
Ask HN: How to Make Money from Open Source Mobile App? - aswinmohanme
I&#x27;m currently working on a mobile app to be released to both the app store and play store. I am thinking about making it open source, cause OSS Rocks!<p>But some extra bucks wouldn&#x27;t hurt, so how do I make some (coffee money) while making the App Open Source?<p>It&#x27;s a feed reader, so not the next billion dollar idea
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Hamatti
Just sell it in the App/Play store. (Unless something restricts that in store
policies,) you can still provide an open source license and the code in Github
while charging money in the stores.

I'm willing to bet most people will rather pay small fee to have it installed
from store and have automated updates than compiling it from the sources and
running it themselves.

People who want to fiddle with the code or get the app for free can use the
code and compile it themselves and people who value ease of use, can just one-
click buy it.

~~~
zerr
What would be the license to prevent other devs cloning it (and
putting/selling on app stores themselves)?

~~~
tobylane
I don't think any such thing exists because then what does the community
benefit from. A no-clone licence is pretty much a 'You can look and build for
yourself and make PRs for me' deal.

~~~
zerr
"and use". Why not... And this has implicitly happened/happening to many open
source projects - people are downloading (or "buying disks") from the original
author anyway. e.g. back then, I doubt anyone would buy an Emacs distribution
from other person than RMS - so why not have a license which would enforce
such usage - this is just an alignment to fact.

------
atonse
I'm a former iOS developer and even I don't care enough to save a couple
dollars by compiling my own app, when I could get auto updates from the app
store. I don't suspect it'll hurt your sales with customers too much in that
sense because they aren't making this choice.

I'd think more about other developers taking your code, slightly theming it
differently, and selling it in the app store for a dollar less than you.

If you're ok with that, then go ahead. And no license in the world will help
simply because you actually have to mount a legal challenge, and who's going
to pay for that?

I'd say a better strategy to scratch your OSS itch is to make the underlying
libraries OSS, but not the UI, that way you have some kind of value
proposition you're offering.

------
rococode
In my opinion, it's fine to just include your monetizing code in your repo.
You can use config files or environment variables or something to hide private
details. As long as the ads you publish are fairly standard, I don't think
anyone would mind - and it also leaves people who really don't like the ads
the option to compile an ad-free version. If you really wanted to curry favor,
you could even post a separate ad-free .apk release on your repo and just push
a version with ads to official app stores.

~~~
hooksfordays
This is what I currently do with my app. The code is open source, it's free
for anybody to build and install, the build steps are simply clone and build
with Android Studio. I upload the debug .apk as a GitHub release with no valid
keys (so no ads), but there are ads at the bottom of the screen on the play
store version.

It makes a little change every month and I've not had any complaints about the
ads, except to offer a pay-to-remove option, which I mostly just haven't
gotten around to yet.

------
fairpx
From what I've seen work, most of the OSS projects make money off of
'convenience'. This can be split up in many different tactical things, from
consulting to charging for hosting, support, etc.

------
cimmanom
Ad supported or consulting services related to it.

You can also dual license it - for instance, put a public facing GPL version
on Github and a private proprietary fork with proprietary extensions (such as
advertising embeds) that you put on the App Store.

