“Indie” developers like Pasco, Stone, Walker, and Dalrymple program for its own sake, for the pleasure of making apps for users. The money is supposedly incidental, except for the fact that it supports their livelihoods doing what they love,
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as they claim that they would do it for free as a hobby anyway. These programmers might all make considerably more money if they joined a startup in traditional
Silicon Valley fashion, but instead, forgoing potential earnings by rejecting corporate control is what gives them the prestige amongst their peers in the Cocoa developer community. It shows that they are more devoted to their art than becoming instant millionaires through a sudden acquisition or IPO. Their social capital in the Cocoa community derives from the more edifying purpose of their creative labor.
“Indie” developers are programmer-entrepreneurs who are independent of corporate software firms and work on their own self-directed software projects as they please. Because going into business alone is risky, it typically requires some saved up capital accumulated from a prior job, as well as already developed programming skills and the computer hardware to program on. All the indie
developers I have spoken with come from middle to upper-middle class backgrounds.
Most spoke of childhoods or adolescence tinkering with and possibly programming personal computers, which means that at early ages, they already had begun to acquire both the skills and access to the material artifacts, the capital goods,
necessary for a life of programming computers. Overwhelmingly, indie developers are Caucasian, with a few exceptions, such as Mike Lee, who is half-Asian and originally from Hawaii. The vast majority are men, especially the older generation of Cocoa Mac OS X developers. These Mac Cocoa developers also tend to be of middle age or older, in their upper forties or late fifties. A few independent iPhone
developers I encountered have been women, but these women are not well known in the community for famous applications, nor do they have must-read blogs or wide Twitter followings. The famous names in the Cocoa indie community are almost all men, with the exception of Erica Sadun who not only writes a personal blog but also was editor and senior writer of the Apple fansite, The Unofficial Apple Weblog or TUAW, at http://www.tuaw.com/editor/erica-sadun/, accessed February 7, 2012.
Sadun is probably better known for her blog posts than for her apps, however.
The term “indie” is an actor’s category, used to describe artists and smaller companies in the film, music, and video game industries, which are “independent” of
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the dominant corporate firms. The term connotes an artistic and cultural authenticity that comes from creative autonomy from the profit-maximizing interests of corporate content producers, who are concerned with a lowest common denominator mass-market blockbuster or chart-topper. Similar logic applies to “indie” software developers.
According to indie developer Brent Simmons, the term “indie” came into use in the Mac developer community around 2002 or 2003, only a year or two after the release of Mac OS X, when development of consumer applications using NeXT-derived Cocoa technology became possible. As is common in the community, this first occurred on blogs, an Internet medium that was also gaining widespread traction in that same era. “We didn’t call them Indie developers in those days, I think that started in 2002 or 2003, I think it was a blog post by Buzz Anderson, actually, that it got us to stop using the word ‘shareware’ and move to the word ‘Indie.’ Because the term ‘Shareware developer’ was [used] throughout the ‘90s...” (Brent Simmons, Interview, February 17, 2012)
The term indie replaced the term “shareware.” In the 1980s and 1990s, avocational programmers often wrote software and freely distributed it over BBS or commercial online services, or at local user groups such as the Berkeley Mac User’s Group, by passing out floppies. Users were encouraged to donate $5 or $15 to the author by mailing in a check, if they found the software useful to them. Shareware was a 1980s-era compromise in the emerging dispute among hackers over
intellectual property. As discussed by Fred Turner (2006), and shown in the documentary, Hackers: Wizards of the Electronic Age (Florin 1985), the 1984 Hacker Conference convened by Stewart Brand included commercial PC game developers, Apple engineers such as Steve Wozniak, as well as free software pioneer Richard Stallman. At the conference, the idea that information (software) should be free (both to acquire and to further modify) seemed to conflict with the notion of the programmer as creative auteur, whose creative work should be protected as well as compensated. Shareware was a middle ground: software, produced by individuals, was distributed for free (though not its source code); users who felt that its author
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should be compensated for their work would voluntarily give them a donation to keep working on it. For a lucky few whose applications became widely used, the authors were able to make a commercial business out of shareware; but this very success stretched the economic model of gifting rather than payment. The more successful shareware packages began to require registration keys to unlock full functionality, or timers that would shut down full functionality after a trial period.
Nevertheless, for a shareware author looking to commercialize and compete on a level field with corporate firms, the barriers were significant. Corporate firms sold software in shrink-wrapped packages and dominated expensive retail shelf space in brick and mortar stores. Van Meeteren’s work on Cocoa indies argues that it was the advent of the commercial internet, and the dot.com boom which created the
infrastructure of e-commerce and electronic payment and distribution of software, that made the indie possible as an economic entity. (van Meeteren 2008) Freed from the burdens of either competing for retail space, and relying on mail-in donations for payment, small operation programmers could become a more stable business. It was in this new economic environment that the term “indie” began to replace “shareware”
to describe small operation Mac programmers.
Indies are the logical endpoint of the vocational drive among Cocoa
programmers—making apps of one’s own creation. Its ideology disavows money as an indie’s primary motivation. Rather, pursuing one’s passion for programming as a way to make manifest one’s creative vision is seen as the ultimate raison d’être of the indie. This is coupled to a belief that making software will help people become more productive or enrich their lives, and thus improve society. In this way, a lone
individual writing code, working through the mechanisms of the market as a small businessman, makes a contribution to society without recourse to politics.
“Indie is to me, it’s just an ethos. …you’re part of a culture of… I’m not in this for the money, I’m in it to make something cool, and to make the whole environment better for everyone…
(Wil Shipley Interview, April 18, 2012)
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Independence from corporate control is required for the creative autonomy necessary to be an indie:
“What is Indie?” …If your agenda is… to have complete creative control, and that takes precedence over what will make us the most money—and you have the freedom to make those choices—that is the definition of Indie. It doesn't mean broke or small. It means that you're actually calling your own shots, and not beholden to someone else.
(Daniel Pasco Interview, June 12, 2009)
The “indie ethos” also encapsulates all of the previous values Cocoa programmers profess: vocational and craftsperson identity, which focuses on the pleasure of making and on quality, self-cultivation of skills and knowledge, and a commitment to a community of practice in which this knowledge is shared. Indies also share a belief in the empowering (and democratizing) effect of technology on individuals, and seek to participate in that empowerment through making apps for themselves and others. This latter value, we will see, is one heavily promoted by Apple and is central to Apple’s own corporate identity.
Being “indie” connotes small-scale, though not necessarily individual, production of apps. Indies, from the perspective of the Cocoa community, can be companies started by a two or three like-minded developers, such as OmniGroup or Black Pixel, that later grew to about a hundred employees. At this size, it can be difficult to articulate why a company of OmniGroup’s size is an indie while smaller ones might not be. For one, the company must be founded and controlled by
developers (and sometimes user experience designers), not by a “business person.”
Thus, unlike many other technology startups, those who hold the “indie” identity reject funding from angel investors or venture capitalists, seeing such money as coming with strings attached, giving away creative control to the money people.
Indies are about making whatever apps the employees themselves want to make—
they are not founded for growth, to attain an IPO or become an acquisition target, but simply to make enough profit to be self-sustaining. The goal is to be a small business, like a country store, or in the case of OmniGroup or Black Pixel, a medium-sized, privately-owned business, in perpetuity. This is markedly different from the mindset
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of most Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, whose goal is to found and grow the next Facebook or Instagram and make a billion dollars; either result would be seen by indies as “selling out.” This category is somewhat fluid—Instagram may have been considered an indie until it was acquired. For Cocoa developers, what constitutes being or remaining “indie” is continuing to retain creative control over one’s business and products.
Of course, this does not mean that money does not matter to an indie. Despite common assertions that “we’re not out to make money,” many of the well-known indie developers easily make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, enough to afford expensive toys like Tesla electric sports cars. Each of these indies, however, would claim that they might have made much more money working for a company like Microsoft, joining a VC-funded startup, or selling their company off. “We actually tell people we’re not interested in being acquired; we’re not interested in being invested in,” proclaims Daniel Pasco of Black Pixel. (Daniel Pasco Interview, March 28, 2012) What matters to developers who call themselves “indies” is that they reject the potentially higher earnings they could achieve by selling to a larger company or accepting investment capital in order to maintain control over their own work.
Indies must care about profits to sustain their small businesses. Indies worry about cash-flows a great deal, which means that practically speaking, most indies are not completely self-sufficient through sales of their own apps, but supplement their income with corporate contracts. Even OmniGroup and Black Pixel, companies well known in the Cocoa community for original applications, have relied on contracts for a significant portion of operating income. The iPhone boom has resulted in enormous demand for skilled Cocoa developers from corporations which want a “mobile app”
presence in the same way they all suddenly needed a website during the dot.com boom. For many indies, contracting is a lot more secure and lucrative than trying to make one’s own app, as an expert iOS programmer can command a rate anywhere from $100 to $150 an hour (Patel 2010). Because indies have rejected investment capital, they are self-funded, and this involves considerable financial risk. Most
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would-be indies start by writing an app in their free time off work, and only those lucky enough for their apps to succeed are able to quit their day jobs. Others decide that they want to go indie ahead of time, and save up money from either a day job or contracting to build a reserve of capital on which to sustain themselves while they work on their app full-time. However, the days of the iPhone App Store gold rush, when stories abounded of programmers making thousands of dollars selling apps written in a weekend, are long over. The App Store is crowded with apps that do similar things, and unless one is featured prominently by Apple, or cracks one of the top 25 lists in iTunes, it is difficult to rise above a handful of downloads a day.
Would-be app developers can easily spend months slaving away, only to find, once their app is on the store, that they are making only a few hundred dollars a month, and have to go back to a regular job or take a contract. Says one successful developer,
“It’s either feast or famine. It’s hard to go indie on iOS. …I mean that’s like winning the lottery, right?” (Gus Mueller, Interview, Feburary 1, 2012) The only true indies are those who have managed to make their app work self-sustaining. For every indie who has made it, there may be ten more programmers working on apps on their free time, eking out a few hundred downloads a day. Despite this risk, however, indies are constantly striving to shake off their corporate clients and become fully
independent and self-sustaining. While the actual number of successful indies is dwarfed by the majority of those trying to make it, their influence on the Cocoa community is magnified through their blogs, Twitter feeds, and conference
presentations, and it is the voices of these prominent indie Cocoa developers that set the agendas of the community’s discourse.
For a number of indie Cocoa developers, Apple’s opening of the iPhone to third party development through the App Store has unleashed a wave of
entrepreneurship that they see as an indie revolution. Before the iPhone, being a Cocoa indie developer meant catering to the Macintosh’s relatively small
marketshare, and releasing Mac-only software meant dedication and devotion to the platform. Apple’s iPhone App Store, which takes care of digital distribution of software for the developer, has significantly reduced the barriers to entry for
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independent software entrepreneurship. Many Cocoa developers saw this as a boon, a way to democratize programming for the masses: “This is like my wildest dreams come true. Millions and millions of indies!” (Andrew Stone, Interview, June 7, 2011) This has convinced some that the future belongs to such individual, decentralized production of software, replacing large corporate production of software: “It’s not driven by [the large software firms] anymore. It’s, what is the next Tiny Wings going to be?” (Wil Shipley, Interview, April 18, 2012) It is particularly striking how much the iOS “revolution” sparked these utopian visions among the core Cocoa developers despite the subsequent sobering realization that the vast majority of independent iOS developers with their own apps could not sustain themselves. Longtime indie Cocoa developer Brent Simmons noted by 2014 “almost all the iOS developers [in the Seattle area] are making money either via a paycheck (they have a job) or through contracting… Some money for iOS development is coming from companies like Omni that do create products—but most of it appears to be coming from corporations that need apps (or think they do). Places like Starbucks and Target. The dream of making a living as an indie iOS developer isn’t dead… but, if I’m right, hardly anyone believes in it any more. [sic]” (Simmons 2014) What is important is how committed the core members of the Cocoa community, who saw themselves as a revolutionary vanguard, were to this vision of utopia, even in its failure to materialize.
Many Cocoa developers see the iPhone App Store as Apple’s response to a huge demand among iPhone users to extend and customize the iPhone’s functionality.
When the original iPhone was released in 2007, Apple’s policy was that developers would not be allowed to develop apps that ran “natively” on the device, but rather could only write web applications that were tweaked to run well in the iPhone’s web browser. Much of Apple’s developer community understood the iPhone to be not just a cell phone, an iPod, or a web browser, but a fully-fledged mobile Macintosh
computer. Once hackers discovered how to “jailbreak” the iPhone, effectively circumventing Apple’s security protections and allowing programmers to write software for it, an underground market of apps written for jailbroken iPhones
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sprouted. Responding to this user appropriation, in 2008 Apple announced that it would provide an officially sanctioned Software Development Kit (SDK) for third party developers to use, and an App Store that would allow developers to sell their apps to users who did not jailbreak their phones, legitimizing the app market but also putting it fully under Apple’s control. This “curated” app market has turned out to be hugely profitable for both third party developers and Apple itself (as Apple takes 30% of app sales revenues.) By opening up the iPhone with an SDK, Apple allowed developers to extend the iPhone to do things Apple never originally intended.
This view of the App Store as empowering and democratizing small-scale technology creators has a lot in common with the DIY Maker and Hackerspace movement. The emergence of indie mobile app development has largely coincided with the emergence of the Maker movement, and there are Hackathons centering on iOS app production (“iOSDevCamp” 2014). I do not claim that indie iOS or Mac development is a subset or extension of the Maker movement, as there are some notable differences. Much of the Maker movement is aligned ideologically with the open source software movement, as the recent controversy over DARPA funding of hackerspaces shows (Savage 2013). Cocoa developers’ reliance on Apple for
proprietary tools and hardware thus contradicts the value of open participation in production and repair of both hardware and software. Despite this, much of the rhetorics and ideologies informing Makers and indie Cocoa developers are similar.
The DIY Maker movement has been hailed as democratizing production and transforming passive consumers into participatory producers, with a particular focus on technical education and pedagogy (Ames et al. 2014; Tanenbaum et al. 2013).
DIY makers see their work as self-actualizing craft (Sivek 2011). Made possible by the availability of open and affordable technologies such as 3D printing and Arduino circuit boards, DIY making started out as a hobbyist practice, but has now generated VC funded startups hoping to sell products to consumers. Indeed, much of Maker culture seems to harken back explicitly to the 1970s counterculturally-inflected personal computer hacker/hobbyist culture, where open sharing of computer
hardware knowledge produced Apple Computer. Nostalgia for that time is prevalent
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among the promoters of DIY Making. “…if you look back into time, you see what's happening in the 60s. The 60s brought advances in computing. Its pioneers were people like Wozniak and Steve Jobs. They were makers, hackers, academics, and entrepreneurs. But this time around it’s different. You have Kickstarter and VCs...
Hardware startups today can really make anything possible. Today, DIY means that anyone can take a product to the market, with the support from the crowd.” (quoted in Lindtner, Hertz, and Dourish 2014, 441) Nor do Makers necessarily see business as incompatible with openness: “That the commitment to countercultural ethics was not perceived as antithetical to structures of the market economy is what we would like to emphasize here. Many… considered such alignments essential in order to
Hardware startups today can really make anything possible. Today, DIY means that anyone can take a product to the market, with the support from the crowd.” (quoted in Lindtner, Hertz, and Dourish 2014, 441) Nor do Makers necessarily see business as incompatible with openness: “That the commitment to countercultural ethics was not perceived as antithetical to structures of the market economy is what we would like to emphasize here. Many… considered such alignments essential in order to