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Comment by hboon | Hacker News Reader

> Like what the hell even is indie app?

In the Mac world, and now iOS which most of this article refers to, the term indie developers has a more specific meaning. It refers to a single developer or small team of a few developers that is self-funded. It almost definitely implies doing it full-time [1], and not doing this during their free time only (aka. hobbyist).

It has more or less the same meaning as used in the video games community, and similar to how it's used in film making.

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Similar definition with musicians as well, at least in the 90s - an indie musician was typically not signed to a record label, and published their own CDs and merchandise and sold / mailed them directly to fans. They didn't have the resources of a huge marketing department or big record label advances, but they had direct contact with individual fans & got a much higher percentage of the profit on every sale. They could make a living from a smaller fan/customer base (The 1000 True Fans theory).

Indie video games have never been defined like that, and neither have indie films. It means independent of a major publisher, that's all. The team size or level of funding has no bearing on that.

There have been development studios not owned by major publishers with a couple hundred people (not many left today), these were never called 'indies', at most 'independent studios'. The term 'indie' was always only used for very small teams or single developers.

"Independent video games (commonly referred to as indie games) are video games created by individuals or small teams generally without video game publisher financial support." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indie_game

That was always my understanding. Wikipedia could be wrong too, of course.

Many studios are large enough that they have publishing departments to rival major publishers. These are never defined as indie.

Er, that's not true - at least in the case of games. Lots of indie games have major publisher support, although generally not much in terms of funding. Look at PlayStation Network (Sony) and Xbox Live (Microsoft). Braid, Journey, Bastion (published by Warner Bros) as a few examples. Sony in particular is a big supporter of indies.

Secondly companies like Supercell aren't considered indie, despite being completely independent of any publisher.

Generally indies are defined as single devs or small teams, small budgets (usually little to no outside funding) and retain creative control.

So it's just about size of the team and the amount of money? Why should that be a consideration? I personally just care that the application works and does what I expect it to do. I don't care if it's done by big team or small team or a single chimpanzee from the local zoo.

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