Thoughts on Planet of the Apps

Vidit Bhargava
I watched the first episode of planet of the apps this week and wanted to write down some initial thoughts about the show:

1. This is very much a “Startup” reality show: Planet of the Apps is not about “making” an app. It’s about making a business around an app. There’s a load of startup jargon being tossed around. You have your Elevator pitch, VC Pitch, constant questioning and everything. Seriously devs, this isn’t a show where the judges will help you with code-signing. This is about startups meeting investors to take their app-centric business to the next level.

2. The judges all asked relevant questions for startups: All the judges seem to be asking questions that are extremely valid for the startups. They aren’t under-qualified or just popular faces put on a screen. They know their stuff. (I think one of the things that people felt about the show was the line up of judges featured more of the popular faces instead of VCs). That’s not really the case. These guys have had successful ventures in the past and the startups that they end up mentoring are some-what related to their prior work. So it makes sense to have these people in the show.

3. This is not a tutorial about making a billion bucks as an indie-developer. This is a show that’ll help upcoming services to reach a big set of audience and this is definitely not Apple’s version of the App Story documentary.

4. There will be things that’ll make Apple developers slightly uncomfortable : This is reality TV. There’ll be drama around things. There’ll be people spending days and nights in a work culture which developers don’t like. Don’t take this show to the heart. If a tweet quotes one of the contestants talking about their workaholic life. Apple’s not urging others to do the same. It’s just the part of the story of a product.

I liked watching the episode for the “startup reality tv” aspect of it. It’s looks like an interesting idea. It feels like an honest attempt at providing apps with interesting ideas succeed in their endeavours.