The cost of producing software of any quality has fallen to the cost of a few API calls. This mirrors the decline in production cost of many for

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2024-07-10 18:30:03

The cost of producing software of any quality has fallen to the cost of a few API calls. This mirrors the decline in production cost of many forms of media, like books and photographs.

As cost declines, production increases. As Michael Keaton quipped while posing as Ray Croc, the founder of McDonald’s: “You increase the supply, demand will follow.”

Of course, the demand was always there; everyone wants to capture moments in time and share their ideas in ways that are more durable and transferable than memories and speech. Everyone wants to create impressions.

This creative flood becomes a brute force search for “interesting”, placing pressure and strain on our ability to create, publish, host, filter, surface, and discover. The browsable, hand-crafted blogosphere gave way to Twitter and Facebook’s commoditized units of content and algorithms out of necessity. It would take us too much effort to create and too much time to find hawk tuah without them.

Today’s app development ecosystems resemble the creative contexts for writers and photographers pre-web and pre-iPhone. They are based on assumptions that a trained professional is engaging in a noble pursuit. Sit down, load up your IDE, give your app a name, make sure it belongs to a company with a business address, add a logo, upload screenshots, submit for review, wait, respond to the authorities, and hope your creation gets published.