Making money on apps? That's over.

by Volker Weber

Brent Simmons on the state of creating paid iOS apps:

Do we still talk about new apps and recommend apps to people? Hardly, these days.

Vesper is shutting down. If Simmons and Gruber cannot keep an iOS app viable, the ecosystem really is in trouble. Games & junk just mask it.

You can still make money by creating apps that solve difficult problems. You can still make money by creating apps for people who pay for development. But solving a simple problem does not pay anymore. No matter how good your app or your marketing is.

Hindsight is 20/20. Work on Vesper started in 2012, before Apple started working on a viable Notes app or Microsoft started to throw it weight around. Evernote was the only game, and that was just awful.

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Comments

Sounds too apocalyptic. What did we expect? That the app lasts 'til 2038?
Remember the time when you had more than one Twitter client on your iPhone just for the sake of evaluation & getting drunk by nifty UX/UI? It's gone bc we turned old. :-)
iOS development is still well funded, the money just shifted to vertical apps.

Martin Kautz, 2016-08-23

And Brent's article is already one year old...

Ole Saalmann, 2016-08-23

Things have gone downhill from there.

Volker Weber, 2016-08-23

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