with at this stage are how an app store changes the way that Drupal websites get produced. In the YouTube video Randall talks about ‘end-users’ making decisions to purchase apps and install them but for many websites developed by smaller shops (like me) these ‘end-users’ are our clients. These clients may be comfortable with some content management and light user management tasks but extending the features or functionality of their website is not an option for most of them. In this context the marketplace for apps are really other Drupal developers, digital marketing agencies, and web design studios. In an app store scenario these stakeholders are what I’m calling the end-1 users. What kind of app-store do the end-1 users want? I think if the app-store idea sticks it will be this marketplace that makes or breaks it.
2 Comments
I need to watch the level ten video first but I’m going to comment anyway…
I think we’re still a long way from a viable, and revenue raising (for individual developers), app store. The considerations you touch upon e.g. How it will affect the community, need to be considered further especially at this time when drupal is undergoing change and stress at the code developer end.
I think, again personal opinion, we’ve seen the concept of and it’s boom and thought “hey, we do something similar but… We don’t charge for it???”.
Your info re app store income is, as you say, sobering. There must be a spectrum though? Surely those results are tainted by the hundreds of random (and useless) apps that seem to make it in.
You can see my hopes (to some day make it rich via the app store) dying in my eyes as we speak.
Thanks again Cossey.
Yeah, those app store figures are pretty stark but I think they make sense, the whole app store paradigm looks like the publishing industry… a small number of ‘hits’ and then lots and lots of titles making up the remainder of the ‘tail’.