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Oh shit, my weekend project turned into an App Store Best New App (2018)
- 0x0aff374668 7y agoI don't know what troubles me more: 1. a clearly-expert developer bragging about 1 hour to write hit app then telling everyone to basically live the dream chicken soup for the soul bs 2. people who experience increased anxiety from said wampeter/foma/granfalloon* because they haven't wildly succeeded My brain to me: Welcome to 2019. * See: Kurt Vonnegut
- liquidise 7y ago> “Snaplight serves an extremely niche need: mine.” There is a subtle brilliance in this sentence. With this recognition comes the permission to not try adding a mountain of features and complicating matters. Build something you will use. Solve a problem you have. Enjoy the process and accept the vulnerability that comes with shipping something to the world. Chances are good things will come of it.
- rolltiide 7y ago*Non-programmers need not apply
- melling 7y agoYes, it’s an old proverb. “Necessity is the mother of invention” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessity_is_the_mother_of_invention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Necessity_is_the_mother_of_inv...
- SuperGent 7y agoWhenever I hear that I'm always reminded of my father saying 'We put a man on the moon before we put wheels on a suitcase'
- gridspy 7y agoPerhaps wheels on a suitcase required modern plastics?
- DocTomoe 7y ago... because wheels necessitate plastic.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Merrill 7y agoI think that the first wheeled suitcases used indoor roller skate wheels. So the parts were readily available for a long time before wheeled suitcases. But early airports didn't have miles of corridors and a hundred gates, so maybe the need wasn't as great.
- danesparza 7y agoWe had wheels on cars, baby strollers, and bikes before the moon landing. The cold war re-prioritized life for many Americans (and Russians, too I'm sure)
- personjerry 7y agoChances are NOT good that things will come of it. There's a million useless projects for every one post like this. There's a lot more work than just building it.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y agoOn the other hand, you do have to be in it to win it.
- Vinnl 7y agoI think that's GP's point: do not publish it expecting it to lead to good things, because the chances are so good - they're not. Publish it because it solves a problem for you, and because it's little effort, so might as well. I do that a lot. Pretty much every one of them is used practically only by me. That's fine, because that was my expectation anyway.
- lerxst00 7y agoI recently had a similar experience: I watch a lot of YouTube videos and I like reading through the comments. Often, comments quote specific timestamps from the video and I would find it a pain to keep scrolling between the comment section at the bottom of the page and the video at the top and then find the specific time in the video that the comment was talking about. So, I created a Chrome extension that surfaces YouTube comments that have timestamps right below the video, around the time that the comment contains. And, then disappears it after a few seconds. It was fun to make and in the end, it solved a very specific problem that I was facing. Link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-timed-comments/mfmjnhncafdcdegeiamnjpnjgmmkkaal https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/youtube-timed-comm...
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y agoThanks for sharing. You’re definitely not the only person who has this issue. It’s definitely something YouTube could implement if they weren’t content with the minor tyre fix they’ve built.
- lerxst00 7y agoYou're welcome! The only issue I have now is that I've moved on to using Firefox. So, I can't really use this extension anymore. I guess that sounds like another 'niche problem' that needs solving.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y agoYou wouldn’t be alone there either.
- CalRobert 7y agoThis Firefox user would love a port...
- hellweaver666 7y agoChrome extensions are quite trivial to port to Firefox these days. One of my colleagues built a chrome extension and had the firefox version working minutes later.
- rohan1024 7y agoThat's what Bhagvad Gita says as well. Please note these are not the exact words but this is how I remember them कर्म करो फल की अपेक्षा मत करो जब तुम फल की अपेक्षा रखोगे तुम्हारा कर्म दूषित होगा Translation: Do your work, don't expect anything in return. Because when you do, your work gets corrupt.
- kranner 7y ago> Do your work, don't expect anything in return. Because when you do, your work gets corrupt. This translation doesn't seem to cover the familiar, deeper meaning of the passage. The term कर्म (karma) can refer both to work/action as well as to the principle of cause and effect (that the word 'karma' more commonly represents). My understanding is that it really talks about the purifying effect on the mind of doing your duty without expectations of being rewarded. A bit like Bushido. This is not duty in the sense of solving your own problems and taking risks as an entrepreneur. It is more about doing the job that society (the very rigid caste-based society that is the context here) has laid out for you. The subject of the speech was Arjuna. Krishna, the speaker, was reminding Arjuna that being born a warrior it was his duty to fight in the war that he didn't want to fight in, even if it meant slaughtering his cousins who were on the opposing side. Seen in its original context, it doesn't quite mean the same thing as what GP said.
- rohan1024 7y agoI came up with translation. Duty is the better word instead of work.
- jrochkind1 7y agoI got the implication of "do your duty without expectation of reward", and implications of cause/effect from rohan1024's off-the-cuff translation already. But maybe I didn't get the implication of "job that rigid-caste-based society set out for you". Which of course probably seems less sensible/ethical to many of us modern people. One of the things that has made the religious texts that have been treasured for thousands of years succesful is how they have such expanding/multitudinous possibilities of interpretation and directions of symbolism. And they usually have been understood differently by different people at different times (as a historical fact, even if the fundamentalists want to argue otherwise). I find that a very interesting and thought-provoking passage, that has resonances with things in other religious/spiritual traditions (unsurprisingly especially some kinds of Buddhism), but I have no interest in the "your duty is exactly what 'society' tells you it is" part. I think we have a duty to ourselves/our neighbors/humanity/god/the divine, and expecting something in return will corrupt it (and possibly ruin the outcome), but it might not be quite what 'society' is telling you it is.
- papito 7y agoSomething something eat your own dogfood.
- FigmentEngine 7y agodrink your own champagne works..
- papito 7y agoNo no - that's in startups coasting on VC money. In places trying to actually get something done - it's dog food :)
- Allower 7y agoGuess Im a shitty developer cuz i tried this and failed, many, many, many times. I wont use anything I build because 1) its very limited, 2) i have to maintain it, 3) it takes forever to actually make anything (for me)
- finnthehuman 7y ago>With this recognition comes the permission to not try adding a mountain of features and complicating matters. Well, yeah. The only thing that’s surprising about this is that the opposite has gotten so engrained. We are so accustomed to an attitude that (without the niceties of professionalism) is basically “who the fuck are you, nerd, to have the audacity to think you understand user needs? You’re weird and nobody wants what you want from software.”
- thanatropism 7y agoIsn't that the whole world of one-off github repos though? Here's my world-famous Python tool for Monte Carlo sensitivity analysis of Excel sheets depending on expert estimates: https://github.com/asemic-horizon/stanton https://github.com/asemic-horizon/stanton And my extremely unrequested extension for expert estimates that may be correlated: https://github.com/asemic-horizon/multibeta https://github.com/asemic-horizon/multibeta
- m463 7y agoI wonder about this... The Tesla model 3 has no dashboard in your line of sight, and Elon Musk says he builds something he likes and hope others will too. But the car has sold well in spite of the fact that many owners I've talked to said this was a big compromise for them.
- King-Aaron 7y agoThere's a strange double-scrollbar in the #content div, that makes viewing on a desktop a little awkward (Chrome/ Win10)
- Traubenfuchs 7y agoWhich could be easily fixed by setting the body height from 100% to 100vh.
- tannerc 7y agoThanks for flagging, just updated the CSS and hopefully it resolved the issue!
- guitarbill 7y agoI don't know if it's that or something else, but scrolling is also altered/inhibited with Firefox on iOS. Luckily, reader mode "fixes" it.
- ladberg 7y ago> As of March 2017, two years after launching Snaplight, it’s still going strong with about 10,000 downloads each week. Wow. I've been hearing for years that the gold rush of 99 cent apps on the App Store was done for, but this kinda gives me hope. I might get around to finally finishing any app I've worked on...
- curiousigor 7y agoSnaplight is a free app though, so while the 10k number is high I think it would be hardly reached if he had placed a 99 cent tag on it, given the niche. Some people (me included) like to download and try new apps, only to remove them after the utility hasn't proven valuable enough. That shouldn't stop you from finishing your app though. Building and later publishing an app to your audience can be an awesome experience. Go for it!
- rkho 7y agoFrom the original screenshot in the post, it looks like it debuted at $0.99, I wonder if there's a way to look up App Store price history
- test1235 7y agoIn the spirit of the discussion, maybe there's an opportunity for an app that does that ...
- lvturner 7y agoI'm not sure if it is still the case, or if my memory is lying to me, but I think AppAnnie did/does this.
- curiousigor 7y agoYou're right, totally missed from the screenshot and based my comment on the current App Store data. I looked the app on Appannie (non paid account) and the pricing history is quite interesting: 26 Mar 2017 - 0.99 to Free 29 Mar 2017 - Free to 0.99 19 Jul 2017 - 0.99 to 1.99 20 Jul 2017 - 1.99 to Free 02 Aug 2017 - Free to 0.99 04 Feb 2018 - 0.99 to Free 10 Feb 2018 - Free to 0.99 03 Mar 2018 - 0.99 to Free 27 Mar 2018 - Free to 0.99 04 Dec 2018 - 0.99 to Free 03 May 2019 - Free to 0.99 05 Sep 2019 - 0.99 to Free From the above details, it was a paid app for most of it's time. I wonder why the developer played with the pricing as much though?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- vinhboy 7y ago> All-in-all the project took me an hour to program That's amazing. I don't think I've ever written anything usable in an hour.
- rolltiide 7y agoThat is amazing. One thing I often see is that enthusiasts and professionals spend too much of their life and energy working with an inferior set of tools such that they are very dismissive of people expressing themselves faster with a better set of tools, solely because the discipline is no longer required I am personally all for people being able to express themselves more effectively
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y agoAs an enthusiast and a professional, I see a lot of people spending more time building a "better" set of tools and/or arguing about the merits of various trendy tools (hello HN) than actually writing code. If all you ever do is the same kind of thing over and over again (say, build CRUD web apps with the same stack), then sure, go nuts and optimize so you can deploy with a single button press from your IDE. But if you're in a role where the stuff you build varies wildly -- say, any type of startup where you are the dev team or a significant fraction of it -- then diminishing returns sets in very fast. Mandatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1205/ https://xkcd.com/1205/
- scarejunba 7y agoThe beauty of selling tooling is that if you can sell the tooling, the "how often you do task" is multiplied by number of customers and so you get way more value.
- scarejunba 7y agoHe's working in a space he has mastery. Like, look at this legend with his live note taking of Inkscape + Latex. I would have been like two orders of magnitude slower https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-2/ https://castel.dev/post/lecture-notes-2/
- rolltiide 7y agoInteresting how the current version only has 5 ratings, but the author at the time says it received 10,000 per week. We would never know this and could never be able to assign validation to this app from the metrics we see in passing I find that interesting
- forkLding 7y agoI've had an app that kind of blew up and grew to thousands of users in several weeks and then reach top 200 Lifestyle Apps on Appstore. It also had more than 100 ratings with an avg rating of 4.6. However I stopped updating a long time ago and removed it from Appstore, I noticed basically that old ratings get erased after version updates to the app which I guess make sense as it ensures reviews are actually of the current version of the app so.I guess Snaplight just died in popularity after several updates.
- dmurray 7y agoThis makes sense in a way, but also seems like it has bad incentives for developers.
- melling 7y ago“This app is no longer supported by the developer“
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mister_hn 7y ago> "All-in-all the project took me an hour to program" Come on, it's more than that. Being compliant to Apple Developer Guidelines takes some more time.
- _-___________-_ 7y agoThat's a strange statement. It's a very simple app, which specific guidelines do you think should have taken significant time for him to write code that complies to? In my experience the guidelines are mostly common sense once you get used to the "Apple way", and are straightforward to comply with, especially if you're already familiar with them (OP had submitted several apps before).
- mister_hn 7y agostill, claiming to hacking a mobile app together in one hour is something strange as well. Does the "hour of code" includes setting up project in the IDE, setting a repo, testing it, making it AppStore-ready? Options are: a. you have already the code somewhere (own sources, StackOverflow, GitHub, etc.) b. you are bluffing
- trevyn 7y agoMy first app store submission was a challenge to go from idea to submitted app on one laptop battery charge (2-3 hours?) and was approved on the first try, so it’s definitely possible.
- samwhiteUK 7y agoSounds like you need a new laptop
- rumanator 7y agoI have no experience with iOS development but I do have in Android, and in Android it is quite possible and even uneventful to put together an application that allows users to navigate through half a dozen activities and fragments in about an hour of work.
- z3t4 7y agoThe year should say 2015. Would be nice to know some more stats, maybe a downloads graph? When was is made free, and why?
- jnordwick 7y agoHunblebrag much?
- LukeWalsh 7y agoI don’t think this is a humblebrag. It’s a success story, and we should celebrate those. There’s nothing wrong with being excited about something turning into more of a success than expected, and there are a lot of general values in the post that may be broadly encouraging to folks here.
- bonoboTP 7y agoIt makes me sad that features are now paid apps. Imagine if every tool in GIMP was a separate app. This app should be a feature of a default Paint-like app.
- LukeWalsh 7y agoIt’s free, go download it if it’s useful to you :)
- ineedasername 7y agoIn some ways I think this is the environment Apple has cultivated (maybe not deliberately) over the years. Basic features like cut & paste are left out, and then announced in a later version to as though it's this great innovation. Not that this particular app is such a basic feature, but illustrates the reasons why there are so many single-function utility apps. And of course the danger of them for their developers, if they rely on them for their livelihood, is that Apple will at any moment swoop in and copy the most popular ones. For the record, I'm not sure there's anything wrong with that on its own, but there is when Apple doesn't let developers access iOS as deeply as they do themselves.
- woodrowbarlow 7y agoi would love it if every tool in gimp was a separate command-line tool all stitched together by one GUI wrapper app that unifies all of them. imagine being able to use gimp's skew tool on an image from inside a bash script.
- luke14free 7y agoJust to be clear: the app makes ~20 downloads per day (checked on App Annie premium and Sensor Tower premium) except for the fact that you change the price from paid to free multiple times, causing multiple spikes in downloads generated by sites like https://www.148apps.com/ https://www.148apps.com/ and https://appadvice.com/apps-gone-free https://appadvice.com/apps-gone-free which basically list all apps that have become free from paid. So claiming `about 10,000 downloads each week` is not very correct.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- rokalakt 7y agoI know at least a few apps that show little to no downloads on App Annie and Sensor Tower, yet their authors drive lambos. I wouldn't trust these two. Funny how office workers pop their heads up to point out the failure of someone who built something.
- kranner 7y agoAny chance you could name those apps?
- sean-duffy 7y agoHow do you know their wealth came from the apps?
- yoz-y 7y agoI assume that the author has better visibility to actual download numbers than App Annie or Sensor Tower. I assume they just got the number from the App Store connect. That is, apple highlights are massively more impactful that any other venue. My app had reviews in multiple publications and I average about 200 downloads per week, at around 4500 impressions. It got featured once in some list (in Thailand) and I got about 1 million impressions per day. Sadly, the app was paid (and not translated) at the time so no sales. 10k downloads per week is legitimately impressive for this kind of app. Kudos
- Double_a_92 7y agoI wonder how much the app name and icon contributed to the success. The name is unique while still having the know "snap" as trigger in there, and the icon is also quite neat and clean.
- bemmu 7y agoThe video was also very good, I imagine Apple wants to promote apps that have nice intros.
- tannerc 7y agoWow thank you! I’ve always disliked the icon I came up for this, and I hadn’t ever considered the “Snap” as relation to the app/company aspect to the name (I just liked the idea of “snap”ping a photo and highlighting it.
- LukeWalsh 7y agoWow this is actually scratching an itch of mine now. I love the kindle feature of saving / sharing quotes and have been wanting something for offline. Awesome work Tanner!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- nirui 7y ago> I held my place in the book with one hand while thumbing through the app store on my phone in the other, unable to find an app that could accomplish what I was looking for. Then an idea suddenly struck me: I could easily create — or try to create — an app that allows me to highlight and share quotes from the books I’m reading. This, my dear, is what an application should be created for -- To help resolve real problems and improve lives. "Best New App" is well desired.
- Rerarom 7y agoWhat if you don't have any itch? Seriously.
- rubbingalcohol 7y agoThat's okay, and there's no shame in working a 9 to 5 job in that case. Not everyone is cut out to (nor should) be an entrepreneur.
- dsabanin 7y agoSometimes you can scratch an itch of someone you know.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- IfOnlyYouKnew 7y agoLots of motivational quotes in that article, and I guess it's appropriate considering the product. People often criticise scientific studies for too small a sample size, sometimes even when the effect size is large enough to get significance at small numbers (i. e. n=2 is plenty when studying "can bullets kill"). Yet they'll lap up vague business wisdom with gusto as long as it generally agrees with what they want to believe. In this case: they are millions of apps (and other businesses) far more successful than this that 1. Didn't scratch the founder's itch, 2. launched with far more than an MVP and even 3. are free either initially or permanently. I don't think I could say which answer to any of these questions has higher chances of success, empirically. I'm most sceptical of "scratching your own itch" because it narrows your world to the restricted experience of, usually, middle-class white men from suburbia, USA, in their 20s and 30s, whose itch-scratching needs see plenty of competition while other demographics, non-consumer businesses, government and other groups have not just unscratched itches but plenty of pain (and money). But people love to hear the minimal/what you like/charge a lot answers and that maybe points at the fact that "what would be more fun to work on?" is both the real question being answered, as well as a legitimate question to ask.
- svd4anything 7y ago> middle-class white men from suburbia I keep wondering why people always include white. Is the idea that non-white middle class men from suburbia have superior perspectives and life experience? If we removed “white” isn’t the point still accurate?
- rocqua 7y agoIt seems obviously true that the majority of people from tech are white. Beyond that it isn't much of a stretch that the 'average' experience of a white man from suburbia is different from that of a black man from suburbia.
- svd4anything 7y agoWhy is it black vs white? What about all the other colors ... It’s hard to say for one generation previously but for current generation of middle class suburban American teens I think differences in perceptions between races and genders are diminishing rapidly. I just find it odd that it seems at almost every opportunity a commenter or poster will look to insert “white” like a dirty word in discussions. That strategy is backfiring terribly imho and I hope it can pass as some sociological fad in the next 10-15 years. I can say with certainty the teens growing up today in “middle class” suburban america are likely to look down on injecting “white” whenever possible for minimal or even irrelevant distinction. Sorry if my view offends anyone.
- wodenokoto 7y agoWhile the article was last updated 2018, I think 2015 is more appropriate.
- not_a_cop75 7y agoSounds cool, but the scratch your itch advice isn't for everyone. Most everything I would want as an app, maybe 1% of the population would every even consider using, and that's assuming they knew about it.
- bemmu 7y agoI sometimes wonder about this. Do we really have unique needs that few others would need, or is it just that we lack the imagination to fully appreciate how huge the population is? Maybe only 0.001% of people need it, but that's still tens of thousands of people.
- ineedasername 7y agoIsn't that the point of the statement though? You do it for yourself, not because anyone else at all might want to use it. Then if you toss it up on the app store and anyone does actually use it, it's just a happy upside.
- not_a_cop75 7y agoIt would make more sense if the example were of an app no one ever knew about, if that really was the case. His app provided more of a counterexample, if what you're saying is true.
- ineedasername 7y agoI took the fact that his app became popular as a happy accident. That he made it mostly to satisfy himself, because he was, in his words, "scratching his own itch". That it worked out on the app store was just a nice benefit, but not really part of the motivation. Or such was my interpretation, maybe I have it wrong.
- tannerc 7y agoExactly right.
- dfrew 7y agoI had a similar itch and built a similar app, except snippets are captured as searchable text and organised by books [1]. It was only ever my second app and app building for me is as much about the journey as the destination so it took me a lot longer than 1h/24h. I agree with the premise of the article ie build small, monetize, learn. Other lessons I've learned: Promotion is harder than building. It's pretty hard to get more than a few downloads per day. Free or not, once it's out there your users will make demands. I got emails from all over the world requesting all sorts of new features. Simple is better. Almost all feedback I got was that the app did one thing well (actually good enough). Try different monetisation strategies. [1] Key Passages https://apps.apple.com/us/app/key-passages-study-assistant/id1442938779 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/key-passages-study-assistant/i...