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Comment by Buttons840 | Hacker News Reader

Solo devs who want to make a few bucks should look into developing desktop applications. VC companies can't compete in that space, it's not profitable enough.

Only problem is we don't have any good UI toolkits anymore, all are second rate compared to the browser. Qt might be the best, but their licensing scares solo devs.

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I want to make a living making desktop applications. However, as far as I can tell, unless you hit the lottery, it's not doable in general, because of a growing contingent of users who won't use your tool unless it's free or open-source (there's a bunch of people running around the internet, many on HN, who think that the existence of proprietary software is intrinsically evil), and an increasing number of devs who will make an open-source clone of your tool simply because yours isn't open-source.

With that, if the only thing that's going to happen is my ideas get taken and used in an open-source project, why not just keep my tools to myself and continue to work for a big corporation?

>it's not doable in general, because of a growing contingent of users who won't use your tool unless it's free or open-source

Oh, don't worry about that. Trading money for things is an ages-old thing and will remain for centuries no matter what. Just make something useful and put the right price on it. People will buy it if it solves their problem. If someone won't use it because it's not free - they don't really have the need that your product solves. Just ignore them.

This is not as bad on the Mac platform as it is on Windows.

Anyway if a few devs can quickly slap together a functional open-source clone of your apps you might want to ask yourself if your app really provides enough worth to your users to pay for it.

I've been making desktop apps for two decades (proprietary closed source software).

My target audience is businesses, not HN users so I haven't ran into these open source zealots.

Some businesses do ask for open source (politely declined)

Some have also asked to place the source code into escrow for continuity in case the business folds (also politely declined but for some companies this a reasonable ask)

The thing is that people will ask for literally anything and the requests are asinine:

* Rewrite in java\python\ruby\c++\whatever language the IT guy read about last week (nah)

* We need a mac version for the one guy who somehow uses a mac (nope)

* Support oracle (fuck no)

* Support novel networking (lol)

* Make a webapp (lmao)

I'm also not afraid the "hacker" who is going to re-write my app. If theirs is truly better, I will just fork it and crush them :)

Don't let the bobble heads dissuade you. If you want to make a desktop app and if you think the desktop is the correct medium, do it.

Username checks out.

Loved VB6. I have a friend who is still writing and maintaining software he wrote in VB6 for an industrial plant to this day.

Three years ago I started a proof of concept electron app to design and print labels on thermal printers. That app has grown into mid-6-figures revenue from mostly “one-time license” sales. I do offer monthly subscription pricing with an expiring license and after a year my MRR has hit $3k. My competition is windows only and closed-source, largely backed by private equity.

I live in a small town in Minnesota so I don’t need to make much money to be comfortable, raising a family. I’m in my late 30s and have done mostly iOS and Node IIOT consulting the last 10 years. That’s what was paying the bills until my electron app started making “real” money.

On the technical side. I get emails every day saying how much a user loves my app. It’s really rewarding. Every year I get one angry email or App Store review saying that there are much better design/desktop-publishing apps out there. These reviews are usually written by technically savvy people that don’t quite get how stupid-complicated label printing can get. Like, don’t expect to design your company logo in my app. But surely, you can drag in your company logo and my app will dither your image for a 200 DPI zebra printer.

My app is basically a no-code image processing pipeline that effortlessly hooks up spreadsheet data, generates barcodes, resizes and fences text, dithers images, dynamically changes colors, and then talks directly to a thermal printer without using a driver.

And you can use it for free for 14 days to see if it works. It’s a single download. Yeah, it’s electron, yeah it uses some memory. But you can share the design files between Mac and windows and it doesn’t require internet for use.

I don’t know. I think it’s a pretty good solution.

Read more at https://label.live

Very interesting! I'm always amazed at kind of creative work I come across on here. Did not expect to read a success story about generating imagery for thermal printers this morning, but I'm glad I did.

Btw, what do you mean "without a driver". Do you bundle code that talks to thermal printers in you app? Is there a standardized communication protocol in this space or do you maintain a breadth of custom implementations?

Yes, the app uses node-usb to read and write directly with printers matching vids/pids. Each vendor is a custom implementation with some similarity and lots of differences. It usually involves parsing status to get DPI, busy states, then sending raster image data, and other commands to place the image, feed speed, heat settings, cutter, etc.

Also worth noting they in my journey I’ve added the ability to submit the label jobs as PDFs to existing printer drivers. This allows for targeting full color label printers like epson and Primera, but also inkjet and laser printers that use sheets of labels. This is accomplished by rendering the labels on a larger page and then sending the resulting PDF to the system printer. There’s also the option of sending the images to a directory on the file system and naming the files using a column from the spreadsheet. Quite versatile … but difficult to market.

Curious, how would this solo dev convince anyone to _download and install_ something on their machine?

They would publish it in a trusted App Store.

Do desktop users use these app stores? I'm yet to install a single app from the Mac app Store

Give them a choice between a web app, a desktop app (which can be on Steam or the Windows Store too), or mobile apps.

My anecdotal evidence says yes. My wife was confused on how to "install an app" for something that wasn't in the Mac app store. She had been used to the iPhone/iPad model for so long that she had forgotten how it was on her Windows PC 10 years ago: if not in app store -> google company/go to company website, download the installer, install program.

I feel like general computer skills have decayed quite a bit in the general public, especially with people who don't work with computers 8 hours/day. See this recent article: https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-direc... The advent of the smartphone/tablet overtaking PC use for general/casual use, e.g. emails, photos, social media, online banking/billpay has really reduced the general public's skill level with desktop operating systems. Probably similar overlap with the subset of people who always dumped every file to the desktop directory instead of organizing files in specific directories.

Mark it as "pay once use forever" instead of the infinite cost sink of a subscription model.

And more and more, "it will never change, no new features" can be a selling point.

Change the model to "pay the subscription fee otherwise we will alter it"

And pray we don't alter [the deal] any further

Sure, unfortunately as a solo developer unless your app is a unicorn or you make several of these apps, pay once use forever doesn't pay your bills a year from now.

> or you make several of these apps

Yes, this.

Investing all your energy into features none of your users want for an existing app is a waste of energy for you and an annoyance for the users.

And maintaining the backend of a SaaS can mean more operations busywork for you, compared to a standalone application.

Build something new people actually want.

I'm afraid desktop apps mean a lot of annoying bug/crash reports from users with idiosyncratic local configs (e.g. antivirus software, or they modified some windows registry key a long time ago, because a YouTube video told them to do so, and now don't even remember it etc.).

Indie game studios have managed it. They're a response to the current era of bloated AAA titles that discourage single-player modes and nickel and dime the user with frequent microtransactions to keep the recurring revenue coming.

Speaking for myself, I have replaced Adobe CC with Affinity Publisher, Designer and Photo. A one-time fee for software I can use forever, as opposed to paying forever regardless of whether I use it or not.

I also have Dreamweaver and Flash-type animation tools (Bootstrap Studio and Tumult Hype) that are also one-time fee apps.

You aren't the only one. A lot of people and smaller shops have abandoned Adobe for this reason. A single, upfront cost is just a more justifiable expense than an upfront cost with a monthly subscription, not to mention, losing access to your work if you miss a payment.

Do you not do this?

No unless you're counting browser, ide and everything CLI I install using brew

Interesting. I have the Adobe Suite, Ableton, a zillion audio plug-ins, ProTools, and the Unreal editor, not to mention DropBox, Outlook, Teams, Slack, Bear, excel … This is just from memory without looking at my apps folder.

Even for IDE I have XCode, Webstorm, Sublime …

In general, native apps are still far superior for most tasks I do.

What if this something did not need installation? Just download and run.

The fact that you are even asking this makes me feel so old :-)

Anyway, you'd be surprised. Once you venture outside the HN echo chamber there are large numbers of people who really prefer that their data stay on their own PC. Also, many are concerned about the same problem that this topic is about: having interfaces change without warning is a huge problem for most people.

Convincing them is largely about providing an upgrade path if they need it and not having forced upgrades.

> Once you venture outside the HN echo chamber there are large numbers of people who really prefer that their data stay on their own PC.

AFAICT, that's backward: people with that preference are over-, not under-, represented on HN.

You're right. I really didn't say that well. What I was trying to get at is that there's a preference for webapps vs. PC apps on HN. Which is strangely at odds with the privacy obsession you find here.

No, I think parent is right. One gets the impression that HN only meets two kinds of computer user: their parents who just use a web browser[0] and tech company or large enterprise employees. There are a lot of people out there relying on highly specialized VB 6 applications to run their business or engage with their entirely-too-serious hobbies.

[0] anyone who just uses a web browser arguably doesn't even count as a 'desktop computer user'.

Not sure why you got the impression that I haven't used software in the 2000s.

My understanding right now is that if you have a software that people need to install and your competitors have an in browser offering, your customers overwhelmingly choose the in browser offering.

This has been my experience even though I hate the subscription model as much as everybody else in this thread

If it fulfills a business need it's a lot easier.

Unless you’re doing Linux applications you have all the toolkits you need. WinUI for Windows and Cocoa for the Mac, done. They’re not cross platform, they might not be all they could be, but they are the default and they work.

I believe you’re right in that there are money to be made in developing desktop app, but I also believe that the customer base expect thing to be native, so don’t try to do Windows application using GTK or macOS applications using wxWidgets.

>They’re not cross platform

Which is why everyone and their dog is going Electron. Linux compatibility is one thing (which no one really cares about, except for software in the public services sector), but users generally expect that their software is available on a Mac - not to mention that people using a Mac tend to be on the better-earning/willing to pay actual money for software side.

My dog is actually doing Mac only, since that’s where the money is.

True, but beyond VS Code name one Electron application that’s actually good.

Companies want their application on two platform, use Electron and now their product suck on both.

Electron is actually a reasonable solution for internal and bespoke software. It just not at a level where I can see it being something I’d want to pay for as a consumer. Again VS Code is pretty good, but it’s still clearly not a mac app.

Discord and OBS come to mind.

I'm fairly sure that OBS is writing in C++ using QT.

Ah, I was thinking of this: https://www.electronjs.org/apps/streamlabs-obs

Discord certainly works, but when I see a chat box lag on an i7 8700k with 32GB of memory I die a little inside.

And that happens occasionally with Discord, without running make -j42.

Discord is awful to use a desktop application. It's sluggish and cumbersome, not snappy and lightweight like a native application would be.

I disagree. I think the troubles of cross-platform GUI are overstated. People used to port software to a dozen different 8-bit micros and 5 game consoles using assembly, writing for Win32 and Cocoa can't be as difficult as that. Besides, it will incentivise you to make your interfaces simpler, while still providing you the ability to leverage platform specific features.

I think everyone is moving to electron because web developers are a dime a dozen.

I’m really tempted to learn Swift and the macOS UI toolkits just because I’m 100% on macOS these days and there’s a few things in my life that I think could be better as a stand-alone desktop app rather than a web app or Electron app.

unrelated, but nice username!

Cheers, lots of things from San Francisco get featured on HN but the Grateful Dead have to be my favourite!

SwiftUI is really nice but I've found performance to be questionable (they seem to be improving it over time) and there are some things that are impossible to do in it that are absolute must haves for some application types. For example, there is no way to change the tab order of which text entries get focus.

> all are second rate compared to the browser

As a non-web developer I'm genuinely curious, what is a good UI toolkit targeting web browsers/Electron that rivals Qt?

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