The tooling has become insanely good, so long as you trust the shoulders of the giants you’re standing on. For example, a month ago the Electron team introduced a bug that made my Microsoft Store app think it was outside the store. The users of my app were not happy - so I looked into how I could test the app “in the store” as a beta ... it’s basically an exercise in frustration. Package flights are a joke, build numbers don’t make a package unique. Just all sorts of hassle for a store that’s 1% (I’m being generous) the size of Apple’s.
Anywho, I’m a solo developer that created a desktop electron app that lets you design and print labels (either roll or sheets) and can import spreadsheet data for use in text, barcodes and even colors. It’s been a hell of a ride so far because my customers run the gamut of “organizing my yarn” to “storing nuclear isotopes.” I get emails and calls like, “I need to print 15,000 labels by Tuesday or I’m fired!” Those are always fun. My customers are in my small town of Minnesota USA, California, UAE, Russia, China, India, Brazil, Australia, NZ. I have global reach in this funky little niche.
All this made possible by some insane tooling (and toiling). It’s a really fun time to be a developer... even if my app takes up 500MB memory. Ha!
You can download my app from https://label.live