jmbrook

What is the point of having all that propaganda apparatus if you can even do that?

What I don't quite get is why the royalty payers don't start buying as well, feels like an easy way of boosting profits (assuming they can finance at a lower rate)

TLDR - really quite liked it.

Has a fairly bleak write up. It makes the point that if enriching the founders is the aim they are doing pretty well.

As one of the comments says it'll be used as textbook example of stripping a company.

They (wolfstreet) are pretty bleak about most finance/tech/stocks stuff...

Just showing my age really :^)

The big shift is that touch became the only game in town (along with all the associated dev wrinkles). Also the demise of all content aggregators meant we could just upload our apps to a store and keep 70% (prior to this we got ~20% i.e. operator took 60-70%, aggregator took 30% and we got 50/50 on that).

I do agree with the idea of hiring decent engineers and just training them, my only concern would be that without having had the mobile experience they might not know that they don't like it - it can be quite painful getting code to work nicely on a large collection of different hardware.

You have cracked the first problem of getting people to download + use +care about the app.

I like the idea of doing the survey however from my experience (we did a paid for Google Customer survey) our users want more content and for price of free which wasn’t hugely useful.

Personally I think you have three easy options:

1. Add some low level not too obtrusive adverts in (you will get a nice trickle of money in)

From my own experience of putting adverts into a util app (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.teazel&hl=...) no-one minds at all. The key is to not go overboard. We have banners that don't refresh too often, disappear if they going to draw over a dice. The number of apps I see show full screen adverts at start up, every page transition etc - all very icky.

2. As others have said try and grow it and use it for Resume/CV building. My one reservation on this is make sure you actually try and capitalise on it. I’m reminded of friends staying in awful jobs due to the training/experience and years later never really harvesting the rewards.

3. Use it to cross promote another app (either by yourself or sell the space). Getting an app to be downloaded is so hard now having this to kick start the next project is a great de-risker.

I would go for option 1 or 3 depending on whether you have other apps in the pipeline.

As an aside is this lightweight wrapping of a webapp model work for other providers? LinkedIn etc?

The amount of non payment, uncharged downloads, operator/distribution backhanders and outright fraud was striking. With Apple we get paid on time, I trust the download reports and it is ‘quite’ clear what the submission rules are.

The Apple (and Android) appstore just reminds me of a very pure form of business in which the barriers are low, not everyone can be a 'winner' , and Surgeon’s law applies (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_law)

I do however agree with your conclusion - neither you nor your app matter to Apple but that isn't unique to you/your app - it is just business.