Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and system skills?

Re:Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and sy... by alin23 on Wednesday November 16, 2022 @06:38AM (#33621601)

I love the App Store product and what it offers, what I don’t like is the bureaucracy that grew around it.

Because Lunar uses lots of private and reverse engineered APIs, it isn’t allowed on the App Store, so I had to replicate a lot of the distribution myself:

    - payments and refunds 
    - license activation
    - anti cracking measures
    - automatic (and rolling) updates
    - making a website for the app
    - SEO (the App Store is quite good at this)
    - error reporting and crash data collection
    - anonymous analytics
    - making sure I’m not mishandling any user data

I mostly opt for the App Store nowadays because it saves me the hassle for all of the above, but it comes with a number of pains and disadvantages:

    - no trial mode for one-time purchase apps
    - the sandbox is very limiting: no private APIs, no full disk access, no Accessibility Permissions etc. 
    - the review process is more annoying than helpful
    - the user ratings can hurt the business a lot when the product is harder to understand and users leave an angry review because they didn’t read the description before buying the app

For the trial thing I have my own solution where I publish a trial-only build on my website and a link to buying on the App Store when the trial ends.

The sandbox, well I found workarounds for most of my needs [1] but I still skip building some ideas because I know they would never be approved.

The reviews are as annoying as ever [2], I even got my name in a Wired article [3] because of that. They can be very discouraging.

[1] https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/window-switcher-app-store/

[2] https://notes.alinpanaitiu.com/App%20Store%20review%20timeli...

[3] https://www.wired.com/story/apples-app-store-review-fix-fail...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and sy... by Noneofya on Thursday November 17, 2022 @03:17PM (#33645007)

Can you not publish the app with limited functionality and/or ads for free and make the full version an in-app purchase?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Alternative ways to make money with coding and sy... by alin23 on Friday November 18, 2022 @02:51AM (#33651653)

I can but:

    - in-app purchases come with more disadvantages than a one-time purchase (harder to implement, more UI and explaining needed, restoring purchases is a confusing thing)
    - I don't want ads in my products
    - there's not much functionality to limit, since the apps are very focused on a single thing
    - App Store reviewers don't approve apps that limit functionality too much

The App Store way of doing this is with an additional $0 in-app purchase named "7-day Trial", but I tried it and it creates an incredibly confusing experience for users.

[ Parent | on HN ]