Ask HN: App Store Devs, Are you guys still motivated? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: App Store Devs, Are you guys still motivated?

9 pointsdiminium11 comments

We now know that the vast majority of apps make a large loss. They are part of the long tail. Only a very small portion of apps make any sort of money and most of those investing in them still don't make enough money to quit their day job. If you count in opportunity loss, you might even say most of the winners still lost money.

Are you guys still motivated? If so, where does your motivation come from?

Edit: Minor corrections.

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I seem to have lost my motivation a while ago, partly due to personal life problems, partly due to there being free competitors now, and partly due to being stuck for a long time making a very complex feature which ended up bringing nothing in return (a fancy billing system for subscriptions/trials/etc, which customers don't seem to fancy).

On the other hand while working on these apps I came up with a number of great technical ideas, which I would like to flesh out before moving on, so that I can at least have a sense of technical accomplishment. That sort of keeps me going, but not really fast...

I'm tempted to do some work for hire now, just to take a break and recharge.

Well, for me, I love developing for iOS. The development tools are just awesome. They've made real effort to make it simple and fun (compare that with other Environments).

Regarding making money, I do make some money from the apps (not enough to replace my day job), but that's the case for any other thing you pick up. There will be competition everywhere.

I am motivated because i know that one day i will make it. But i try not to focus on one thing. i have 3 websites 3 android apps and 5 iphone apps. If required one day i will alsp learn something else. My objective i trying to make something so i can focus on many things not only one. Even if you can make it with one app chances are that it will not last.

Having high-quality products in the App Store is a great way to convince prospective contracts that I'm legit. http://cdixon.org/2011/02/05/selling-pickaxes-during-a-gold-...

and "high quality" doesn't necessarily mean "successful". There's plenty of good apps (and cars and restaurants) that never make a dime, and plenty of absolute shit that can't seem to die fast enough.

Right, totally. If it looks and feels good, it doesn't matter if it never turns a profit for me. It'd be great, mind you, but it's more important to me as a demonstration of what I can do rather than a means to generate income.

I make myself remember the job and life I had before I started my start-up and it keeps me motivated. I don't want to go back to that. Ever.

There is a lot of opportunity for good apps to shine

Installed, and am using this now. I haven't had time yet to see how it handles notifications and the like, but it is quite frankly a dead sexy Twitter client, and I do like it.

The introductory tutorial is also gorgeous.

It still has some work to be done, as I've hit a couple placeholders, but I'm looking forward to that.

One questionable UI detail though (at least to me) is using the account context menu instead of having a 'settings hardware button' menu. I get using the account context (at the top) for account management, but for things like refresh interval and all that jazz, I expect it to be available on the hardware button. Even if you bound the hardware button to the same thing (such that if you click the hardware button, the account context menu expands) it would probably work... just as it is now, the hardware button does a noticeable nothing.

Will definitely be using this though. Very nice.

Think you meant to post that here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4210062

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