On Shareware

Some of you probably heard about mac enthusiast/blogger/wunderkind Phill Ryu recently launching a contest called “My Dream App.” The basic idea? Everyone can submit ideas for cool shareware apps that they wish existed, a panel of judges (including some shareware developers and Mac notables) cuts the list down to 24 cool and feasible ideas. Website users then vote to eliminate candidates every week, until 3 remain. These candidates get their apps written by some of the aforementioned shareware developers, fame and royalties ensue. The “American Idol” of Mac software design.

I’m curious to see how well this is going to work, and what it says for the shareware market as a whole. By definition, it’s sort of a niche market – the apps are usually simple (though sometimes surprisingly useful) one-shots that are used by a subset of the already-niche mac geek userbase. People within that group usually register your app because they often are developers themselves, they respect your work and so on.

But when you try to get out into the more mainstream market (even just to slightly less geeky mac users), you need to start guilting people into registering, because the internet often makes your serial numbers just about as as easy to distribute as your software. This is really where the problem arises, I think – people will steal your app, and they’ll do it a lot, and you either have to compensate for the people who crack your software by charging more for the people who actually register (a $20 desktop worldmap or a $25 blog updater come to mind), or you charge peanuts and hope that you’ve dropped the cost to the point where people would rather pay than waste their time looking for codes or cracks. Of course, if you choose the latter option, then some people might feel less guilty stealing it because “oh, it’s only worth 5 bucks anyway”.

Ryu and his buddies have money to burn on something like My Dream App, so there’s no question that people buy their shareware – but I’m wondering whether it’ll ever grow out of this mac-geek/blogger-developer thing and to more mainstream.