Is app creation a profitable hobby?

[1458279]

Thus, the way to better your odds at a profitable endeavor is to only do apps where you know something or have something that will take newcomers a long time to acquire or copy (trade secret sauce, enforceable patent, exclusive license, zillions of "followers", etc.), thus extending the time until your potential profits go to zero... assuming you are lucky enough to find any profits at all.

If you don't know something or have something unique, it's better to spend your time finding such before creating your apps.

Excellent point, while others are paying $10 for a "template game" that they reskin, others are focused on specific areas.

Look back at WordPerfect, they only did one thing, but they did a hellva job for that time, printer drivers were a huge problem back then, they wrote drivers for almost anything. IIRC, they were the only ones with a fax/modem driver back when those came out. Sadly Microsoft pushed hard to put them out of business by making Windows hard to write for.

Sadly, the good guys don't always win. BTW, Microsoft sucks.

 

[grandM]

Excellent point, while others are paying $10 for a "template game" that they reskin, others are focused on specific areas.

Look back at WordPerfect, they only did one thing, but they did a hellva job for that time, printer drivers were a huge problem back then, they wrote drivers for almost anything. IIRC, they were the only ones with a fax/modem driver back when those came out. Sadly Microsoft pushed hard to put them out of business by making Windows hard to write for.

Sadly, the good guys don't always win. BTW, Microsoft sucks.

wordperfect, brings back memories. Yep, it is dead now.

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I think the people who make money from apps are the people who don't initially expect to make money. The developers who release apps to the world because they think the world will enjoy them are usually the ones who end up making money.

Focus should probably be on both
marketing is important helas

 

[ackmondual]

Yeah, AppStore's waay too saturated. Complaints from developers that Apple doesn't do enough to better promote the little guys.

Some of the companies that publish digital board games mentioned when EA and other giants do their mass holiday sales, they stay down and wait a week later. Otherwise, their sales get washed away by those folks.

Rovio mentioned in interviews that it's not enough to get people to DL your game. You want them to be playing it often, so push updates. Don't just offer fixes. Fix something, and add new features while you're at it. Some have estimated it took $180K to make the engine for Angry Birds, but they seem to be doing well, with their users spending about as much time on the AB games as watching prime time TV.

wordperfect, brings back memories. Yep, it is dead now.

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Focus should probably be on both
marketing is important helas

And some of us are counting on the likes of WPS, Google Docs, and OpenOffice to avenge it.

 

[grandM]

Yeah, AppStore's waay too saturated. Complaints from developers that Apple doesn't do enough to better promote the little guys.

Some of the companies that publish digital board games mentioned when EA and other giants do their mass holiday sales, they stay down and wait a week later. Otherwise, their sales get washed away by those folks.

Rovio mentioned in interviews that it's not enough to get people to DL your game. You want them to be playing it often, so push updates. Don't just offer fixes. Fix something, and add new features while you're at it. Some have estimated it took $180K to make the engine for Angry Birds, but they seem to be doing well, with their users spending about as much time on the AB games as watching prime time TV.



And some of us are counting on the likes of WPS, Google Docs, and OpenOffice to avenge it.

I've worked with OpenOffice: it truly is a poor substitute
But now I'm on pages etc and I love pages !!!!!!

 

[1458279]

I've worked with OpenOffice: it truly is a poor substitute
But now I'm on pages etc and I love pages !!!!!!

I just saw where large companies (Coke) is ending "classic" documents and voice mail for more modern streamlined services, so these older solutions will play less of a role.

The "office" business model will be used by fewer people as we get more advanced enterprise solutions. Office products like spread sheets were a great universal solution for it's time, but people really didn't use it well.

Example: 90% of spread sheet users, used 10% of the functionality of the products. Their macro languages were hard to learn and error prone. The errors were hard to find and users were very poor debuggers.

I remember one of my contracts years ago was a hospital equipment acquisition system that could have been done with an office system (spread sheet, word processing, database) but the company found the users were very poor at using the office type solution.

As apps become more advanced, the user will have more "ready made" solutions where they can't screw it up as easy as with a spread sheet.

I was in the processes of getting a home loan years ago, the loan person at the bank couldn't use a calculator to figure out the loan/equity ratio... she had to guess and then check with the calculator if the guess was right.

I went to a fast food years ago, paid with $20, the cashier punched in $20... I said wait... put down some $1's and coins... she looked confused and asked why I was doing that... She then punched in the numbers and looked at the computer in complete shock.

People can't do math or parallel park, how do you expect them to learn a macro language?

The smarter the computers... the dumber the people... The people are already dumber... make the computers smarter...

 

[firewood]

Apple reports over $10 Billion in 2014 app sales. I wonder what percentage of that trickles down to "hobby" developers?

The bulk probably goes to companies that pay professional developers and consultants in regular salary and fees.

 

[1458279]

Thus, the way to better your odds at a profitable endeavor is to only do apps where you know something or have something that will take newcomers a long time to acquire or copy (trade secret sauce, enforceable patent, exclusive license, zillions of "followers", etc.), thus extending the time until your potential profits go to zero... assuming you are lucky enough to find any profits at all.

If you don't know something or have something unique, it's better to spend your time finding such before creating your apps.

Excellent point. Consider FB, they stay alive because of their following, anyone can, and several have tried to knock them off, but it hasn't worked (yet). It's because of at least two things: 1. they already have a following and it cost money to get that many users on board. 2. anything you do, they'll try to copy (snap-chat) but that doesn't always work, but they can buy you out as well

One other option is to predict where things are going. Look at business software for mobile, look at the trends toward mobile doing things that used to be done on a PC.

There's still a ton of new things down the road, we started off with flashlight apps, now the flashlight is built in. Things will continue to be more seamless and automatic.

Many problems left to be solved.