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Comment by neepi | Hacker News Reader

I had an idea years ago for an app but came to the same conclusion after some market research and a risk assessment so didn’t bother. I do not regret that decision for a moment.

I either have to put enough time into the idea to do it full time or do a shitty job. I can’t win either way without incurring massive risks so I will continue to part time two jobs and invest the earnings from those wisely instead.

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Did the idea really require being an app? Could it have been a website/webapp instead?

How do you do photo deduplication on a website?

WASM

Photos are on device.

It could but I respect my potential userbase too much to make it more convenient for me and less convenient for them.

Do you think it’s easier to make a living creating web apps?

There’s no code signing process or update review. There’s no $99/year registration fee for the privilege to have your code signed. There’s no up to -30% hit on your fees.

So yeah, there’s an easier way of avoiding the Apple specific pain points. If you think that I felt it would be easier to program the actual app, then you’re clearly just trying to be a hostile commenter and insinuating something about me.

I wasn’t talking about any of that. I was talking about the ease of earning a living as a solo developer on the platform. On iOS, it’s true that there are hoops you have to jump through and you have to share 15% of your fees (if you get to the point where you owe 30%, you are doing well!), but in return you get access to a fairly large audience of people willing to pay for apps and services.

The web is the Wild West and I don’t really have much of a feel for how difficult it is to find an audience that will pay to use the software you build.

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