Ask HN: App Store Devs, Are you guys still motivated?
We now know that the vast majority of apps make a large loss. They are part of the long tail. Only a very small portion of apps make any sort of money and most of those investing in them still don't make enough money to quit their day job. If you count in opportunity loss, you might even say most of the winners still lost money.
Are you guys still motivated? If so, where does your motivation come from?
Edit: Minor corrections.
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On the other hand while working on these apps I came up with a number of great technical ideas, which I would like to flesh out before moving on, so that I can at least have a sense of technical accomplishment. That sort of keeps me going, but not really fast...
I'm tempted to do some work for hire now, just to take a break and recharge.
Regarding making money, I do make some money from the apps (not enough to replace my day job), but that's the case for any other thing you pick up. There will be competition everywhere.
The introductory tutorial is also gorgeous.
It still has some work to be done, as I've hit a couple placeholders, but I'm looking forward to that.
One questionable UI detail though (at least to me) is using the account context menu instead of having a 'settings hardware button' menu. I get using the account context (at the top) for account management, but for things like refresh interval and all that jazz, I expect it to be available on the hardware button. Even if you bound the hardware button to the same thing (such that if you click the hardware button, the account context menu expands) it would probably work... just as it is now, the hardware button does a noticeable nothing.
Will definitely be using this though. Very nice.