Don't get me wrong, I do love my iPhone, but this isn't something most people (myself included) will have the patience to do.
I'm surprised you find that surprising because customisation isn't exactly a new phenomenon. I mean is it really any different to techies slapping stickers on their laptop? Or car enthusiasts modding their vehical? Or home owners decorating their house? Maybe you consider this different because it is software rather than physical stuff; but people do also change their ring tones and wallpaper images too, people customise their avatars on MMO games and profile pictures on social networks. Heck, I even have an alternative coloured border on HN. So while this particular workaround will undoubtedly be more work than most people are willing to take I do still get why some people might want to customise their home screen.
An entire generation of developers is growing up being told that users like being told how to use their devices, and that options scare them.
If you're targeting a segment that likes options it's a different story.
Sure, if you approach the average person about an obscure topic like their privacy on the internet, they probably don't have strong opinions about it because that is outside of their wheelhouse, and they probably haven't given it much thought. If you couch privacy in terms that they are familiar with, such as drawing parallels to Supreme Court cases regarding surveillance and privacy, suddenly they care about whether or not they're being stalked online by corporations and governments.
For example, right to repair is something that most people don't think about. However, if you press the average person about whether they think they have the right to repair their own vehicle, suddenly everyone has strong opinions about it. People assume they have the right to use their hardware as they see fit, and aren't afraid of such options.
To be clear, I don't like the Apple approach. I think the options should still exist--but they need to be far removed from the UI without significant, non-discoverable steps.
Maybe the subset of people who spend time on software customization is small because software customization tends to be low priority and well hidden?
It's like the cost of eating lunch out three times in a big city.
Given the amount of work put into drawing icons, I'd say it's fair. I'm absolutely thrilled someone found a way to charge for something that is a personal project and not backed by some big corporate marketing buck.
Don't take this the wrong way. I'm happy for the designer to have been so successful. I'm merely pointing out that the price is relatively steep in comparison with other icon kits of the same craft. But good for him that he was so bold to go with the price and get rewarded for it!
If adding a sticker to your laptop increased the boot time a fraction of a second some people would still do it, but many would it find it maddening!
"A delay of less than 100 milliseconds feels instant to a user, but a delay between 100 and 300 milliseconds is perceptible. A delay between 300 and 1,000 milliseconds makes the user feel like a machine is working, but if the delay is above 1,000 milliseconds, your user will likely start to mentally context-switch."
http://designingforperformance.com/performance-is-ux/#design...
You'd be surprised at the lengths of inconvenience some people will endure for the sake of aesthetics.
Stickers take a trivial amount of effort and don't impair performance. Car mods take time and money, but often make things functionally better. The icon app takes time and money to setup and the only functional change is for the worse. I think the icons are just enough different/worse than most other customizations that it's reasonable to be surprised at their popularity.
Never underestimate a persons vanity.
Another classic example: https://skins.webamp.org/
https://winworldpc.com/product/icon-do-it/1x
I remember it was not inexpensive ($19).
I know what the logos correspond to, Apple.
It's not a technical achievement(that took Apple 10 years to do), it's a design choice(that Apple made then and now). It can have multiple motivations that we can speculate on, would have been great to have someone from Apple to give us some perspective.
>iPhone owners are willing to spend $28 for a icon pack, a very nice one, but still an icon pack.
There are multiple games that make billions of $ by simply selling cosmetic items, this is very similar. It also has a a version in the physical world, people pay a premium for stuff with a special visual design and no functional advantage all the time. Handbags, clothes, cars, jewellery, movie merchandise(like Darth Vader helmets etc), houses, paint, books, computers - you name it, people actually pay for design.
That's the most poetic way of saying "it's not a bug, it's a feature"
Can you find 3626 iPhone owners willing to spend $28 on an icon pack? Sure you can. In fact I bet you can find 3626 Android owners willing to part with $28 too.
The key to this success story is this:
> Then, MKBHD happened.
The key to a success of this type is luck. Sure, you can optimize for being on the path of success, but majority will still be missed.
What an odd mentality.
No, the key to success is skill, with effort (grit?) thrown in there as well. Luck can sometimes play a significant factor, all else being equal. But the idea that everyone is equally "good" at things, or put in the same effort, and that it's mere chance that success happens to someone is...pessimistic to say the least.
It is rare to find someone very lazy or completely talentless among the most successful, so it must be hard work and talent, right? No, because it's easy to find very hard-working and talented people who are not successful. In fact, according to research[0], the most successful are usually not the most talented, but those of mediocre talent and a lot of luck.
But luck is a huge component in getting wealthy. Plenty of people with equal skills, equal expertise, and equal hard work never succeed because they don't get the magical conjunction of right time at the right place.
That being said, it doesn't mean that one shouldn't hone their skills and try to be successful. It's just that it's not likely that you will have such meteoric success no matter the skill or effort you put in.
Luck doesn't just play a significant factor, luck almost always plays the biggest factor. But being skillful and putting in effort is the only thing you can change and definitely does help too.
But your point is entirely correct.
MKBHD could have picked up something much less refined and it would have been popular, a different designer dabbling with no prior mobile icon interest could have come up with something appealing to others as well.
Being there and getting an influencer is what made this story, and can be repeated by anyone. OP is conflating the rest of it with his own trials and tribulations.
I think MKBHD also has to worry about his reputation, if he promoted something less refined his viewers might get pissed off.
The key to finding those 3626 people willing to shell out $28 was the exposure, with MKBHD being the biggest contributor.
Whatever was the key to getting that exposure in the first place is irrelevant to my point.
He succeeded because his time to market was shorter than anyone else's.
And went on to say:
> The market will decide a huge part of what comes after sharing something, so continually increase your odds by building, publishing, then repeating.
All the people here decrying everything he had done up until this point and proclaiming any degree of success is attributable only to luck is amazing. It's not the same as stumbling on a winning lotto ticking on the street (unless you have spent years scouring the streets looking for winning lotto tickets).
It's one of those things that makes me want to scream at Hacker News regularly.
Even if you think it's about "luck", how are you modelling it?
MKBHD did a fair coin toss between all of his options?
Nah, doesn't seem realistic.
Some options are probably more likely than others.
Based on what? Oh well, the quality of the product, the buzz around it (which itself is probably based on the quality of the product, how it matches the zeitgeist's aesthetic (which means good understanding of trends, marketing, psychology, etc.)), the original reputation of the person creating the product, and so on.
Hacker News's take: it's just luck, it could have been any other icon set with the same probability.
Yeah, no.
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2018-05-01-loot-boxes...
In my opinion, most features that have come out in recent years for smart phones don't really matter to users. They are marketing checklists.
Also there was a plethora of Android features to support local advertising that I considered very invasive of my privacy. One example was an ad campaign for a children's clothing store called "Charming Charlie" which would pop up on my phone whenever I walked past their store at the mall regardless of whether Bluetooth and Wifi were on or off.
Finally, I can actually talk to a live human when I'm having problems with my Apple phone.
I don’t deny I can do more with the android phone though.
Meanwhile android has 3 nice buttons at the bottom that are there always.
That's subjective. Many people prefer iPhones. They may find the features of iPhone more desirable or some other aspect about it like the Apple ecosystem.
(For context, I'm writing this not as an Android fanboy, but as an 11-year iPhone user, though I've often had a secondary current gen Android for testing, etc, and have constantly evaluated switching and never found a compelling reason for doing so, despite some of those attractive line-items)
Let's talk about cameras specifically. Samsung has this "burst mode" feature which lets you take 100 or 200 shots in rapid succession. This was linked to a long press of the "take picture" button, so when I would use my wife's phone if I paused for a moment with my finger on the button it would fill up the memory card with hundreds of identical JPEG images that she would then have to sort through and delete individually.
Contrast this with Apple's "Live Photo" feature which takes a short 2 or 3 second video around the moment when you take your picture. You can still sort through each individual frame and pick the best one but it doesn't completely fill up the device's memory with hundreds of identical JPEGs. And it gives you this cool video of the moment for every picture.
Being first to market doesn't matter if the feature isn't actually usable.
What's not to like?
My last Android (Nexus 5) stopped receiving updates just 2 years after I bought it, because of some ridiculous graphics driver bs.
My Galaxy S7 is 4 years old. It's still very fast (never had to reset it) and still gets security updates (last one in August) although no more OS updates.
If I played AAA games on my smartphone, I might want an upgrade, but I do my gaming on PCs. Otherwise newer models don't really have that much appeal, except for the better camera (although I am not impressed by the fake bokeh effect). However, even for the camera, it always feels like a compromise whenever I use it, in that I put up with lower quality in exchange for convenience.
Then I got my first iPhone almost three years ago, and I still have the same phone and I don’t feel a need to get a new one. After several major updates my phone still works perfectly (even better I would say). Battery is in 85% and still lasts a whole day. Do I miss some features? of course, but the same would be true if I switched to Android, I would miss Shortcuts, Airdrop and other small features, plus at present time I can’t think of a big feature I’m missing from Android.
If you want your phone to last forever, you need to take control of it yourself. Get a Lineage OS compatible phone and ditch the play store. Not only will it be faster, the battery life will quadruple.
It's painful to use and look at, all of which was described in the video, and people paid $28 for it. Pretty insane.
Is android still using really low resolution icons?