More on iOS Indies

When I asked who all the iOS indies are, I got a bunch of good responses. By iOS indies, I meant:

• People making all (or almost all) of their money from iOS.

• And who are making that money from publishing their own apps, not via contracting or a paycheck.

There are plenty of people with both iOS and Mac apps, and plenty of indies who make much of their money from contracting. But I was curious about the pure iOS indies, since I thought it would tell me something about the ability of indies to make money on the iOS App Store.

(Games, by the way, are another country. I should be explicit about not thinking about games, since I don’t know anything about the market or what it takes to make an iOS game. It’s possible that game-writing is a wonderland of fun and money. I don’t know.)

There aren’t many pure iOS indies. I’m sure I’m missing some, but the names that kept coming up were David Barnard (Launch Center Pro), Jared Sinclair (Unread), David Smith (Feed Wrangler and others), Charles Perry (Action Lists and Benjamin), and Greg Pierce (Drafts and others).

(Congratulations to these folks! And to the others whose names I missed. You’re living the dream, and that’s cool.)

I think my point still stands — pure iOS indies are fairly rare. I can easily come up with a bigger list of pure Mac indies, even though iOS developers in general outnumber Mac developers.

If you want to write your own iOS apps, it appears that either you accept the likelihood of a pretty low income or you have a day job, write Mac apps, or do contracting (or some combination).

I think this is too bad. It seems like the iOS market is so huge that it should be able to support lots of iOS-only indies.

But with how prices have fallen — how people are now accustomed to not paying anything until they’re hopelessly addicted and need the $4.99 packet of imaginary things that will get them to the next level — I can’t recommend to anybody that they quit their job to just write their own iOS apps.

(Unless those apps are games. Maybe games are fine. I have no idea.)

There’s a downside to this beyond just the vague feeling that it’s a shame that iOS developers have to supplement their incomes — it’s that any rational developer aware of the economics will not be able to make as big an investment in iOS apps as they would if they could expect their effort would be rewarded.

Consumers win in terms of quantity of choices and low prices, but not in terms of quality.