Sometimes I feel like I passed up a big opportunity not getting in on the iPhone market. Other times, I feel like the app market is like very packed concert where people get crushed and trampled, and avoiding it was a good move.
Most of us missed the gold rush. That is long gone. The real money in creating apps is in agency work for clients. I don't think that Agant wasn't profitable, I think that they just didn't like the work they were doing.
edit: I'll add too that "real money" does not mean riches. I make an adequate salary making apps and am very happy.
It was very lucrative and easy to enter for a while. Now all the easy gold has been dug up yet there are more prospectors than ever before.
Getting into the paid mobile app market was never a viable long-term strategy, but it was certainly capable of making someone extremely wealthy for a while.
There's an interesting gold rush analogy that in real world gold rushes only a small number of early adopters make any real money, but the support staff dragged along by the me-toos has a much longer and more profitable run. You wanna be the gold rush equivalent of the old prospector now running a general store, land agent, and saloon. Teach training classes, .edu market, tools ...
Repeated past observations imply that years after the bubble pops they'll still be .edu's offering classes to prepare noobs into the bubble, which no longer exists anymore.
Yeah, that is the conclusion I have reached as well. Interestingly, some people are saying that iOS 7 presents a sort of second coming of that gold rush, but we'll see.
I feel the same, especially when I compare it to the business of developing / running a website:
- much lower barriers to entry (Apps are much less complex than websites that need to work on many different browsers, especially with iOS)
- micropayments are built-in, users will pay for additional content/features much more often
- scales much better (most of the functionality is in the client)
On the other hand, it's relatively unlikely that an App released today will work or be useful in 10 years - so it's an even faster market than websites.
Apps are much less complex than websites that need to work on many different browsers, especially with iOS
I can't really agree with this. I did web dev for ten years before I got into iOS and iOS development is far more difficult. You have to deal with threading, pointers, tight resource limits, crufty persistence APIs, flaky network connections, etc etc. A typical web app is far easier to build and maintain.
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Sometimes I feel like I passed up a big opportunity not getting in on the iPhone market. Other times, I feel like the app market is like very packed concert where people get crushed and trampled, and avoiding it was a good move.
Most of us missed the gold rush. That is long gone. The real money in creating apps is in agency work for clients. I don't think that Agant wasn't profitable, I think that they just didn't like the work they were doing.
edit: I'll add too that "real money" does not mean riches. I make an adequate salary making apps and am very happy.
It was very lucrative and easy to enter for a while. Now all the easy gold has been dug up yet there are more prospectors than ever before.
Getting into the paid mobile app market was never a viable long-term strategy, but it was certainly capable of making someone extremely wealthy for a while.
There's an interesting gold rush analogy that in real world gold rushes only a small number of early adopters make any real money, but the support staff dragged along by the me-toos has a much longer and more profitable run. You wanna be the gold rush equivalent of the old prospector now running a general store, land agent, and saloon. Teach training classes, .edu market, tools ...
Repeated past observations imply that years after the bubble pops they'll still be .edu's offering classes to prepare noobs into the bubble, which no longer exists anymore.
Yeah, that is the conclusion I have reached as well. Interestingly, some people are saying that iOS 7 presents a sort of second coming of that gold rush, but we'll see.
I feel the same, especially when I compare it to the business of developing / running a website:
- much lower barriers to entry (Apps are much less complex than websites that need to work on many different browsers, especially with iOS)
- micropayments are built-in, users will pay for additional content/features much more often
- scales much better (most of the functionality is in the client)
On the other hand, it's relatively unlikely that an App released today will work or be useful in 10 years - so it's an even faster market than websites.
Apps are much less complex than websites that need to work on many different browsers, especially with iOS
I can't really agree with this. I did web dev for ten years before I got into iOS and iOS development is far more difficult. You have to deal with threading, pointers, tight resource limits, crufty persistence APIs, flaky network connections, etc etc. A typical web app is far easier to build and maintain.