Spare Change
As you probably know, we try to remind people as much as possible to support the developers and there’s good reason for it. The reason most of us use a Windows phone is because of the huge amount of tweaking and software available for our phones and it’s all at our fingertips. But we can’t forget that a lot of this is not the result of large corporations- it’s regular individuals who are devoting their spare time for the sake of the community. And as good hearted as they are, the sheer amount of time and in fact out of pocket expenses (between web hosting and third party paid software) often puts them in a deficit…especially when you think about the time devotion in particular. Recently I asked some of the developers that we’ve highlighted about the level of donations that they receive relative to their costs and I was shocked. The best of the group received about one tenth of one penny for every download but the average is closer to one one-hundreth of a penny per download. Think about that…it means that for every 10,000 downloads they receive $1. It’s staggering. A lot of this has to do with free riders – the developers make great apps and everyone assumes that someone else contributing or that they don’t need to contribute since others will. The problem is that almost everyone is in this group and donations are few and far between. Let’s talk specifics though.
Raise your hand if you’ve used a theme from Mobile Matt – like FuzeBerry. It was wildly popular. Check out Matt’s websites now and you’ll see that he’s given up the domains. The reason is simple. The costs of hosting exceeded the donations to the point where it made no sense to continue a site. Of course, we’re working to give Matt a dedicated page and hosting on our site (and our forums are now his current residence until we can make him shinier accommodations) but we need to all think about the spread between downloads and donations and how vast it is.
It doesn’t begin or end with Matt though. I’ve had the same conversation with other developers. Herm (HermsSoftware.com) has moved to a mix of paid apps and free apps. Of course, the free apps are just that – they are downloaded and very very rarely lead to donations. Again, Herm is just an individual who is kind enough to develop for the community but he’s been forced to do paid apps to cover his costs. Herm has freebies that include Magic 8 Ball, Peggle, Dog Whistle…well he’s up to 20 apps now half of which are free. I think Doug Simmon of BlownFuze.org and Tilt2.BlownFuze.org put it best when commenting on Herm’s latest release:
Hey, to all you people who’ve never paid for software, here’s a good opportunity to see what it’s like. Herm is brilliantly creative and if you click the link to his site in the article you’ll see what kind of fun stuff he’s come up with. You’ll also see that his prices are not only reasonable but dirt cheap. If you’d like you can try a few of his free limited versions of some of his programs and then once you’re convinced that laying down $1.29, less than a load of laundry, on something like AudioMeter or DogWhistle, is worth satisfying the intrigue you may have. Then you’ll get a warm feeling for doing the right thing and score a few points with God to offset all those torrents you downloaded.
Well put Doug. The same argument can be made for Bbonzz who provided Mobi O’Lantern, Pocket Coffee Mobile, Ring ‘n Run, Walk of Fake, PocketNoise and Fake Badge. He’s been releasing free ‘lite’ apps and providing the full version for a mere $.99. The reason is simple – without charging he was able to count his donations on one hand.
Of course, these are all just examples. The same arguments can be made for Herg who has ported just about everything to our phones (as well as cooking the ROMs they run on) who has started a ‘donators only’ line of ROMs. This was required of the person that ported (often as part of a group) numerous Opera builds, footprints, Xperia panels, HTC album builds, and the latest HTC keyboards to name a few, because of an utter lack of donations. And we also can’t leave out the Olinex team who provide the unlockers for our phones…who without there wouldn’t be flashing at all.
So why the long intro? Simply put, if things continue the way they are then we’ll all have a lot less developers, a lot less apps and a lot less fun. This is a simple plea to the community. It just takes a dollar here and there from each of you (yes, each and every one of you) to support the developers and chefs out there who have provided to you the tools and apps to make your phone what it is today. Remember, a cup of Starbuck’s coffee is over $2 and I’m sure many of you buy a few a day so parting with a dollar here and there shouldn’t be a bank breaker. That cup of coffee lasts all of a half hour while the apps, ROMs and games provide countless entertainment…I ask that you put these in perspective and support the developers in our forums and on XDA.
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Comments
Rick Well said. As a programmer from a previous generation, I am appreciative of the great work that volunteer developers make available to us. The quality and professionalism of the work is amazing. I agree that those of us who download and use should do a better job of donating and expressing appreciation. I have donated to the developer of the ROM that I use, and I will be looking to donate to others in the near future.
Another pet peeve is the way that we comment on this site and others, like XDA. The organization and professionalism of these volunteer gurus is better than most corporate support sites. The least we can do is to be professional in return and follow the rules of the forums, no matter how picky we might think they are.
kbiel And with this post you have rediscovered the tragedy of the commons. I appreciate your appeal and I hope that it works, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
herg the whiz kid i agree with the above. my passion for modifing devices is fun but has come at a price. that price is it would be appreciated by users if they said thanks and oh by the way here is a couple of dollars for your effort.
by doing that it tells me i am doing something good and pushes me to do more ports/roms to share.
Doug Simmons Now I’m not defending cheapskateness but it could be argued that part of the blame if not most (as the tragedy of the commons is to be expected) falls squarely on Microsoft for failing to create a decent and trafficked centralized and secure application distribution system for developers to use to earn some money more proportionate to their to the hard work they did, the utility they add to the customers, along the lines of Google’s marketplace and Apple’s app store.
Think on that. 
But I believe the trend is that you get a cell phone, you google your way onto xda, you go cab crazy, you download visual studio, you make your first application, next thing you know you’ve ported The TP2’s WVGA Manila onto a VGA phone and you’re getting jack for donations. You keep it up though, you get grumpy and cynical on irc, and either you get spotted by a venture capitalist (Chainfire) and sort of make it but not really or the futility of this dawns on you and you throw in the towel entirely. So for those of you who are aspiring developers, reread the article and double check that windows mobile developing is indeed the right endeavor.
Thanks for the quote, thanks for the plugs, thanks for the good article. Fan these flames.
Raudel Maybe there should be a 1 dollar minimum monthly contribution to be a member of XDA-Developers website. 1 dollar isn’t anything but it is better then nothing.
Doug Simmons Raudel, the folks who are behind the operations, not just the administration and not the moderation, of the XDA website and all its forums, their interests lie in unique IPs visiting the site, click through rates and payouts, not getting sued and minimizing overhead, things like that. Their interests do not include making herg a few bucks a month. They don’t even include hosting software on their ftp as they used to, forcing everyone to turn to rapidshare.
I had my own idea like yours — all new users upon registering must prove they have a paypal account. But both your and my idea would stifle registration and traffic to the site, along with it revenue, and firing up that ftp server again means money spent unnecessarily on bandwidth. Perhaps more significantly, doing such things could expose them further to IP lawsuits as they would appear openly complicit in the distribution and/or compensation of developers for fiddling with and proliferating potentially copyrighted material.
Given that such measures might stifle revenue, increase overhead and increase liability, what could possibly be in it for them to outweigh all of that to help the categories of people herg just listed? The word volunteer gets tossed around a lot but make no mistake, decisions along the lines of all of this and XDA’s general direction are made as any other business would. Or a nonprofit, a church, any body of people with bills to pay and a product or service to push.
Dougie Downer Simmons
Doug Simmons I guess I should point out that everything I just said right there is conjecture — but good conjecture. I don’t know who those “folks” are, how many of them exist, if they sit on some kind of board and call themselves trustees or if they’re all administrators as well or hell even rom chefs. But XDA claims on its Wikipedia page to have 800,000 members. Between the members and non-members, that’s a lot of traffic, enough to bring in thousands a day, probably a bit more than their ISP bill, which someone must be paying. Probably the same guy who has access to the bank account into which all the ad revenue is dumped.
Regarding legality and their elevated sensitivity to getting sued and how that might affect their behavior in regards to what I said in my last post, according to some articles they have had heat from Microsoft in the past and mods are on high alert for anyone mentioning even the word torrent, even if used in an innocent context. All it takes is one scary cease and desist letter and byebye rom forums or a lawsuit and byebye XDA entirely.
Their ISP, xs4all.nl, is one that takes risks with sketchy clients including the Church of Scientology which got the ISP raided. Another noteworthy item is that iphone-developers.com resolves to the same IP as XDA’s (which could be a proxy server or the same machine hosting both sites). They also share the same nameservers as 2600.com, another very gray area operation, a hacking magazine and a large organization that has had its share of run-ins with the law with friends like Kevin Mitnick doing heavy time. If you have something that’s sketchy legally (projects modifying and distributing Microsoft and HTC software), you look for such an ISP and if you want someone else for whatever reason to be your nameserver, well, same decision making. I just can’t see the 2600 and Scientology relationship as a coincidence.
You don’t put a gray-area site on just any large ISP, you scout one out that has a reputation for looking the other way and trying to protect its clients from law enforcement as aggressively as they can, one that has had experience with its government before. And you make sure no one posts porn or warez or anything not family-oriented so as not to raise your risks higher.
Point being, XDA is pretty big relative to any kind of site, not just niche sites, so what I said about it needing to be run like any other business must be more or less right. The smaller an organization is, like the mobility sites (not to mention mine), the more room they have to exercise altruism, as illustrated right here in this article.
Doug
jimski OK, so DavidK (and DougS), you humbled me tonight. Although I have some serious financial issues right now I just served up a few cups of coffee to each of five XDA developers. And I didn’t forget our own Herg who has made my stock Fuze look good with his TF3D theme these past several months. I had a short list of “to donate” and was waiting for my situation to improve. But after reading tonight, I figured if I waited too long some of these developers might just find something else to do, and that would be sad. Having developed a bunch of complex database applications I can honestly say the motivation is in the thrill of getting something to work just right, but the appreciation, financial or otherwise, helps to keep you focused.
You know from previous posts I am a proponent of paid apps as I have purchased well over 100 (not including updates) in the past several years. I guess with donationware, sometimes you take it for granted because that 30 day trial never runs out. In the future I will try to be a bit more disciplined with wheeling out the coffee cart in a more timely manner. Thanks for kicking me in the side of the head. I needed it.
Doug Smith Hi everyone, I for one am really glad David posted this and that the response has been so good. The team here at Mobility Digest have been actively discussing this issue for quite some time. We have been seriously brain storming on how we could compensate developers and keep them developing. The current honor system does not seem to be working and something needs to be done. We have thrown several ideas out but I am trying to create a developers corner in the forums designed to support them. Not sure yet how to do this, but I am thinking on it. I am also in the middle of a new website layout that will make our content much more visable and more easily located. This new layout will also allow me to feature developers and draw attention to them.
I would also like to ask for your support for our community here at Mobility Digest. I am doing everything in my power to promote and build this community but I need your help. It doesn’t require money either. How you can support our community is by simply coming to our website daily and checking out our forums. Participate in the conversation being had daily in our community. We need the traffic to pay the bills, and we do have bills guys. Instead of complaining about the sidebar advertisments, why not click on the ones you might like? Support our sponsors and check out thier websites. Increasing traffic will help us continue on into the next device and continue on with our community. Help us by recommending our community to people who have a passion for mobility. Another great way to help us is to drop us tips on breaking news that needs to be posted. We all here at Mobility Digest work day jobs and sometimes it is very difficult to stay on top of things that happen minute by minute it seems. We are also in desperate need of writers. If you got some time, we could use your help. Email me if you are interested. Those are bunch of ways you can help our community which in turn helps our developers. As we go forward with new websites, we will need your help.
So send a few bucks to our developers, and stop by our websites and join in our community!
Doug Smith
bbonzz Won’t enter in the merit since am one of the mentioned people. But one thing has to be said: thanks David!
Chris L @Raudel I agree completely. XDA-Developers has almost 2 million members and they have between 2 and 4 thousand active members at any given time. If those members were to donate jsut $1/month to the active developers, the site, bounties, or even charity, the quality of ROMs and applications for WinMob (and now android) would increase 10 fold..
Don’t see it happening anytime soon, but it sure would be nice.
Raudel Sorry I’ve been busy and haven’t read all the replies to my comment on the thread, I’ll catch up on all the comments tonight.
RAudel
Raudel David K.
This Post really brought out some good points.
I’m not an expert at any of the legal issues behind any of the ideas that will request money as a contribution instead of a donation.
But despite the comments that your post created, the great many will continue to download and request, download and request, and download and request, without ever donating a penney to anyone. So the only way developers will get properly compensated is if the hosting forum is only accessible by paying members.
I’m unsure how the money would be distributed among developers (if a mandatory contribution ever happens) and i honestly don’t care as long as we have happier developers. Happy developers = more applications = more tweaks = more ROMS = more happy users.
I too will need to do my share for I am also among the ones mentioned.
I hope this Post has a higher IMPACT then just the comments created in response to your POST.
Raudel
jimski It’s real simple. Download to your hearts content. If after two or three weeks the app, tweak, game or ROM is still on your device, if it’s suggested, buy a cup of coffee (even a small cup) or remove the install. Fair is fair. You will sleep better knowing that you are helping a vast community of developers.
And if you are one of those people who can sleep well regardless of who you cheat or steal from, then maybe you should think about buying an iPhone.
Very well said, it’s definitely one of the reasons developers stopped developing stuff especially looking at how aggressively demanding people are now when it comes to new, cutting edge stuff, and yet the attitude and gratitude shown back to them will put even Uncle Scrooge to shame.