Totally get it. I'm very happy for him, and I'm fully aware of why I only made $190 :) As the parent of an autistic child, I'm really happy that app authors like this can disrupt entrenched and overpriced industries and make tech like this available to a lot more people. Someone will eventually compete with him too (App Stores totally grease the wheels for competition) and then consumers will benefit even more.
May I ask you why, being an experienced developer with an autistic child that know the actual state of the industry, you overlooked this opportunity?
It's a genuine question, because I do it all the times as well and then, when I realize it to late, I wonder why I didn't think about it in the first place. I would like to know if there is a pattern or something.
In this particular case my child is fairly high functioning and not non-verbal, so I wasn't aware of this particular need. We do use some small pictoral cards with him to help prepare him for transitions, but it's literally like laminated clip art. Don't really need something high tech. In that case presenting him with an ipad would likely just distract him...
But I sympathize with your general lament over "why didn't I think of that?" Haven't we all experienced that SO many times?
Spotting commercial opportunities is its own skill. Any experienced programmer could have made the v1 of Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, etc... but figuring out that people need that is nontrivial.
Is that how it works, or do lots of people build lots of things, and when a tiny handful of them go big the creators are retroactivley deemed prescient?
I think that there's no question you have to do some things right to succeed, but many people do things right and fail, because ultimately, a lot of it is just pure luck.
A lot of it is that the people build things they know will work (rather than things they think will work) tend to succeed more often. (At least in my own admittedly anecdotal experience) The hard work of research, initial sales and market validation is later retroactively glossed over as "vision" by onlookers.
Everyone is convinced that their startup is the next big thing. Some of them end up being right. Part of that was prescience, part of it was the "luck" to be obsessed with the right idea.
True. The reason why this went well for the developer is that he did direct sales to find early advocates, and didn't rely on an app store magic wand. Of course, that is possible with a $199 app, not so much with a $1.99 one.
You may laugh, but this is exactly the type of story we need to hear more about to balance the super hype around apps. Yeah, you could hit gold, but with a random roll you're much more likely to fire a dud.
It is not a crap-app story per se, but I and many other developers I know have made all of our money from client work, not a dollar from the app store.
Since we manage the provisioning etc. for the client and walk them through the initial paperwork, no one ever knows who built the (admittedly sometimes faddy) app.
We do build our own apps but just for fun and personal use.
I'm curious how the mechanics work for publishing an app to the iTunes store for a client? Does the client create the account and handle publishing the app? (Do they need to sign the package, deal with XCode, etc.?) Or does the client create the account and turn it over to you to publish the app(s)? Or do you - the developer - publish the app yourself and pass the money through (which doesn't seem good)?
We manage everything. We hold their hand through the initial paperwork for company registration with Apple. They never deal with Xcode. Services like TestFlight are really their only point of interaction pre-App Store.
For financials, developers can be given only development level privileges.
Serious question, if I outsource my app idea to be made elsewhere through a freelanceer or agency, should I be worried? How would I protect myself here? NDA?
Trust is important. Go with your instinct (this is why a face to face meeting, if only initially, is so important - you cannot evaluate someone virtually, the nuances get airbrushed over). Basically, if we were to screw a client, the grapevine would know. Relationships are everything and that is why we get work that others could do 80 to 90 percent of.
We do sign NDAs from time to time. But really most of those NDAs are to protect the client from us revealing we did the work.
Truly unique ideas, you will need to build your own trusted network. And sell the developers on the idea (they will not commit just for money, you want to capture their heart).
I wrote an app to display traffic images for my local city - I followed all the correct avenues and got permission to use the images from local traffic authority. Part of our signed contract is that I'm not allowed to sell the application. I've had about 200,000 downloads and was number 1 on the Australian app store for a week.
There are people who don't seem to have followed any path to keep their applications and content legal (with the same app idea) and are selling theirs with the same content as mine, they seem to be on the app store with no repercussions. I guess I have that piece of mind that I won't get sued or asked to pull my app..
I've made about enough from my admob ads to pay off my developer subscription :)
I made a game in high school and sold it in the android app store along with a free trial version. The trial version got about 300 downloads and the paid version sold a whopping 3 copies.
Ah well, it was a learning experience. It now no longer works despite not having been changed at all; perhaps some new android version broke backwards compatibility, or the API I was using depended on some undocumented functionality.
The first web app I ever built (about 6 years ago) was related to sharing photos of home design and architecture. I got something like 4 signups, and it was free...
Being my first effort, I did everything wrong. Too many features, delayed launching, awful code, unrealistic traffic expectations, fear of billing systems (probably warranted at the time) - pretty much everything.
But... not giving up too easily, I tried selling links on the site. (I had no traffic, so ads were a bust. I figured it might have some SEO value). Turns out that's not a bad niche for that sort of thing, and the site wound up making a few hundred dollars a month in link sales. That has since dried up (across every site on which I've sold links - I think Google is figuring this out), but it was nice that it wasn't a total waste of time, financially speaking.
It would be great to actually see these apps you talk about making no money so that we all could look at them and think about what went wrong with them.
I remember ordering 65 of these calculators from the states (I'm in SA). They worked out to be about $200 each. If the varsity students knew about this app, the benefit for them would've been insane.
Pretty much the same here. Then again I'm targeting cross-stitchers (pretty small market) and went with iAd over any form of payment. All things considered the fact that it's made any money at all is kind of astonishing.
Was a bit of a letdown to figure out that Apple had sent me a check at one point and I didn't notice it until two months later.
