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Comment by navait | Hacker News Reader

Maybe not rich, but if 5000 people buy a $5 app that you spent 30 hours on, that's a pretty good ROI for your time.

I seriously doubt you could design, develop, prep, submit app, and market for 30 hours and have anything that anyone would download for free, let alone pay $5 for. The sheer volume of users doesn't obviate the fact that there's a minimum level of quality for discoverability to kick in.

30 hours is the amount of time the author of Redacted claims to have spent developing the app.

That's just development. There's time spent on support, marketing, prepping app store submission, responding to interview questions, etc.

Plus the amount of time it took to master the language, the framework, the platform etc. before even starting to develop the app.

I have actually done exactly that. Twice. If I can do it, anyone can.

Mind sharing? I didn't see apps on your site.

I don't want to get into specifics because I have abandoned their development and support a long time ago. The first one was a developer tool priced around $10, the second one was a more generic IT productivity tool priced around $5. They've both made around $10-15K over the years. In the end I had to abandon them because sales started to drop more and more every month and continued development didn't seem to stop that.

(responding to child comment)

> I have abandoned their development and support a long time ago. > sales started to drop more and more every month and continued development

So there were obvious support and continued development costs, so I expect that the true hours you'd add to the ROI calculation are well more than 30.

Right, this is the fate of many apps on the Mac App Store. Eventually you run out of people you are able to reach who are willing to purchase your app. Because you cannot charge for updates, this means that continued development and support becomes unsustainable at some point.

An app in 30 hours? Believe me that this is not the usual time it takes to build an app !

Exactly. You can spend 30 hours just preparing screenshots in various languages and device sizes, preview video and so on.

That's not what all the articles and media are telling me.

I can spend almost no time on an iOS app and make myself rich. Even kids can do it.

According to the hype. So it must be true.

I'd be curious where you're getting any kind of hype that states "I can spend almost no time".

I'm curious how you haven't seen any miracle articles of the kids who just learn iOS programming in a week, spend a few hours on a game, and make serious cash. For the longest time those were coming out weekly, which always made my boss say "Why can't we do that?"

"Redacted, which peaked at No. 2 on the Mac App Store, sold 1,845 copies through May 19 and earned $6,600"

That seems to be a low ceiling on success, no?

Maybe I just have low standards for success, but $220^H^H^H160/hour sounds pretty good to me. Also if it's sucessful on mac app store, a $2 version on iOS/android might be viable.

Well, you also have to take out Apple's cut (30%), plus taxes.

That's not bad for a passive income stream, and for only having spent 30 hours on it.

And for an app that just lets you selectively blur out bits of images. GIMP can do that in seconds, for free.

It's indicative of the state of the App Store that there are so many apps like this. The worst culprits - in my view - are 'distraction-free text editors'. I guess if the market is there for a $20 text editor that does nothing, then people are going to try to exploit it.

People are also forgetting that the time spent writing an app in your free time is "fun", or should be. I program in my free time for fun, getting paid after the fact is gravy. Getting paid $6600 for 30 hours of fun time (or so he says) is awesome.

Yeah, if you have no expectations at all of getting paid (like, say, Wozniak), a check is a very good surprise. However, since you are jumping through the hoops to get your app approved, you are expecting (or hoping) to get paid to some degree.

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