G+_Marlon Thompson Posted August 25, 2014 Share Posted August 25, 2014 Jason Howell topic for discussion. I love Koushik Dutta because he strikes me as the kind of dev who just loves to find out how stuff works and how much cool things he can build with it. Unfortunately he has gotten a bad rap for lack of support for some of his apps. Which begs the question what exactly is the kind of support to be expected from a lone developer who needs to continue to make money (and so keep putting out new stuff). I personally give a few bucks to indie android devs every month or so, even if I don't intend to use their apps extensively, I want to see more cool stuff on my platform of choice. Some people would gladly spend $3.00 on a cup of coffee every day, but won't see fit to buy a $2 app or buy it and the complain because its not working on their Galaxy S2 rezound droid X Originally shared by Koushik Dutta (Koush) Wall of texted some thoughts on reddit about app revenue, support, and upgrade pricing. http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/2ehp7n/chromeadb_server_by_koushik_dutta_is_the_start_of/ck05yeu Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Jason Howell (raygun01) Posted August 25, 2014 Share Posted August 25, 2014 Definitely. I think we've had some discussion around this on Android App Arena when Chris Lacy was on that show. And I can't recall if we touched on this in the interview with Koushik Dutta months ago on All About Android. But the fact is: One-person indie developers, particularly if developing apps is their sole income, still only have the same amount of time in the day as one person on a much larger team does, yet they are expected to provide the same support and bypass the opportunity to develop new things that continue to allow them to maintain a career doing this for a living in exchange for answering a barrage of emails on ancient (by mobile app standards) apps. I think two years is perfectly reasonable, and not to mention that the pace of OS-level change often makes apps that were developed 2-3 years ago just... not as good as an app developed today for the current version. I think in the modern app economy, we are all still LEARNING what the life span of an app is. We've seen it on desktop computers for years and we've grown accustomed to that value proposition... and there we seem pretty fine with the fact that buying rarely ever means lifetime support and updates. So why shouldn't that also apply to mobile apps? ESPECIALLY when the people making many of these apps are single-person operations. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G+_Marlon Thompson Posted August 25, 2014 Author Share Posted August 25, 2014 True dat Jason Howell my support for indie mobile app devs started back in 2008/9 on my Nokia e71 (which I still consider one of the best phones ever) when I think I paid over 6 or 7 US for a twitter app on Symbian called Gravity by a fantastic dev by the name of Jan Ole Suhr http://mobileways.de/products/gravity/gravity/ He was a one man operation but doing things on symbian that no one else was doing., By the time I left Nokia for Android it was such a full featured app that it should have just been bought and included in new Nokia smartphones. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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