Another week and another mention in New Scientist. After the review for my latest book Digitized last week, the work of myself and colleague Soo Ling Lim is featured as lead technology story this week. Paul Marks wrote a nice story describing our ALife model AppEco. He focusses on our forthcoming paper for GECCO 2012, where we explore which app developer strategies might be more successful than others. If you’re wondering what the answer is - I’m afraid it depends on what everyone else is doing at the time… But in general the app store settles down into a stable state all by itself, with the more dodgy strategies (copying the successful apps of others, or milking a single idea endlessly) tend to be in the minority compared to more imaginative strategies (optimizing good ideas or innovating new concepts). So in general we found that it’s better to innovate or optimize than be a milker or a copycat. Which is just as well, because Apple specifically has clauses in the developer agreement which are designed to discourage milkers and copycats.

It's an interesting piece of work and I enjoyed helping Soo Ling create the model. We're still working on it, and are looking at the effects of publicity strategies, different charts, and all kinds of other things...

The article is available online here, or below if you want a quick view.

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