Patreon is about to eat itself - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/FoldableHuman/status/1092846201374892032 <comment><USER2> People forgot what "sustainable business model" even means. It does not mean "infinite growth and 10 VC funds that want you to crap over your product to make even more money".

Sustainable business model means that you can pay your bills from your income (not from investments, since those want payback). It means happy customers and good products. It means that you grow in a reasonable pace, with costs that you'll be able to cover. Investors are a liability, not a feature.

<comment><USER3> > Investors are a liability, not a feature.

It isn't fair to make a post identifying a misused phrase, but then turn around and call investors a liability. Investors are a key part of the process.

While I personally agree with you on what a sustainable business model should mean, investors hold the opinion that actually matters (much like a judge's opinion of what is reasonable is more important than the average armchair expert). Someone has to decide what "sustainable" means, and it is best that the person who decides is the one who stumped up the money.

<comment><USER4> > Investors are a key part of the process.

What process?

<comment><USER5> The process of making money for investors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Patreon will fail and thankfully it will be purely down to the marketplace.

You see the marketplace does not have the same ideology as Patreon.

> More than $1 billion will be paid out to creators since the company's > inception in 2013.

Patreon does not pay out (it's own money) to creators, although they act like they do. They are merely a middle man. That's it. However, Patreon sees themselves as some sort of moral compass policing the internet and choosing whether or not to payout to a creator whether or not they have broken their terms of service.

Now that other competitors like bitPatreon and SubscribeStar have come into view and actively taking payments on-behalf of creators that would otherwise not be allowed to under Patreon. This will be seen as the start of a shift for creators overall.

One last thing. Last I heard, Patreon has over 140 employees. Seriously, for what. Fraud should be down to Stripe. Paying out, again to Stripe. Their platform could be built over a week using Vue.

Oh right, those 140 employees. It's for policing the content creators... I gotcha.

Needless to say. I'm not happy about this situation. Maybe I'll do something about it.

<comment><USER7> The vast majority of Patreon's user base (the artists getting patronage) are not producing anything that would get booted off of Patreon for. In order to compete, bitPatreon and SubscribeStar will have to compete on attracting Patreon's artists off Patreon.

(FTR, I'm mildly certain that many artists on Patreon might even find the policing of the Patreon platform to be a positive, because it means their name isn't associated with the names of people they find reprehensible. I'm concerned that alternatives such as bitPatreon and SubscribeStar will quickly gain the reputation of being a platform _for_ people whose beliefs are considered reprehensible elsewhere, which automatically makes it difficult to market those alternatives.)

<comment><USER8> But some of those artists are rightly concerned that Patreon has that kind of power. I don't want the phone company to restrict who I can call, even if I never would call the "criminals" they block me from calling. There are others who are supporters of the banned topic even though their particular bit of art doesn't actually have anything to do with the banned topic.

I don't know how many will leave, but I don't like the idea of a company choosing morality and so I won't support anyone on patreon. If an artists wants my support they won't get it on Patreon (fair notice, so far I have not supported any artists in other ways - who knwos if this will change)

<comment><USER9> I'm not sure the comparison to the phone company is very applicable. This would be the case if Patreon would be a pure payments proessor, like Mastercard or Visa (or maybe Stripe). But Patreon provides pages on their own website within their own brand identity for these creators, stores their digital media, promotes them through their search interface etc.

In my opinion, Patreon is more akin to a newspaper deciding which ads to show next to their articles or to a shopping mall deciding which shops to rent space to. And _of course_ every newspaper will reject ads that would infuriate their readers (or journalists) and shopping malls will not rent to businesses that might damage their reputation (depending on how "upscale" it is this might be everything from soup kitchens over gambling outfits and payday lenders to brothels).

Now, you might disagree with them whether they have drawn the right line there and consequently take your business elsewhere (just as you might not want to visit a shopping mall with the wrong mix of shops), but I find it a bit of a stretch to frame this as a "free speech" issue.

<comment><USER10> > Patreon provides pages on their own website within their own brand identity > for these creators, stores their digital media, promotes them through their > search interface etc

Which is exactly the kind of useless functionality that they don't need. Most of the creators I've seen either migrate away from Patreon or diversify themselves end up using payment processing services like Stripe or Paypal.

<comment><USER11> > Which is exactly the kind of useless functionality that they don't need.

So says you, yet the vast majority of people I subscribe to on Patreon use it as a delivery platform for advance content to subscribers. One of the major ways it promotes higher donation amounts is by letting those people have gated access to content. How else would this be easily accomplished except for this "useless" functionality? A single password that is handed out? A large list of passwords that the artist needs to manage?

It quickly becomes obvious that this useless functionality has a very real use case, and I think it's in fact one of the drivers of high donation rates in some cases.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Lot's of people are basically asking why Patreon ever needed $60m VC money and why couldn't it have just emerged into a sustainable little platform for creators. I think the answer is here:

>The new capital will go towards hiring to expand its 80 person team and scaling up growth by recruiting more creators including videographers, political pundits, game developers, illustrators, musicians, and comedians.

Patreon was doing a Netflix. Patreon is a platform and it needs content on it's platform to draw people in. So it used the $60m to bribe creators to sign up. Without that $60m someone else could very easily have created the same platform, bought all the big content creators and squished Patreon over night. It was about establishing their network effect.

Now they've effectively done that, they're the defacto place for this. So now they need to extract value from the position they're in. It makes perfect sense to me. It's not great for consumers - it's basically buying a network effect driven monopoly, but isn't that basically 80% of what silicon valley is doing today?

<comment><USER13> This seems weird to me. Patreon isn't really a platform, at least it isn't considered as such by any of the people I patronize. Their platform is youtube, or software. Patreon is just a way they get their work funded by people like me. As was shown during patreon's last big fuck-up, it is pretty easy for people to pack up shop and get their money through some other channel.

<comment><USER14> I believe Naomi Wu (@RealSexyCyborg) would beg to differ - I think she only managed to get 300/800 patreon subscribers to follow her to subscribestar (before it got eaten by the culture wars)

<comment><USER13> 300/800 isn't a meaningful statistic. What percentage of her funding did that account for?

<comment><USER15> Even if it's 75% of revenue on only that 37.5% of patrons, that still means it's not "pretty easy" to move to another service without taking a massive hit in revenue. Don't underestimate the network effects at play for something like this.

<comment><USER16> How is this a network effect? It's just inertia - it's inconvenient for the patrons to move their accounts.

<comment><USER14> Except if they have other people they patronise on patreon, they aren't looking at moving their accounts, they're looking at creating an extra one.

And people leaving patreon entirely is often even worse because they often do so over a boycott by a well known account, in the process depriving lower tier creators they previously supported on there of revenue.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> Yup. Patreon is a Series C company. If you take that amount of money, your strategy becomes Grow Or Die.

If they had bootstrapped, they'd be totally sustainable on a hundredth of the revenue.

I get it though. When Patreon started it was not clear whether the model would work AT ALL. It could have easily just eaten Jack Conte's savings and he would've been a 30 year old eating ramen for years and then end up with nothing.

In retrospect the time was right, and YouTube was the perfect ally, and it could've been easily bootstrapped. It would've been hard to know that up front.

Still, $100 Million over 5 years seems like a lot of cash burnt for what they offer. I guess we'll find out where it went when they release their "value services".

<comment><USER18> Actually, what did VC give this company that supported their growth (actual question)? I'm a little bit surprised (having not ever looked into it) that it _isn 't_ bootstrapped. I mean, you take people's money upfront and then distribute it monthly, taking a cut. All your operations costs are covered because you are paid upfront. In fact, you _should_ be able to squeeze out even 1 or 2 percent more because you're holding on to people's money in advance. It's recurring credit card charges, so relatively easy to manage expectations of operating expenses.

Is it mostly the social media side of the business that's eating up the money (i.e., the services for allowing the creator to interact with their patrons)?

How is Librepay doing? As they are a non-profit organisation, I suppose that probably means they are boot-strapped (barring a sugar daddy somewhere). I've barely ever heard of anyone using them, so I guess growth is slow, but are they able to fund themselves without volunteers yet?

It seems weird to me that this is not a more open playing field -- especially since these guys aren't even doing payment processing internally.

Edit: As usual, I can answer some of my own questions right after I post. Here is a statement of the progress of LibrePay: [https://liberapay.com/about/stats](https://liberapay.com/about/stats) They are distributing about 1400 Euros per week now. Interestingly as of the middle of last year, they were distributing up to 4000 Euros a week, but then it precipitously dropped off (presumably because they blocks donations from certain donors... I seem to remember hearing something about that). So, it's not big enough yet to pay anybody a salary.

<comment><USER19> > mean, you take people's money upfront and then distribute it monthly, taking > a cut.

I don't think they do that for all creators - there's a bunch who work on an "$N per item" basis and I'm assuming those are charged at the end of the month once those items have been distributed to patrons (otherwise how would you know what to charge?)

<comment><USER20> Nonetheless, I doubt Patreon pays out to creators before they're paid by patrons.

<comment><USER21> They definitely get the money before distributing it. They will also pass any payment processing delays onto the creators, which just happened at the beginning of this month.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I rely on donations for about 30-40% of my total income, and Patreon makes up about 50% of that. But I've always been fearful of its inevitable decline for the very reasons laid out here, and I don't like putting my livelihood in the hands of a VC-backed company whose interests might not align with my own. To that end I diversified my donation-based income sources, by using LiberPay[0] and by building fosspay[1] myself, which together make up the other half of my donation income.

[0] [https://liberapay.com/SirCmpwn](https://liberapay.com/SirCmpwn)

[1] [https://github.com/ddevault/fosspay](https://github.com/ddevault/fosspay)

Anyone who is in a similar boat should feel free to reach out to me and I'll happily provide free hosting for a fosspay instance. A model whose incentives align with the people who depend on it and the people who support them is crucial, and it probably isn't a business model. If necessary and useful, I'd be happy to build this into a general purpose service.

<comment><USER23> Have you made any efforts to transition your Patreon patrons to Liberapay?

<comment><USER22> No, because Liberapay is just another basket where I don't feel comfortable leaving all of my eggs. Even Liberapay has a history of problems.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> What is the purpose of having this message be via dozens of tweets? Am I the only one that finds this extremely obnoxious? Just write a blog post and summarize it in one tweet.

In any case: the Patreon model seems doomed in the long run, regardless. At some point content hosters themselves (YouTube, Instagram, etc.) will introduce a similar payment support system. Just like Instagram ate Vine's lunch and entire raison d'être. At that point, exactly what benefits or advantages does Patreon offer?

<comment><USER25> It doesn't have ads, the width of the paragraphs are optimal, it supports rich content, and allows user engagement on each section.

<comment><USER15> You're right, it's impossible to have a blog without ads, with custom paragraph width, and with images and video.

<comment><USER26> To be fair it's not really worth setting up a blog just for a single post, and OP probably didn't know about things like threadreaderapp.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> The language is insidious. "Patreon's generous 90 percent pay-out model". That Patreon takes only 10% is seen as generous when the entire model is people sending money to a creator. This is declaration that they intend to grift the patrons and creators for more money soon, because making 5% isn't "sustainable" for a service that has a few pictures and links to youtube along with money transfer.

</comment><comment><USER28> "Patreon needs to build new businesses and new services and new revenue lines in order to build a sustainable business"

The first and last parts of that quote say it all. It's basically saying, "what you have doesn't satisfy us so go do more things."

</comment><comment><USER29> A lot of good $50 million dollar companies have turned into $0 companies by trying to be billion dollar companies. The VC model seems to encourage this.

</comment><comment><USER30> The problem with these sort of predictions is that they never include falsifiable criteria, which would render the entire analysis false depending on the outcome. Here's a sample quote:

"It's not going to die overnight, Patreon will still be here in 2020, it'll just be, you know, worse to actually use."

Of course it will be "worse", users tend to complain about every single product change that ever happened. No objective criteria of the worsening are provided. This is the author backtracking: "oh, contrary to what I said in the first tweet, it's not like it would die or anything, but it'll be like "worse", y'know?".

</comment><comment><USER31> Would it be possible for a nonprofit to step in and fulfill the role Patreon plays? A company like Patreon seeems completely tangential to "endless growth" unless they're expanding for purely infrastructure reasons..

<comment><USER2> There's [https://liberapay.com/](https://liberapay.com/). Not sure how well it works though.

<comment><USER32> From a donor point of view, it works differently from patreon and IMO far inferior. On patreon, you sign up to a creator for a fixed amount every month. Once you've subscribed, it's like any other online subscription - every month, your card is automatically charged.

On liberapay, you have to manually fund your account in advance. If your account runs out of money, you have to log back in and top it up again.

<comment><USER33> Some people dislike automatic charges, while others don't want to be bothered with renewals, so it's best to support both. For historical reasons related to payment processor limitations Liberapay was launched with only manual renewals, but we're working on implementing automatic charges now.

See our recent blog post "The third year of Liberapay" for more details: [https://medium.com/liberapay-blog/the-third-year-of- liberapa...](https://medium.com/liberapay-blog/the-third-year-of- liberapay-636fbe7d95a8)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> I think the biggest question here is what did Patreon even need that much money for.

<comment><USER35> I wonder about this too. The tweetstorm linked here only talks about technology, comparing Patreon to YouTube. Since Patreon handles payments, I can imagine their load on customer support, anti-fraud, abusive behavior etc is significantly higher than that of YouTube. The fact that the OP did not address this belies a simplistic view about what it's like to run a business (that and the fact that he thinks the Patreon founders could've gotten a bank loan).

At the same time, $60M? How can a platform like Patreon even begin to spend that much money? On what? I didn't understand it when Medium raised so much and I didn't understand it when Patreon did.

Basically my gist is that while this is a fun rant to read against getting VC funding, there's also a middle ground: raise _reasonable amounts_ of VC funding. This might not always fit VC incentives perfectly, after all their business model depends on funding dozens of companies hoping that one is the next Facebook, but in the end it's your call. And hey, if you grow half speed you'll just be the next Facebook 5 years later, no man overboard.

VCs can usually veto new sources of funding but if they can force you to raise followon rounds then you've been negotiating wrong.

<comment><USER34> I think finding what a "reasonable amount" looks like is the big issue, but nevertheless that is solid advice.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> "Sustainable" is an interesting choice of words.

What is sustainability for Toyota? It's some combination of sales volume at profit margin such that they can afford to pay for their fixed costs, factories and such. IE, earn more by selling cars than it takes to make cars.

The financial definition is derived from the business one, because debt. Car companies borrow money to build/tool factories. Toyota would need to earn a return greater than interest to be sustainable.

For a facebook (or a patreon), what does sustainability mean?

Facebook don't have factories. Costs are what the CEO decides they should be and the CEO decides based on how much revenue is coming in.

Currently, FB is on about $60bn pa. If you look at their current cost structure, even critically, you'll probably conclude that facebook needs tens of billions to be sustainable.

Except.... You obviously don't need $50bn pa to make a social networking site. If the ass fell out of online advertising (not likely), fb might collapse, but social betworking would continue to exist.

If you told patreon toda that: " _your revenue is $15m forever, no matter what you do,_ " would they conclude that patreon is unsustainable and must be shut? Toyota would. I suspect Patreon would find a way to sustain the service.

<comment><USER8> While I don't know how much Facebook needs to exist, it isn't zero. All those server have to be bought - just like Toyota can get a loan to build a new factory, facebook can get a loan to build servers and the building to put them in (note can, in both cases there are non loan options for funding as well). Facebook needs to pay people to wire all those servers up. Facebook needs to pay people to mitigate all the attacks on their servers. Facebook needs to pay power bills for those servers. The CEO doesn't get to decide any of the above costs - they are what they are and not paying them will put Facebook out of business.

The CEO can decide how much to put into new features, and what those features are. Not putting enough into R&D is a path to disaster long term.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I've been wondering why I even needed Patreon in the first place. My users who choose to donate via Paypal can choose either a one-time donation or recurring. So all I need is a supporter mailing list and blog (perhaps with member-only section) to send out updates to. And I've found that most of my users (many of whom are older and not as trendy) prefer to donate via Paypal rather than signing up for yet another service.

<comment><USER38> This model of recurring micro-payments wasn't always the norm from the outset. Patreon wasn't the first to do micro-payments nor subscriptions, but they became the de facto platform for audiences to support content creators. Banks and other financial institutions have been doing payments, micro-paymenst, and subscriptions for years via bill pay and autopay services.

It would make sense that someone like PayPal would add a monthly subscription option. They already have much of the infrastructure in place. You might not need Patreon for your subscribers to support you, but you probably wouldn't have subscribers under this model if Patreon hadn't established this as a norm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Is this is the famous ouroboros growth model I've heard so much about?

</comment><comment><USER40> How is Patreon not already very good "sustainable business model"? To me there is nothing better than what they have. Taking a cut for doing almost nothing. All the freemium SaaS business out there trying to break even are wishing they had the business model patreon has.

<comment><USER41> It's sustainable as far as Patreon goes. Their company is doing fine and looks like it will continue to do fine. But in the world of investing, sustainability means more than that. It means perpetual double-digit growth and other probably unrealistic expectations.

It seems to me that they have a good thing going, although I disagree with their policy of policing the content and speech of the projects they support.

However, there should be room in the market for competition and hopefully a competitor will arise who doesn't try to enforce his morality and/or politics (good or bad) on the fund-raising projects he facilitates.

That is all.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> Part of the issue involved surrounding the whole content/censorship/etc controversy is that Patreon _hosts_ content.

If they were strictly a pay-creators platform that took a percentage, it would be sustainable, they could run more efficiently, not spend money on content policing, etc.

If they still wanted to deny certain types of customers on their platform- that is their right, but their decision to also host content adds a level of complexity that when scaled, can become a problem, and probably a pretty costly one.

Now, I still don't know for sure that this makes the level of funding make more sense. Going the investing route is going to introduce a lot of expectations and changes in the way the business handles itself that could doom it- that could have been avoidable

</comment><comment><USER43> The CEO did a thread in response: [https://mobile.twitter.com/jackconte/status/1093223206805106...](https://mobile.twitter.com/jackconte/status/1093223206805106688)

I'll just say here what I said there: "You lost the plot. No one outside your VCs are asking why you struggle to scale. Everyone wants to know why you're scaling before getting the fundamentals right. You can't even manage feature #1: paying creators reliably."

</comment><comment><USER44> The CNBC article says this and I now get why...

> "We don't allow hate speech, which other platforms say they don't as well > and Patreon really means it," Conte said. "You can't just say anything you > want in the world and we don't want to build that platform."

> The company also revised its content policy in 2017 to eliminate the site's > use for the exchange of adult-themed photos, videos and content.

You can't have your cake and eat it too.

</comment><comment><USER45> The thread's title points to a CNBC story by Brandon Gomez. However, the journalism is very light and is missing a lot of context about what CEO Jack Conte is talking about.

However, a better story that Dan Olson linked to (scroll down his twitter feed) is the September 2017 announcement of the $60 million round by Jack Conte himself[0]. In that blog, JC laid out in more detail the _new products_ Patreon was trying to build to increase revenue. Excerpt of the bullet points:

 _1\. Business Infrastructure - Think of this as the back office — the tools, workflows, dashboards, and information that you need to get your business cranking. [...] analytics [...] financials [...]

2\. Rewards to Energize Patrons This is everything you need to entice and keep your patrons, [...] Actual goods, whether digital or physical, like a signed poster or an extra episode [...]_

Patreon doesn't want to be just a simple "paypal/stripe" payment middleman that takes a 5% cut of subscribers payments. As a rough analogy, they also want to be a "SalesforceCRM/QuickenAccounting" backoffice and a "Amazon/WooCommerce" for merchandise -- for their creators. JC is hoping that creators will give up more than 5% (e.g. maybe 30% cut) to pay for those services.

So when people ask _" what does Patreon need all that VC money for?"_, JC basically told you. The question remains if the creators are willing to pay for those extra "value-added" services to manage the creators' backoffice + storefront. (Examples of those "new features".[1])

I think we can assume that the bullet points laid out in JC's blog post roughly match the Powerpoint slides he showed to the VCs to convince them to invest more money. In fact, if you look at their Crunchbase profile[2], you'll notice that in the 3 rounds A & B & C, he had the same VCs repeatedly investing more money: Thrive Captial and Index Ventures in 3 of the rounds. And StartX and Accomplice in 2 out of 3 rounds.

Not only did JC convince a VC to invest more money, he convinced the _same VCs multiple times_.

Both JC and the investors did not think of Patreon's business as a _" simply take 5% cut of payments and that's all we do forever"_. Maybe they will be proven wrong in expanding the Patreon platform ambitions but I think we can at least see why the $100 million investment doesn't look "illogical" to them.

[0] [https://patreonhq.com/new-round- funding-816d5a592477](https://patreonhq.com/new-round-funding-816d5a592477)

[1] [https://blog.patreon.com/new-membership- features](https://blog.patreon.com/new-membership-features)

[2] [https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/patreon#section- fund...](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/patreon#section-funding- rounds)

</comment><comment><USER46> This is a great use case for Ethereum and there is an excellent application live for it - gitcoin grants ([https://gitcoin.co/grants/](https://gitcoin.co/grants/)). It is really slick and defaults to use a USD pegged stablecoin (DAI).

</comment><comment><USER47> Ugh, it's painful reading what looks like a few paragraphs or a short article, split up into tweets.

</comment><comment><USER48> I don't work at Patreon and I don't be intimate knowledge of their problems. But I can say for sure, they have an awfully difficult problem on their hands.

The first is content. If they want to do business in Germany, they need to make sure there's no Nazi content coming from Germans. They need to make sure there's no child porn. They need to respond to DMCA notices and other types of disputes. They need to keep an eye open to ensure they're not hosting content that violates SESTA/FOSTA.

They need to be sure that creators aren't saying they're providing therapeutic ASMR audio but actually selling synthetic marijuana behind the scenes. They need to handle folks doing obviously risky (or regulated) things, like recommending pharmaceuticals or helping addicts doctor shop.

They need to comply with regional KYC/CDD requirements and verify the identities of the folks on their service. They need to do this in many languages and with local identity documents from around the world.

All of these things cost money to do, even if it's outsourced. And in many cases, the cost grows faster than user acquisition. Patreon could be criticized for censoring content, but they still need to avoid being dragged into court or even shut down. And it seems that they're learning quickly that being compliant and managing risk is not an inexpensive thing to do at scale.

<comment><USER49> > If they want to do business in Germany [...]

Does Visa have that same problem? If I understand Patreon, they aren't producing or distributing content. They are just acting as a middleman between fans and producers.

<comment><USER50> Patreon hosts content. Visa does not. Every single thing on [https://visa.com](https://visa.com) is Visa's content only. Whereas every single creator's page on [https://www.patreon.com/](https://www.patreon.com/) is created by the creator.

This imposes a large moderation/liability burden that Visa doesn't have.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> well, I can think of one 'product strategy' they might be tossing around but it would be a super bad idea long term. Let's just hope someone bootstraps an alternative, they can name it Parteon.

</comment><comment><USER52> Average Twitter users

[https://twitter.com/rabbitmyrabbit/status/109286461987651584...](https://twitter.com/rabbitmyrabbit/status/1092864619876515840)

[https://twitter.com/PuddiCure/status/1093042166379745281](https://twitter.com/PuddiCure/status/1093042166379745281)

<comment><USER53> They aren't your typical average Twitter users, they're artists (although not the industry-professional kind; one is making small indie games, and the other is drawing fanart). Those small-scale artists (who are earning barely enough money for their skills) are probably gonna look down pretty harshly at the investors who seem to look at dollar signs as the ultimate goal... I guess the language is a bit harsh but I could understand.

(Maybe HN isn't that sympathetic to those type of people, so I might get downvoted to oblivion - but you still can't generalize them as average Twitter users...)

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> @dang/mods: please replace with [https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1092846201374892032.html](https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1092846201374892032.html) for readability.</comment>


Pinterest for Android released - <AUTHOR> https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pinterest

<comment><USER3> They also released the iPad version, I tried linking to their blog but it [dead]ed my submission immediately.

</comment><comment><USER4> [offtopic] I would _love_ to see the source code for well polished apps like this.

So much good could be done for the promotion of well designed apps, by making things like this openly available.

<comment><USER5> The sad truth is that the differentiator for apps in the Play marketplace is to be really good. That is their competitive advantage.

In a world where a Designer (with training) can fire up Interface Builder and skin an app without having the code and make it look pretty darn awesome - <USER2> where to skin an Android app is almost like torture for a designer - really - ask a designer, if you don't believe me.

In a world where there are at least a double-digit number high-quality open source implementations for image caching (as in load over network on demand, tiered cache - memory, disk) in the iOS world - and maybe 4-5 (AQuery, Novoda, Ignition - I remember off-hand) in the Android world - it's just a different community. There isn't a lot of sharing going on (but that has changed). I think it is a top-down thing - Apple loves its developers (I've been to a couple Apple events) - they want their developers to make awesome apps. Google - not so much - with the exception of Diane Hackborn and Romain Guy and a few others - there is no army of developer evangelists - just a SWAT team, at best. Google hides behind the curtain ("pay no attention to the man behind the curtain). Apple, for lack of a better term, has created a strong community (profits from the App Store help - and profits for making free apps for Fortune 500 companies - for the majority of those who don't make an App Store revenue living) and really, a tribe (in the Seth Godin sense).

However, there is hope. Jake Wharton, now working for Square, has done more to single-handedly advance the lowest-common-denominator for UI/UX in the Play marketplace at large with his ActionBarSherlock.

<comment><USER6> Ya, pretty spot on.

I'm just coming off a big Android project and it is indeed really painful, but as you said saints like Jake and ABS make it actually possible to make something that looks good on all devices.

I do have to say that with the combination of ABS and HoloEverywhere it isn't THAT hard to make a good looking Holo app across all devices anymore. There is a very steep learning curve, but once you have your project set up and learn the tricks of RelativeLayout etc, then it is mostly predictable.

But ya, nowhere near the amount of resources as iOS.. hope that changes.</comment></comment></comment>