396: ‘The Essence of Stealing’, With David Barnard

Special guest David Barnard joins the show. Topics include the App Store — past, present, and post-DMA future — and the excellent new update to his app Weather Up (contrast.co/weather-up).

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Links:

• Weather Up (contrast.co/weather-up).
• On the App Store (apps.apple.com/gb/app/weather-up-live-widgets/…).

• Screenshot of two Weather Up widgets (daringfireball.net/misc/2024/02/TTS-396-Weathe…) showing somewhat different forecasts via two different weather sources.

• RevenueCat (revenuecat.com).

• Sub Club Podcast (subclub.com).

• “How to Game the App Store (davidbarnard.com/post/180568817995/how-to-game…)” — an unfortunately still-relevant piece David wrote back in 2018.

• Trip Cubby (daringfireball.net/linked/2008/09/15/trip-cubby) — first link on Daring Fireball to one of David’s apps, in September 2008 (just two months after the App Store opened).

• March 2008 Apple event announcing the iPhone SDK and App Store (youtube.com/watch?v=IS5bMRKc5Ss).
• Apple Newsroom post (apple.com/newsroom/2008/03/06Apple-Announces-i…).

• WWDC 2010 keynote (youtube.com/watch?v=UjUd0VSM2RA): iPhone 4 and iAds announced.
• Apple Newsroom post (apple.com/newsroom/2010/06/07Apple-Presents-iP…).

• Aaron Hillegass’s acclaimed books on Objective-C and Cocoa programming (amazon.com/stores/Aaron-Hillegass/author/B001J…).

• Ben Bajarin, Creative Strategies (creativestrategies.com/team).

• Fakespot (fakespot.com) — Mozilla’s tool for identifying scams and fake reviews.

• City on Fire (themoviedb.org/movie/42120) — Ringo Lam’s 1987 Hong Kong action movie, starring the great Chow Yun-fat, that inspired Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs.

• Apple’s nearly ruinous “Look and feel” lawsuit against Microsoft in 1994 (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._….).

• “Good artists copy, great artists steal (youtube.com/watch?v=a6jeZ7m0ycw).”

• David, in a blog post from 2011: "Great Developers Steal Ideas, Not Products (davidbarnard.com/post/10339887834/great-develo…)".

• David, on Twitter/X, with a more accurate ballpark estimate of Meta's average revenue per user (ARPU) in the EU (twitter.com/drbarnard/status/1762877451460292999): roughly $4 per user per app per quarter. They could pay Apple's €0.50 per app installation per year Core Technology Fee without breaking a sweat.

This episode of The Talk Show was edited by Caleb Sexton.