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"Then you see an app like ’101 sex positions’ or ’301 Fart Noises’ reach the lofty heights of App Store Success. They spent a week on a gimmick and made bank, y

"Then you see an app like ’101 sex positions’ or ’301 Fart Noises’ reach the lofty heights of App Store Success. They spent a week on a gimmick and made bank, you spent 6 months building an app of utility and are struggling." So why not go make your own fart or sex app? There's a reason why these apps make it to the top; it's what people really want. Sadly or not, there's always going to be a bigger potential market for dumb, entertaining apps than your average practical app. I'd even go so far to say there's an art to producing the kind of apps that satisfy this segment of the market.

tlrobinson 15y ago
Indeed. I spent ~6 hours writing a gun "simulator" app that's made something like $50,000. Some of it was luck, but if you're willing to sell your soul and you can crank out a few of these a week your chances of success are probably higher than spending 6 months perfecting a single app you don't even know anyone wants.
- pavel_lishin 15y ago
  Why sell your soul and make that decision? Why not do both, and try spending half your time creating trivial fart apps - shouldn't take more than a few hours, right? which you need to get away from your main project that's going to change the way I use my smartphone, etc., etc.
  - patrickyeon 15y ago
    If we're offering advice from the peanut gallery (and I'm no smartphone developer, so I'm way up in the peanut gallery), why not spend that time on a program that can generate trivial apps. Extract data [legally, now!] from some source (eg wikipedia), and skin it with some boilerplate and some generated UI elements. I think it'd be a more interesting project to implement the more general version, and once it's nailed down it's probably a better source of revenue too.
    - Mizza 15y ago
      This happens all the time.
- jarin 15y ago
  This is a lot like the 37signals model of consulting: "sell your soul" to clients until you can afford to take a leap on your own product.
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  - Aqua_Geek 15y ago
    > This comment looks casual, but with $50,000 you don't have to work anymore until the end of life. Sadly, $50,000 doesn't go far here in the US. Don't get me wrong - it's definitely a nice chunk of change, but it's far from "don't have to work anymore" land. It's more in the "pay off one's student loans/credit card debt" area of things. Where I live, average home prices seem to be around $320k, so this would barely cover a down-payment.
waqf 15y ago
> There's a reason why these apps make it to the top; it's what people really want. I think Apple as a monopolist intermediary (assuming we are talking about the iPhone market) has more of a role here than this invisible-hand argument implies. It's Apple's choice to promote a top-N listing, which means that the already most popular apps get even more downloads. Fair enough, you might think, but it's Apple's choice how they count the top N. If they count number of purchases, then throwaway $1 apps will be favored over more substantial, more expensive apps; whereas if they count highest grossing, the more expensive apps will fare better.
Radim 15y ago
In related news, a script called "spark: ▁▂▃▅▂▇ in your shell" has over 1,200 watchers and 79 forks on github at the moment. Scipy is a monumental and long-running effort of creating a scientific library for Python. It's an incredibly advanced piece of software that quite possibly saves lives (literally), and has 207 watchers and 78 forks. It's just what people really want. I'd even go so far to say there's an art to producing the kind of apps that satisfy this segment of HN.
- rat87 15y ago
  I believe the Numpy/Scipy official repositories are on sourcefourge and it has its own website. The github page appears to be the main web presence of Spark. I think of Numpy/Scipy as more conservative library not exactly the best github match. I know that Numpy/Scipy are vastly more important/discussed/used then Spark.
  - Kliment 15y ago
    It's not just that. Spark is smaller, easy to understand, easy to modify, and grabbing someone's modified version is unlikely to make your data invalid. Complex codebases with a lot of functionality are less approachable, and having to verify that each change does not compromise its functionality discourages the use of as many forks.
- kmfrk 15y ago
  I think this is related to why images and memes are, by far, the most popular submissions on reddit: they are simply easier and faster to understand. It doesn't mean that they are necessarily better, but the time spent on understanding them are at a complete minimum. You don't even need to be a technical person to get a grasp of why the spark graphs do. The challenge of a private business is having to strike a balance between "important" and "intelligible".
extension 15y ago
It took a certain kind of genius to realize that people wanted their phones to fart. I would make a gimmick app if I could think up a successful gimmick, but all I can seem to come up with is deeply interesting games.

tlrobinson 15y ago

Indeed. I spent ~6 hours writing a gun "simulator" app that's made something like $50,000. Some of it was luck, but if you're willing to sell your soul and you can crank out a few of these a week your chances of success are probably higher than spending 6 months perfecting a single app you don't even know anyone wants.

pavel_lishin 15y ago
Why sell your soul and make that decision? Why not do both, and try spending half your time creating trivial fart apps - shouldn't take more than a few hours, right? which you need to get away from your main project that's going to change the way I use my smartphone, etc., etc.
- patrickyeon 15y ago
  If we're offering advice from the peanut gallery (and I'm no smartphone developer, so I'm way up in the peanut gallery), why not spend that time on a program that can generate trivial apps. Extract data [legally, now!] from some source (eg wikipedia), and skin it with some boilerplate and some generated UI elements. I think it'd be a more interesting project to implement the more general version, and once it's nailed down it's probably a better source of revenue too.
  - Mizza 15y ago
    This happens all the time.
jarin 15y ago
This is a lot like the 37signals model of consulting: "sell your soul" to clients until you can afford to take a leap on your own product.
deleted 15y ago
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- Aqua_Geek 15y ago
  > This comment looks casual, but with $50,000 you don't have to work anymore until the end of life. Sadly, $50,000 doesn't go far here in the US. Don't get me wrong - it's definitely a nice chunk of change, but it's far from "don't have to work anymore" land. It's more in the "pay off one's student loans/credit card debt" area of things. Where I live, average home prices seem to be around $320k, so this would barely cover a down-payment.

waqf 15y ago

> There's a reason why these apps make it to the top; it's what people really want. I think Apple as a monopolist intermediary (assuming we are talking about the iPhone market) has more of a role here than this invisible-hand argument implies. It's Apple's choice to promote a top-N listing, which means that the already most popular apps get even more downloads. Fair enough, you might think, but it's Apple's choice how they count the top N. If they count number of purchases, then throwaway $1 apps will be favored over more substantial, more expensive apps; whereas if they count highest grossing, the more expensive apps will fare better.

Radim 15y ago

In related news, a script called "spark: ▁▂▃▅▂▇ in your shell" has over 1,200 watchers and 79 forks on github at the moment. Scipy is a monumental and long-running effort of creating a scientific library for Python. It's an incredibly advanced piece of software that quite possibly saves lives (literally), and has 207 watchers and 78 forks. It's just what people really want. I'd even go so far to say there's an art to producing the kind of apps that satisfy this segment of HN.

rat87 15y ago
I believe the Numpy/Scipy official repositories are on sourcefourge and it has its own website. The github page appears to be the main web presence of Spark. I think of Numpy/Scipy as more conservative library not exactly the best github match. I know that Numpy/Scipy are vastly more important/discussed/used then Spark.
- Kliment 15y ago
  It's not just that. Spark is smaller, easy to understand, easy to modify, and grabbing someone's modified version is unlikely to make your data invalid. Complex codebases with a lot of functionality are less approachable, and having to verify that each change does not compromise its functionality discourages the use of as many forks.
kmfrk 15y ago
I think this is related to why images and memes are, by far, the most popular submissions on reddit: they are simply easier and faster to understand. It doesn't mean that they are necessarily better, but the time spent on understanding them are at a complete minimum. You don't even need to be a technical person to get a grasp of why the spark graphs do. The challenge of a private business is having to strike a balance between "important" and "intelligible".

extension 15y ago

It took a certain kind of genius to realize that people wanted their phones to fart. I would make a gimmick app if I could think up a successful gimmick, but all I can seem to come up with is deeply interesting games.