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Comment by tsunamifury | Hacker News Reader

I've said it and been laughed at but the App Store is a shovelware market. A tiny fraction of apps gain enough volume to offset their low prices, and of those many are the result of paid downloads (tap joy).

There is a pervasive delusion that launching an app means immediate access to a lucrative market, but the reality is that it's highly competitive with extremely low returns.

If you are looking to make money off a mobile app (not establish saas mobile extension) rapidly launch MVPs of your apps to see if there is any demand. Don't invest in perfect designs and ux until you've validated that there is a user base worth investing in.

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Agreed. Agreed. I invested a year working on an app that was going to be followed my many. Soon after launch I discovered that people, for the most part, want free shit. A few apps are "blessed" be Apple and they do very well. Everyone else works for nothing. Apple benefits just the same and couldn't care less about making app discovery and the entire ecosytem better and more fair for the average developer. I am sure there are outliers but my current gut feeling about the iOS app world is that it a foolish pursuit.

Let's put it this way: Had I invested the same number of hours begging for change at a freeway off-ramp, instead of coding, I would have made vastly more money. How is that for a cold hard reality? I wonder how many published app authors feel the same way.

Could not agree more with you.

I'd further suggest that creating apps for clients is incredibly profitable. You don't necessarily need sales on apps to make money. Businesses, organizations, and people have problems that they are willing to pay to get solved with an app. Take your time selecting the right problem and you can make a good living and enjoy what you're creating at the same time.

What niches would you recommend?

Niches for creating your own apps? Or making niche apps for a client?

Since I was advocating client work in my previous post, I'll go with the latter. Start with what you love. As an example I love aviation. There's a lot of money in aviation (as well as a lot of debt). Companies and FBOs sometimes have very specific needs that could be solved with an app: scheduling, customer loyalty, logging, etc. Reach out, talk to them, tell that you love what they love, just see what happens.

Also I have absolutely no marketing training and create apps in an organization that I have no control over the clientele, which actually works out great for me.

The problem with the MVP approach is that you get a brief spotlight in the "New & Noteworthy" section when your app first launches. For the vast majority of apps this is the only boost they're going to get from Apple. So you really need to make a good impression right up front and a half-assed MVP blows this opportunity.

It's a pity that the app market is such a wasteland now because the platform has so much potential.

The only people actually making real money are the ones selling trainings, middleware, tolling and dubious mobile developer certifications.

I always tell people to note down the amount of money spent in hardware, digital certificates and development time. Then check how many times they would need to sell their app to recover the investment.

Most of the time the conclusion is that at the current prices, it would seldom pay off.

> If you are looking to make money off a mobile app (not establish saas mobile extension) rapidly launch MVPs of your apps to see if there is any demand. Don't invest in perfect designs and ux until you've validated that there is a user base worth investing in.

That advice is how you create shovelware. You can't validate a market if you don't meet the demands of that market, and that means producing something that can compete in a space of well-made and well-designed applications.

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