#192: Nobility of Effort.

This past week has seen an explosion of writing and discussion about the business of making software for sale on the iOS App Store. Personally I love it when these little bubbles of discussion appear. If you’ve listened to me for any period of time you’ll know that one of the things I really like is being a student of the App Store. These discussions provide the opportunity and motivation for all sorts of anecdotes which help expand my view on where things stand.

I must confess I was a bit apprehensive in preparing for this week’s show. I have had a number of people reach out to me saying they can’t wait to hear me chime in. I’m right in the thick of this. I’m an “indie” developer who has been making my living off the App Store for nearly five years now, so I’m no stranger to the ups-and-downs it involves. If you are hoping that I have some grand unified model that might summarize our current situation, sadly I think I’ll have to disappoint. Business is complicated, dynamic and ever changing. You can do the same thing twice and have wildly different outcomes. Replicating someone else’s approach may not work, or may work shockingly better. Perhaps most importantly, we all have different goals, personal situations and backgrounds.

But here is my best effort, constructed as a series of semi-cohesive mini-rants.

Super, mega, high level overview.

It has never been easy to make a living (whatever that might mean to you) in the App Store. When the Store was young it may have been somewhat more straightforward to try something and see if it would hit. But it was never “easy”. Most of my failed apps were launched in the first 3 years of the Store. As the Store has matured it has also become a much more efficient marketplace (in the economics sense of market). The little tips and tricks that I used to be able to use to gain an ‘unfair’ advantage now are few and far between. The fundamentals of business competition still apply:

You need more than a good idea.

The market doesn’t care about the process it cares about the result.

As supply goes up, prices will fall.

Diversification of your product line is essential for stability.

Most businesses will fail.

…

There are aspects of the App Store’s design that may have enhanced or hastened the emergence of some of these behaviors (and certainly a few unnecessary, undesirable ones) but most would be there no matter what.

Unique opportunity.

One thing that also strikes me is how uniquely situated developers are as a profession. It is rather remarkable that we can even consider there to be a reasonable likelihood that if we do the thing that we love it will ultimately result in a sustainable living. I think of almost all other crafts where you can pursue your passion: art, design, acting, music, etc. In most cases you either pursue your passion as a hobby and are fine with that or pursue it while employed by someone else. Software and the current state of the tools at our disposal allow for a tremendous opportunity to have an alternative path. For you to create something, to enjoy the process of making it and for it to be reasonably possible for you to make a living from it. Let’s be careful to make sure we don’t forget just how fortunate a position that is.

Different Goals.

Whenever we start to think and talk in terms of things like ‘making a living’ it is almost necessarily ambiguous for what that might mean. We all have different goals, lifestyles, standards of living. Perhaps, even more significantly live in different countries. Our individual definitions of success are likely wildly distinct. I know many developers for whom the ultimate goal was simply to ship, and while the fleeting notion that they could derive some renumeration for their work was fun to muse about over a beer was never really the goal. On the other hand I know people who dive in full steam and put their family livelihood on the back of their work. I remember working on one of my apps in the early days