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Comment by zduny | Hacker News Reader

It's available free (and no ads) for desktop browsers and as a $1 Android app (on mobile needs to be an app for performance reasons and I believe it's a fair price).

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While $1 is certainly far less than the value this app provides, it’s going to be a hard sell when there are several free apps which do the same thing.

The intersection of "free", "no ads", and "works right" is often pretty bad. This at least has the web interface where you can see roughly what you would be getting.

Yes, but to be fair it's awfully hard to find a free app that does the same without bloat due to any kind of ads. I'm going to buy this app just because of frustration due to that.

There are several such apps on f-droid.

F-droid often has nice apps, but too often, they are just not good enough for what I want or need[1]. In that case, I'll gladly pay on the play-store because the paid version is nearly always (but certainly not guaranteed to) have less or no trackers ads, and malware included. The free apps far too often do.

I use https://exodus-privacy.eu.org/ to check for trackers, ads and "malware".

[1] Far too often, the apps there are "OK, but...", clearly the work of a someone building a quick "works for me" or someone learning how to build apps. For some tasks, "just OK" is good enough. More often it just isn't.

Sometimes, But a similar "utility" (shameless promotion here) I've made a free open source metronome. No ads and cross-platform.

https://tick.talaviram.com

So if someone like me had incentive for free metronome. I'm pretty sure there are also tuners out there.

Still, 1$ to support an app is really legitimate and sometimes gives more incentives for the developer to maintain it or add features.

Ok.

I also will need to buy a guitar to use this app, so if anything you should be paying me to use it

I agree. Although this might be more about covering development costs than making OP money.

An important distinction so many entrepreneurs fail to make. Don't enter a saturated market without anything new on the table if you intend to make money.

The problem with this particular market is that musicians can mostly tune by ear. Most will have a dedicated tuner next to their instrument and worst of all these apps don't perform as well for a variety of reasons not least of all that the response of the device might be off.

Musicians can tune by ear, but the vast majority of people who play guitar on a daily basis are novices or beginners and they all use tuners or tuner apps.

Even if you can tune by ear, it can be faster to use a tuner, especially in a noisy environment. Also, if you listen to harmonics when tuning a guitar by ear, you'll get something like just intonation instead of the equal temperament tuning that you would get with typical tuner apps.

Even if tuning by ear, when you play with a band or especially are recording, it would be very silly to trust your ear alone because recording hours of takes in an expensive recording studio with many other people's time in a slightly out of tune key would be very disrespectful and wasteful.

Most musicians can tune "relatively" okay, but do not have the ability to tune "absolutely" (perfect pitch).

Here is an example of perfect/absolute pitch that very few musicians have. This is the skill one would need to be able to not use a tuner at all > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dw3-k9 (Jimmy Kimmel Puts Charlie Puth’s Perfect Pitch to the Test).

For sure. We always tuned by plugging into tuners when I played in a band. You might get it to closer than completely out of tune by ear, but when you're in close quarters and there's people talking or playing their music, you just plug in and get to the green light.

I will pay anywhere from $1 to $5 to eliminate ads, so this is a good value, considering the free apps almost all have ads, if I recall. Or are provided by one of the larger guitar companies and promote their subscription/learning platforms?

I find the idea that $1 is a "hard sell" laughable, but unfortunately for software devs that is the world we find ourselves in when trying to monetize an idea.

Same. If I see a free app and a $1 app that does the same thing, I'll probably go for the $1 app.

Well, there are also already at least dozen free ones that allow to buy ad-less versions

> I find the idea that $1 is a "hard sell" laughable, but unfortunately for software devs that is the world we find ourselves in when trying to monetize an idea.

and it's hard sell because you can just pick any of them, test to your liking and pay for one after using it.

Or if you’re paying, just spend the extra few books (it’s $10) and get Petersen Strobosoft which is the absolute gold standard.

Or skip the idea that your phone makes a good tuner, spend $35, and get the TC Electronic Unitune. It's by far the best tuner I've used so far, and it's small enough you can just throw it into your guitar case. (Or leave it permanently attached)

Plus, it's much less fiddly to handle than balancing a phone and a guitar :)

Ultimately, it's a matter of taste, and what you use them for.

Lots of things to tune that aren't electric guitars ;)

The TC works just fine w/ any number of string instruments that aren't guitars or electric :)

Now try to tune a woodwind with one :)

Not available on Android, far as I can see.

Is the app the same as the desktop version feature wise?

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