The assumption that we on the consumer side have kind of been driven to is that APPICS is going to be this entirely separate content world which is primarily focused on mobile devices. Which would be fine, except that an intelligent person then goes on to ask, "but what does that mean for the original steem blockchain?"
And then we cycle into all of the questions that I just asked previously about SMTs.
The APPICS ICO was interesting to me (not necessarily in a good way) because of the multistage nature of the release. The early phase had a 20% price cut and as things went along it dropped to 10% and then 5%. If I were trying to sell the most of the thing before a due date, that would be the exact opposite of what I wanted to do. I don't want to get everyone in at the beginning of my sales, I want to push them to get in right before the drop, keeping excitement high and word-of-mouth really solid once I go live. Instead, what they've done seems to communicate exactly the opposite, that they wanted everyone to get in early while the hype over nothing that they could see was high and then gently screw harder the people who came in via word-of-mouth or people who were excited to get in on a really cheap ICO (comparatively).
If we are to judge people by what they do and not what they say – what they do seems kind of shady.
And again with APPICS, we have a situation where they don't really talk much about the actual process of using the platform. They've given a few show and tells, but from the footage that I've seen, the actual interaction doesn't seem to be offering anything more than a very basic Instagram or Facebook post except that people can drop a steem vote on it. Hades only knows what their beneficiary cut is, or how their token will interact with the rest of the steem blockchain, or how their content will appear in the steem blockchain or anything else.
If they are spinning off a new token just to back a prettier mobile interface for the steem BC, I suppose that's okay, but it feels like a waste of an entire coin hype cycle.
One of the things that, as a game designer of multiplayer games and even role-playing games, I look at when considering whether or not to add a new currency to the game is whether or not you can buy something different with it. If you can't, there's no real reason for that extra bit of record keeping.
I know you've probably been following APPICS a lot more closely that I have, so if they aren't making much of an impression on you, I suspect that they're falling down on the job.
The SMTs are just not that impressive, useful, or needed, as far as I can tell right now. They almost feel as though they are a tacked on technology to compete with ERC20 – which would be fine if they actually conveyed an element of value like an ERC20.
Use cases. We need decent use cases. Ones which seem to be written from the position of "how will users actually use this thing?"
I'm not holding my breath. That never ends well.