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.
Anyone else with a crap-app story?
Anyone else with a crap-app story?
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.
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).
Its so simply anyone with a little programming flair could do it.
It's never a real problem. People most of the times, don't see what you see. Worry less get more done.
"Theme" it and sell it on ThemeForest or a similar site. You'd make more from that than from your app! I would buy one.
For financials, developers can be given only development level privileges.
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 :)
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.
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.
Every stinker is a step forward.
Total profit -$98, Many lessons learned ;)
End of first week and I've made a full $0.40. Woop!
My awesome puzzler fetched me a whopping $55.