The designer of IBM's Harvard Mark I said, "Don't worry about people trying to steal your ideas, if they're original, you will have to ram them down people's th

The designer of IBM's Harvard Mark I said, "Don't worry about people trying to steal your ideas, if they're original, you will have to ram them down people's throats". I have had some minor success in Android apps ($30 a day), but I do not worry much about competition from giving advice for how people can make their apps more popular. Even if the competition is in my domain - I have an educational app too, but only for math - I do not see a spelling educational app as competition. It makes Android a healthy ecosystem - when Android had a smaller market share, I was more scared of iOS or possibly Windows Mobile overshadowing Android then I was over other Android developers. Also, a lot of this advice has been given by others already, including Google sometimes. Have a good, simple, relevant app icon. Have a descriptive app name. Have the app work for devices with different sizes and different densities. And so on. It sounds logical, but I see many people with low download numbers who do not follow this advice. I started doing an Android spreadsheet which could handle Excel. I got XLS files working, but more modern XLSX files were tougher. I hit a brick wall and saw it would take, at a minimum, months of work, maybe even more than a year. So I open sourced what I had (a bare bones spreadsheet which could handle XLS), announced its existence and moved on. You would think I might have gotten some interest - a spreadsheet which can handle XLS, and with some work, XLSX. But I did not. As Paul Graham said in his essay on Viaweb, it was "running up a stairwell". The number of people who know Java is a certain size, the number who know the Android API are smaller, and the number with the skills to work on this advanced problem is quite small. I am sure if ABS author and Square employee Jake Wharton wanted to help me on it it could get done, as he is an expert Android programmer. But he is too busy building up Square and maintaining ABS and his other projects. If you choose a difficult task, you do not have to worry about competition in the way you do with low hanging fruit. I myself have had some success with more easibly attainable goals on Android to where I don't know if I myself would have the time to work on that spreadsheet nowadays, even with a capable partner. There are too many sure things that would generate money with a few weeks of work to devote time to a big project like that. Maybe when my apps generate even more revenue, and competition crowds out all the low hanging fruit will I go back to a more ambitious project like that. Worry about competition? It is as sure a guaranteed money maker as there can be with a few months of expert work, sitting on Github and interest is minimal. Now I have learned a trick or two to get my apps noticed that I do not share with people, but 99% of what I know I can share with little fear. It requires some domain knowledge and some work, and those 2 things are a big enough barrier to get people from doing what I talk about any way.