Indie native iOS development

[Ailam7]

I was wondering whether you would consider building an iOS app natively with swift as an indie developer a fastlane. I feel like it fulfils most of the fastlane commandments.

Control: Ok, this one is perhaps the least fulfilled, as Apple does have restrictions and guidelines about posting apps on the app store. That being said, they aren't too strict and you do have a high level of control in building your app.

Entry: Learning iOS dev can take time. You also need good hardware, like a good quality mac book, which many people might not be able to afford or not be willing to switch from windows to Mac. XCode doesn't run on windows. While it's not too hard to learn iOS development if you are dedicated I think the barriers are quite high.

Need: Obviously completely depends on the app you build. A good app can comfortably fulfil this most important commandment.

Time: Initial development process can take time, but after publishing you don't need much time for maintenance compared to initial development. I'd say the model fulfils this commandment.

Scale: Almost everyone seems to have a mobile and about half of them are iPhones. Even if you niche down the app, still a large audience to target.

Feels like the model ticks most boxes. Would love to hear everyone's opinions, especially people who are iOS developer themselves.

 

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[Tau Ceti]

I am going to be blunt here so bear with me.

Your question is nonsensical. Your future customers don't care if your app is built in Swift or Flutter or dog s*it.

What matters is what value are you delivering.

You are starting from the wrong angle here.

Instead of focusing on tech , focus on the problem. find a problem to solve, then solve it. If it's a mobile app great, but if it's a mac app then also great, or maybe its a web app which is fine too.

Once you start from the problem, and then come up with a solution, then you can decide which stack you should use.

And which stack should you use then? The answer is the one that you are most comfortable with.

Why? Because your job is not to reinvent the wheel or code the perfect app with 100% test coverage with code so beautiful that you want to put it on a frame on your wall.
No, the goal is to solve a pain point and help your users solve their problem.

Remember that in a software venture, building the app is easy. Distribution, marketing, sales, customer support are the hard part.

 

[loop101]

I was wondering whether you would consider building an iOS app natively with swift as an indie developer a fastlane. I feel like it fulfils most of the fastlane commandments.

Control: Ok, this one is perhaps the least fulfilled, as Apple does have restrictions and guidelines about posting apps on the app store. That being said, they aren't too strict and you do have a high level of control in building your app.

Entry: Learning iOS dev can take time. You also need good hardware, like a good quality mac book, which many people might not be able to afford or not be willing to switch from windows to Mac. XCode doesn't run on windows. While it's not too hard to learn iOS development if you are dedicated I think the barriers are quite high.

Need: Obviously completely depends on the app you build. A good app can comfortably fulfil this most important commandment.

Time: Initial development process can take time, but after publishing you don't need much time for maintenance compared to initial development. I'd say the model fulfils this commandment.

Scale: Almost everyone seems to have a mobile and about half of them are iPhones. Even if you niche down the app, still a large audience to target.

Feels like the model ticks most boxes. Would love to hear everyone's opinions, especially people who are iOS developer themselves.

I believe MJ once said, while App development was not perfect, any action was better than no action. (Apologies if this is incorrect).

My thoughts:

There is a ton of money being made by iOS developers not shipping apps in the App store, they are shipping learning materials (courses, books, code templates). If you want to sell actual native apps through an App store, you should consider using a cross-platform if possible. If I was going to make 2D casual game today, like Candy Crush or Flappy Birds, I would use Flutter. You can't control the fate of an app on an App store, but with cross-platform tools, you can diversify across all the major platforms.

You could make a small "Cthulhu Crush" match-3 game using Flutter, and ship on iOS/Android/Amazon/PC/Mac/Linux/Facebook all with the same code base. I expect a lot of small indie devs will do this because it gives them the most control possible, and increases their sales. There was an HTML game developer who targeted the Microsoft Web Game Store (where competition was low), got his game to #1, then boosted his sales on all the other platforms by saying "#1 Web Game on Microsoft Store". If you got an app to #1 on the Ubuntu Linux app store, where the competition is super low, that could be in your advertising on other App stores.

If you simply make a native iOS app in Swift/ObjC, your audience is going to be Mac/iOS users, and Apple can zap you at any time. They might zap your app, zap your account, or zap you personally. I would never put myself in that position. I would write a book about how to make an iOS app before I would just make the iOS app, at least I can control the book. I've heard of people creating multiple business accounts on the Apple App store to circumvent getting all their apps banned at once, but I don't know much about that. In today's culture, you say the wrong thing online, and you can get a whole army of people trying to shut down your business, and an App store account is probably the first thing they would target.

If you simply love Apple, and trust them completely, you can certainly make a living making your own apps. I would just consider it a 9-5 job though, where you get to pick your projects and take a % cut of every sale. At least you are clear on who is in control of your "job".

 

[Ailam7]

I am going to be blunt here so bear with me.

Your question is nonsensical. Your future customers don't care if your app is built in Swift or Flutter or dog s*it.

What matters is what value are you delivering.

You are starting from the wrong angle here.

Instead of focusing on tech , focus on the problem. find a problem to solve, then solve it. If it's a mobile app great, but if it's a mac app then also great, or maybe its a web app which is fine too.

Once you start from the problem, and then come up with a solution, then you can decide which stack you should use.

And which stack should you use then? The answer is the one that you are most comfortable with.

Why? Because your job is not to reinvent the wheel or code the perfect app with 100% test coverage with code so beautiful that you want to put it on a frame on your wall.
No, the goal is to solve a pain point and help your users solve their problem.

Remember that in a software venture, building the app is easy. Distribution, marketing, sales, customer support are the hard part.

Wow that's actually a pretty good explanation! Thanks!

Do you have any advice on where I can start to identify a need/problem that a mobile app might be able to solve?

 

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[Ailam7]

I believe MJ once said, while App development was not perfect, any action was better than no action. (Apologies if this is incorrect).

My thoughts:

There is a ton of money being made by iOS developers not shipping apps in the App store, they are shipping learning materials (courses, books, code templates). If you want to sell actual native apps through an App store, you should consider using a cross-platform if possible. If I was going to make 2D casual game today, like Candy Crush or Flappy Birds, I would use Flutter. You can't control the fate of an app on an App store, but with cross-platform tools, you can diversify across all the major platforms.

You could make a small "Cthulhu Crush" match-3 game using Flutter, and ship on iOS/Android/Amazon/PC/Mac/Linux/Facebook all with the same code base. I expect a lot of small indie devs will do this because it gives them the most control possible, and increases their sales. There was an HTML game developer who targeted the Microsoft Web Game Store (where competition was low), got his game to #1, then boosted his sales on all the other platforms by saying "#1 Web Game on Microsoft Store". If you got an app to #1 on the Ubuntu Linux app store, where the competition is super low, that could be in your advertising on other App stores.

If you simply make a native iOS app in Swift/ObjC, your audience is going to be Mac/iOS users, and Apple can zap you at any time. They might zap your app, zap your account, or zap you personally. I would never put myself in that position. I would write a book about how to make an iOS app before I would just make the iOS app, at least I can control the book. I've heard of people creating multiple business accounts on the Apple App store to circumvent getting all their apps banned at once, but I don't know much about that. In today's culture, you say the wrong thing online, and you can get a whole army of people trying to shut down your business, and an App store account is probably the first thing they would target.

If you simply love Apple, and trust them completely, you can certainly make a living making your own apps. I would just consider it a 9-5 job though, where you get to pick your projects and take a % cut of every sale. At least you are clear on who is in control of your "job".

Really insightful. I was wondering, do you by any chance happen to have a link to a video/transcript of the interview where MJ talked about App development?

Most of your suggestions are games, so I wonder what is the ideal business model you propose? I assume most games would be just free with Ads.

I can also see where you are coming from with developing apps for app store is a 9-5 job. Apple's control over the apps is certainly really risky. However, I believe Apple only takes a 15% cut of the app revenue, in addition to the developer program which is 100$ annual. Obviously this is massive at the early stages. I saw in a survey that about 20% of Indie iOS devs make north of 1000$ and 10% make north of 10,000$. Assuming you are able to work yourself upto that upper 10% with excellent distribution and marketing would you still consider the endeavour more of a 9-5 than a fastlane? Is there enough leverage in the model for asymmetric returns?

 

[Tau Ceti]

Wow that's actually a pretty good explanation! Thanks!

Do you have any advice on where I can start to identify a need/problem that a mobile app might be able to solve?

Thanks for the kudos but you don't seem to have understood my point unfortunately.

To find a problem you need to look around around you. Open your eyes. What are people complaining about? What could be better?

But then again you are starting from the wrong angle. You want this problem to be fixable by a mobile app.

My question to you is what do you want to do? Make a mobile app or make money?

If you want to make an app that's fine by me, you don't need to find a problem to do that. Try to create a Twitter clone or an Airbnb clone and you are done.

If you want to make money then don't start with the tech, start with the problem.

If you need an app to fix the problem, then that is fine but if you start by saying you need to find a problem that is fixable by an app, then all the other problems that you could solve with a web app or a simple form or anything else, then you won't address them because you have already decided that its an app or nothing.

By thinking like this, you are closing yourself off to multiple potential opportunities.

My question to you is why do you want to create an app so badly? Whats wrong with a simple website and maybe a fully fledged web app?
Why not a Chrome extension? Why not a simple form? Why not help people via email?

There is a guy that I follow on Twitter, he makes 500K a year sending an email containing leads to people once a month.

He doesn't have an app and he doesn't need an app because the problem he is fixing does not require an app. Could he create an app? Sure, but there is no need.

You see where I am going with this?

My advice to you forget about your app. Find a problem, then help one person via email or Twitter DM or whatever. Then repeat the process 10 times. Once you have done a dozen , then you can start thinking how to automate this process. Is it an app, a website, something else?

Until you have done this with your customers you don't know what they need. So find what they need and give it to them but don't put the cart before the horse.