Ask HN: What is good business advice for independent mobile app developers? - Nuance
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lwansbrough
This is probably not what you're looking for, because it's very specific
practical advice, but it's particularly valuable all the same: check out
SKStoreReviewController on iOS. We utilized it and our reviews grew from ~250
in the first ~5 months to over 27,000 two months later. Of course there has
been growth with our app, as well, but the scale at which we saw reviews come
in after implementing the UI was incredible: over 1k new reviews within hours.

I say all this because ratings have a huge impact on your app store listing
position, and any small developer can benefit from such a boost immensely.

If you're building on Android too, this functionality unfortunately doesn't
exist, however we have also seen a considerable boost in reviews after
implementing our own UI which asks users to review (and allows them to press a
button to go to the store.)

~~~
tananaev
I didn't realise it makes such a difference. I'm going to implement it in our
apps. Do you have any suggestions on when to show it? I would imagine it makes
sense to show it only after some reasonable time. Let's say if user opened the
app 5 times or something like that.

~~~
hobofan
Some of the best practices regarding it that I've heard (and found to work
very well in the projects I used them):

\- You show the user a internal 5 star rating UI. If they rate anything below
5 you don't forward them to the App store for adding a review. Works well with
3 buttons: "Rate", "Late", "Don't show again"

\- Best time to show it to the user for the first time is when they completed
the first "major action" in the app. For e.g. a shopping app that would be
completing their first order, or for Airbnb booking your first room

\- After that you show it to the user every ~5th time they open the app until
they rated it or click "Don't show again"

~~~
endless1234
Extremely common pattern on Android, but it's so transparent in its dishonesty
it really annoys me. But I guess it works for the masses anyway..

~~~
learnstats2
In what way is this dishonest?

It's really just saying 'if you love this app, tell others - if you don't love
it, tell us'. This is an honest request.

~~~
noxToken
For me, this bit:

> _If they rate anything below 5 you don 't forward them to the App store for
> adding a review._

This method attempts to passively hide negative reviews from the public while
actively prompting users to leave positive reviews.

Storefront ratings don't matter unless the user leaves the app and enters one
via the official app store. Without forwarding the user, anyone with a
negative review will have to specifically leave the app to leave the review.
The dev will usher the positive reviewers forward to leave a public-facing
review, while anything neutral or negative is sent to /dev/null or (hopefully
in the least) used internally for improvements.

Dishonest may not be the correct term. Perhaps "slightly misleading" is a
better way to put it.

~~~
logfromblammo
If the app stores want honest reviews, they have to be the ones to request
them, on a fixed schedule after someone downloads an app. Allowing the apps
themselves to forward users to the app store review interface is an invitation
to game the system in exactly the manner mentioned.

Whether grossly dishonest or slightly misleading, the mere fact that we can be
arguing over how scummy the pattern may be is a symptom of the failure of the
app stores to manage their own review systems. When one seller games the
system to get more 5-star reviews, that's them being dishonest. When everyone
has a 4.5-star rating on every product, that's the ratings system being lazy
and useless. (Looking at you, in particular, Amazon.)

An honest internal review would publish the results on the developer's
website, and leave all the app stores out of it, no matter what the user
rating might be.

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sebringj
An approach I did sometime back was to create a generic template kind of an
app (in code not published) for B2B that had integrations with ERPs where the
bones were finished but the UI was pretty bare so it could be customized for
each client and be deployed as its own app each time. I had built up this
toolkit overtime and it got more profitable and easy as I went. I could easily
tailor it to clients so it was very branded and unique but yet the bugs and
time to complete was very low in the finished product. I still get paid for
this monthly even though I'm doing a startup and have moved on. It still pays
the bills. Everyone's experience is different. I had an advantage of niche ERP
integrations that pretty much no one else did and could sell it way lower than
the competition. This is just a hindsight thing and people tend to fool
themselves that their decisions were correct but in reality I got lucky in my
approach and got lucky I had flow of people that gave me referrals. Find a
pattern that works for you but gives you some clear advantage.

~~~
tomcooks
Great idea

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cageface
As in selling your own apps? Seriously my advice would be give it up. You can
make a good living writing apps for other people but the app store is a very
very unfriendly place for indie app developers. Your odds of making enough to
keep food on the table are much better in other niches.

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echan00
Yes, I also agree with this. App stores are not made for indie unless you
"know someone"

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vbezhenar
What can you recommend for indie?

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bufferoverflow
Make good VR games.

~~~
saintPirelli
Everybody I know who bought any kind of VR system has it sitting somewhere
only to be taken out if someone comes over who "hasn't done this already".
Then they go back to playing regular video games.

~~~
zerostar07
Then make good games.

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LyndsySimon
Just my opinion, but I don’t think VR - especially mobile VR - is mature
enough yet to support “good games”.

Maybe in a couple of years it will be. If you believe that, then yeah, now is
the time to be building your skills and user base. I don’t think you’re going
to hit it big just yet though.

~~~
zerostar07
right, i meant "good regular games". imho VR may not catch up at all ever, or
we may have retinal implants earlier than that.

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srikz
Work towards making yourself into a ‘brand’. It can be giving talks, blog
posts which focus on not just tech bits but a mix of tech and business. You
should look credible just by looking at your LinkedIn and/or webpage. Having
things like conf talks, a moderate traffic blog will give an edge over other
similar devs with just a portfolio.

I’m not sure how far along you are in this so this advice may seem basic:

1\. Factor in costs of your insurance, office space, tools, books, commute etc
when working on your pricing model. You can plainly do x usd/hr and get the
amount for 200 days and feel confident compared to a salary but there are more
hidden costs when running a business and you may not have billable work for
the full year.

2\. When you underprice your offering to get customers, they undervalue your
service. This is where things like blogs, talks, portfolio help in justifying
your value.

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pg_bot
The best advice I've heard recently was said by a playwright. It was something
to the effect of "People don't go to the theatre to see a movie"

Focus on the things that distinguish a mobile device from other platforms. The
two things that immediately come to my mind are the camera and messaging. It
does not surprise me that those types of apps dominate the charts.

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draugadrotten
Once you have a good app idea, flesh it out in at least 5 different
implementations and send them all to the store. See which implementation takes
off, and focus on that one and develop further. This is true both for games
and utility apps. Use the A/B testing thinking and try several different "look
and feels" for your app idea.

~~~
learnstats2
Is this advice tried-and-tested? Because it sounds a lot of work. I would
suggest that putting all of your energy into 1 implementation (at first) would
probably work better.

~~~
mseebach
Parent is basically describing A/B testing, so seems solid enough. It does
seem to presume a fairly simple functionality, though, it probably won't work
well if each version takes you five months to build.

~~~
Bartweiss
A/B testing should generally be done within an app, though. If your app
already calls home to a server, you can collect usage stats and send feature
flags for A/B testing. If it doesn't, you probably have to run your tests on
in-person groups.

The parent here proposes releasing multiple versions of an app and seeing
which ones get downloads, which seems much harder and riskier - you end up
splitting downloads across multiple apps, and then have to deprecate or
maintain the ones that don't work out well.

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peshkira
If you work with clients:

\- Negotiate for a half upfront payment and start only when you have received
it. It will help you avoid clients that don't have the necessary budget and
will save you a lot of pain.

\- Document decisions done over the phone or in f2f meetings (e.g. send an
email saying something like. As we discussed, we decided to ...). It will help
you with unforeseen change requests that the client sees within the scope of
the work.

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verelo
Look for what’s next in tech trends and focus there. Mobile apps were
something special 5-6 years ago, now it’s just a commodity. You’ll do much
better living closer to the edge than app dev unless you have something
special to offer.

~~~
noitsnot
I'm curious what's new in tech trends and not oversaturated? Alexa, Google
type voice apps, VR?

~~~
langitbiru
Mobile app with AR capability and/or AI capability.

~~~
saintPirelli
I feel like AI just re-solves a lot of things that are already solved. In the
tech bubble it sounds way better than to the actual consumer. If the consumer
has a to-do list app he is happy with, how will you convince him/her that s/he
needs AI in there?

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qgaultier
What I found personally tricky is to advertise my professional hedge as a
mobile dev. I have received lots of resume of freelancer to help me on
projects, and it is always quite difficult to know how professional and
experienced they really are. Any blog or contributions to open communities
(stackoverflow, github etc.) are very useful.

~~~
wingerlang
> my professional hedge

Sorry, but what does this mean exactly?

~~~
qgaultier
I mean: what makes me a good mobile developer, or in other words, why is
hiring me a good idea.

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bufferoverflow
Pre-sell your ideas. Otherwise it's a massive waste of time.

~~~
nnd
Before doing that you need to build the audience first otherwise you'll have a
hard time marketing your idea.

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fecak
Create a brand for yourself and for your company - logo, website, portfolio,
LinkedIn company page with logo, etc. That makes you appear legitimate to
anyone who finds you.

I see too many freelancers or independent 'studios' not spending any time to
create any kind of branding for their companies, and people assume that it's
not a legitimate operation.

There is a fairly large difference psychologically between seeing a LinkedIn
profile that says "Freelance iOS Developer, Self-employed" with no logo and
someone who says "Principal, $COMPANY" with a shiny logo. First impressions
matter.

~~~
Bartweiss
I think it was an old BOFH story that said "when the model and the company
have the same name, I know I"m in for a bad time". There's a lot to be said
for having your app's developer be a business, rather than your name or worse,
your app's name.

edit, found it: _One of my personal warning signs on gear is when I get a
brand name the same as the device – ie, with this UPS brand UPS from UPS Ltd,
I 'm fairly sure I'm in trouble_

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gregjw
I've recently listened to a podcast where the guy behind Drafts (Agile
Tortoise) discussed how he's finally been able to make a viable income and
work on it full time because he switched to a subscription model instead of a
one-off purchase model.

Drafts has been out for several years and has been relatively successful and
he's only now able to work on it full time.

Podcast in question: Do By Friday, Episode 79.

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ozmbie
1) Figure out how to reliably and predictably get people into your app. Know
where to advertise, how much it costs and how to optimise your ads and
storefront. Don’t have a “build it and they will come” attitude. Solving this
problem at scale will be roughly half your total effort.

2) Once users get into your app, figure out how to keep them around. Identify
how often you want users to use your app (once a day? Weekly? Etc) and design
the entire app experience around promoting that form of behaviour.

3) Really understand what is unique about your app (compared to all others)
and emphasise it. Ensure new users understand it and experience it. Most users
drop out minutes after first launching your app.

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Trundle
Contracting or making your own apps?

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tananaev
I have an open source project which consists of back-end, web and mobile apps.
I frequently get requests for customisation and branding for the apps. It's a
good balance between having control of the core functionality in your own
hands and making money by developing apps for someone else. It's also much
easier to make adjustments to existing codebase than developing a completely
new app from scratch.

~~~
dakna
That makes sense. I thought about doing something similar for a while, but I'm
not sure about licensing. Which open source license did you choose for your
base code and customizations?

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seltzered_
Apologies if this is a bit off cuff, but I'd start around reading some things
from the release notes community:
[https://releasenotes.tv/](https://releasenotes.tv/)

Also..."startups for the rest of us" (which isn't mobile focused, but arguably
more focused on bootstrapping), amy hoy's 30x500, etc.

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PeOe
It´s not easy to distribute on the bigger App Stores but the biggest challenge
would be to become known. You need to get covered in Magazines and blogs,
reviews are also great and maybe, if you have enough money, you could pay to
get featured on the main page of the app stores. You need good pitches and a
lot of work to get in contact with authors.

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ivm
Make desktop apps instead: 10-30x higher prices, lower reseller fees, B2B and
professional customers, less OS fragmentation.

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xstartup
I use to make my own apps when it was profitable to do so. At any point, we
had 50-100 apps across many categories, different companies.

We were making good revenue, it was still early in the mobile world. These
days, it's not as profitable as it used to be outside of few VC funded
categories which are heavily subsidized, good luck making a big profit there.

Most apps today are complementary to running at loss. So, need a SaaS app
(with enough profit margin) before you make your mobile app.

Today, we develop apps for small businesses which is much easier and doesn't
require any special skills. 80% apps are just CRUD apps. If we need something
advance like machine learning etc..., we delegate it to Google and Amazon like
API providers.

There are some of our competitors in app business who are hiring wizards yet
not able to compete with this formula ^

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kapauldo
Always be looking for leads.

