Bulk Apps: Apple Created The Problem Themselves
“Bulk Apps” or Mass Produced Applications have been an increasing problem with Apple’s AppStore for quite some time now. More and more developers are finding that they can “bulk up” their application catalog or portfolio by simply taking a simple template app, applying different data and publishing the application as a totally separate app.
They started out simply as e-books published to the AppStore one book as one application. Usually a book that is in the public domain. Then, actual book publishers saw that iPhone e-books were becoming popular and decided that they would join in and publish their books as e-books. At the time there were a couple of pretty good e-book reader apps out there for publishers to attach to and before you knew it, there were hundreds of e-books in the AppStore.
e-books have become a huge segment of the AppStore comprising over 9,500 titles ranging in price from Free to $20 and more. e-books are an acceptable “bulk” app because Apple gave developers little choice when it came to applications. Sure, you could put 10, 100, even 10,000 books in a single application. However, a book publisher wouldn’t want to because they would have to sell the application for hundreds if not the maximum $999.99.
The real problem started with a new type of application. Location-based apps as well as fan apps. Location-based applications pull data from RSS feeds, flickr, and other sources to create an application that doesn’t require an internet connection to get to the data. A developer pulls the data for a specific region together, creates an application for the AppStore, and published it. Before long, that developer has 100+ apps all using the same code base.
There are currently 71,617 published applications in the AppStore. This number is based on AppShopper.com’s tally. Games comprise the bulk of that number at nearly 20%. e-books take a good 13% and Entertainment another 13%. The rest of the AppStore categories are less than 10% each, the biggest of which is over 7% in the Travel category.
Interestingly, one developer holds just over 13% (that’s equal to all the e-books that are published!) of the 71,617 published applications with a whopping 9,500+ applications. One developer! Brighthouse Labs currently holds the record for the largest collection of applications in the AppStore. Clearly, this is a lucrative business for Brighthouse Labs. It’s probably safe to say that there is more than one person behind this developer. I would even venture to guess that we are talking between 50 to 100 people work for Brighthouse Labs.
Update: Whoops, I don’t know where I came up with 9,500 apps for Brighthouse, that number should be 2,280 which is 3.2% of all the apps published, still an impressive number. 2,280 comes out to about 6 apps a day since the store was opened. Not inconceivable for a one or two developer shop to produce. However, from information garnered from other bulk application developers, it’s probable that Brighthouse employees around 20 or so people to turn out the apps that they do. Consider that Brighthouse didn’t start creating their apps back on July of last year. they have probably been punching out apps for about 8 months which equates to about 10 apps a day, 7 days a week, for 8 months.
Thanks Frank for pointing out my mistake there. I don’t know where the 9,500 came from unless I read the number of e-books as being the number from Brighthouse. I’m leaving the old text in but crossed out to show that I had made the mistake and corrected it.
I would also venture to guess that 95% or more are minimum wage or possibly even “sweat shop” labor that do the bulk of the work, no pun intended. In order for Brighthouse labs to have 9,500+ applications in the store, they would have had to submit to Apple, 24 applications a day, 7 days a week, 52 weeks a year! That’s assuming they started submitting apps the day the AppStore opened!
Brighthouse Labs isn’t the only developer out there creating Bulk apps either. One such developer, Khalid Shaikh, was booted from the AppStore and their privileges to the iPhone development program revoked. At the time, he was the 3rd most prolific developer with over 900 applications published. Apple pulled the developer, not because he was a bulk developer, but because he was publishing copyrighted material in his apps.
Apple made a change to the way developers could sell their wares when they released OS 3.0 not long ago. A new feature called In-App Purchasing allows developers to combine their content into one application and still make money for their separate content. Comixology is taking advantage of this feature with their application “Comics“. Comics is a $0.99 application that allows you to download comics to your iPhone. They have a large collection of comics from 15+ publishers as well as creater-owned titles. There are several comics that are free, but the bulk of the titles cost $0.99. You don’t have to find these titles in the AppStore, you go into the Comics application, find a title you want, and tap a Buy button. You are charged through Apple for the purchase, but no new applications are downloaded to your iPhone/iPod touch. Its downloaded into the Comics application where you can read it at your leisure.
Game developers are taking advantage of this feature to offer new downloadable content for their games like the PS3 and XBOX-360 have done for years. Developers as well as patrons benefit from this since patrons don’t have to buy whole new applications for 3-5 times the price and the new content doesn’t take up extra space on their device. Developers benefit since they don’t have to charge 3-5 times the price which makes the content that more appealing to patrons.
The problem though, and the reason for the headline to this article, is that Apple should have thought of this before opening up the AppStore to developers back in 2008. Now, to be fair, no one predicted the rise of bulk apps back in 2008, so it’s hardly fair to blame Apple for this. However, if Apple had given developers the ability for In-App purchasing back in 2008, would we be seeing the Bulk application problem we are seeing today?
Dave M.
Brighthouse only has 2000 apps not 9500. There is also no reason for a company like that to have a bunch of employees. They could easily be a two or three person show. The apps are simple and then replicated no need for 50 employees in that process. Also after some research on linkedin, it looks like the company is based in Canada. I would be careful about what you post on a blog, obviously you have not researched your topic and claiming a company uses sweatshop labor, if it is not true is a rather serious accusation. Obviously you may be right on that particular point.
I agree with the point that apple has created this mess. The store needs to be more search centric. Right now people are encouraged to scour lists which is an increasingly difficult task with the large number of apps out there.
Frank, thanks a billion for catching that mistake. Man, I have no idea what planet I was on when I wrote that. Sheesh!
I still say that Brighthouse does have a “team” of people working on putting out the apps that they do. It would be rather difficult for one or two people to put out as many apps as they do a week. They may be simple enough apps, but they still have to track down the data that goes into them. Assuming that the data is accurate. I have never purchased one to find out if the data in them is even accurate much less useful.
If anything, it would take at least 2 or 3 people just typing in all the application descriptions that go into submitting the apps.
Looking at one in the store now, they don’t have to accumulate the data into the app before releasing it. It’s rated as if the app has access to the internet, and from the screen shot that they do give, I’m guessing the app is just a browser that is sent off to a website that they maintain. So all the data they display in their apps are stored on servers somewhere.
I just looked at their “LinkedIn” profile. I’m even more concerned now that Brighthouse is nothing more than a spammer of sorts.
“GM Brighthouse Labs/ Arctic Gerbil (we build Iphone Apps-if want one let me know)”
Iphone? “if want one let me know”? Those are the kinds of mistakes one sees in spam messages, not a professional developer or better yet, a General Manager.
As to researching my topic. I have probably done more research on Brighthouse Labs than any other developer in the AppStore, next to Khalid Shaikh. I made an honest mistake with the numbers, I still can’t figure out where my mind came up with the 9,500. I have followed Brighthouse for many months now and watched their app count rise and rise.
Sorry to roast you over the oversight.
I have a couple of the apps. One of the sports team apps and the Buddha Quotes app. They are very simplistic but they do provide me 99 cents worth of value and to be honest I continue to use them much more than many of the games I have bought. I know I could find info about the red sox using my browser but the app just makes the process a little quicker.
I have been following there story a bit since the busted loop post http://bustedloop.com/blog/2009/7/7/how-much-does-it-cost-to-buy-every-iphone-app.html
I get what they are trying to do from a business prospective, and at least they haven’t ripped off copyrighted material like Khalid.
Has anybody reached out to talk to them or get any kind of public statement from them?
Obviously the have also got a ton of junk out there. The iLocate series looks like it is just a google local search and nothing more.
That being said the entire store is full of junk, we just pick on them for being the biggest. Easy target
You said it yourself, you could get the information just as easily by simply browsing to the RedSox RSS feed in Mobile Safari and then creating a link to that page on your device by tapping the “+” button. You will have saved 99ยข and not given money to a company that is at least running a “questionable” business.
As far as ripping off copyrighted material. That’s debatable. If they don’t give credit to where they are getting their information, which is probably nothing more than RSS feeds that are provided by other sources, I would say that they are. Lets take the RedSox as an example. I can’t say for sure if they are using MLB’s RSS feed or some other feed, but say they are using MLB’s. Well, that RSS feed is the property of MLB. Granted, they make it public for others to subscribe to, but when you click on a link in that feed, you are taken to an MLB page with ads as well as the MLB’s content. I don’t know what happens in Brighthouse Lab’s app, you could help there by telling me what they display. Maybe if you could grab a few screen shots for me and email them to me (davemblog@metzener.com).
I watched a “review” of the Poke-Mon SupaFan app on YouTube just now. I got a pretty good feel for what that series of apps does. It’s likely that they have scripts that scrape different RSS feeds and pulls them into a feed that they send to your device for the news. The video section was just generic info from YouTube which could easily be obtained by using the YouTube app on the iPhone/iPod touch. The reviewer couldn’t get the chat room to work, and I question the usefulness of chat rooms in general. They are usually just filled with 14 year olds typing profanity just because they can.
If anyone asked me for a source of info for the RedSox, I would suggest making a bookmark to the MLB RSS feed and saving it to the iPhone/iPod touch home screen (SpringBoard).
I can’t say if anyone has attempted to contact Brighthouse Labs. I would assume one or more of the journalistic blogs have like KRAPPS.com or TUAW.com. I’m not a journalist (as if that wasn’t blatantly obvious), and was just writing an opinion piece. Tell you what. I’m really curious. I’m going to write them to see what kind of response I get. I’ll ask them about their business model and see if they are willing to answer a few questions for a follow-up piece I’ll write if they respond. My guess is that they won’t. We’ll see. … OK, just sent off the email. Should be interesting…
Hi Dave,
I’m going to go ahead and pretend to play devil’s advocate. As a disclaimer – I’ve never seen Brighthouse’s apps, and basing this on what (mostly rants) I’ve read online.
Your comment does almost sound comedic, if you excuse my straightforwardness. As I understood, the point of the app is to provide its users with some information regarding their favourite [insert band/team name here]. Well, ask yourself this: do people who are likely to buy an app like this for convenience bother with links to RSS feeds on their SpringBoard? I’m not trying to say that they aren’t capable of manually digging out and subscribing to a feed, not at all. However, it’s a convenience app, something that (ideally) eliminates having to do that. They seem to be catering to a niche market here (if we wish to make this leap…).
Unfortunately I don’t have an iPhone handy to poke at the mentioned app myself.
Brighthouse doesn’t seem to be doing anything that is out of line. Surely enough, Apple seems to agree with me. They did manually approve all those apps, right? Brighthouse flooded the store with their stuff, but that’s their business model (as far as we can tell). Yes, you can develop one great app, put a 4.99 price tag on it, and hope that it gets picked up by all review sites, or wins the “Apple lottery”. Alternatively, you can create thousands of possibly mediocre but maybe useful to some people apps priced at the lowest 0.99 (pocket change, really), sit back and enjoy the money flowing in. Seems to make sense, right? As for them “spamming” the store – well, that’s for Apple to fix, with a paradigm shift of sorts.
After all, you don’t open up Amazon’s vast catalog and start complaining that a particular manufacturer is flooding some sections with their products, not allowing others to even poke their heads out? No, you instead read reviews, search for particular things, and buy them that way. Their “recommended products” thing comes to mind as well; basically, as was already mentioned in this thread, this catalog-based approach is a dead end.
People really need to change the way they think about the app store. Performing duties of the omnipresent master, Apple really needs to help people with that
cheers!
@Grigory: Thanks for your comment!
You may very well be correct that they are not doing anything out of line. I still question the ownership of the data. However, looking at some of their Application Descriptions, I am seeing that they are crediting TravelWiki for their travel apps and stating that trademarks and copyrights are owned by “their respective owners”.
The “paradigm shift” you mention is the OS 3.0 firmware that allows developers like Brighthouse to combine all their apps like SupaFan into one application with the ability to purchase individual content as needed.
Mind you, this would take some effort on Brighthouse’s part, but in the end, would save them many hours of having to generate screen shots for specific locations for apps like their iLocate line. They may not want to be bothered if they don’t mind the current process they have in place.
I just get frustrated with all the stories of developers getting letters stating “change this or be removed”, yet Brighthouse Labs seems to be just fine pumping out tens if not hundreds of applications a week.
Hopefully, Brighthouse will respond to the email I sent them. If even to tell me that they won’t be bothered defending themselves to the likes of myself.