41–50 of 55 posts
In terms of advice -- everyone's already said it: don't rewrite now, just fix the important bugs and give it a push.
Good luck!
Release it under GPL if you can, put it on github or bitbucket, document the bugs as "issues," focus on fixing show stoppers and high-visibility user complaints, don't worry too much about it (all these apps are buggy, we just don't like show stoppers), ask for donations and for volunteer drive-by coders.
This is a bad idea. You have to have a plan if you have a for-profit open source product. You need to give contributors something so they don't feel like they're being taken advantage of. It's complicated. It isn't as easy as just open sourcing it and asking for contributions.
This is a moot argument. Of course s/he has to have a plan if s/he wants to be in business. What was asked was suggestions, not detailed strategy deliverables.
> it has bugs and it's not good enough to begin marketing yet Measure and prioritize the bugs. If you don't know how many people are dealing with them you can't figure out how many you need to fix. > I'm learning Swift to build the 2nd version I won't tell you what to do, but software history is full of 2nd versions the morphed into death marches. tl;dr Figure out the fewest amount of bugs you need to fix to make it…
That being said, I highly recommend against it if your primary goal is one of the following:
- revenues
- features
- installs
- bugfixes
It will take you longer than expected to accomplish very little in terms of meaningful improvements which can be relayed to your customers.
OMG I want an Android version of this SO BAD. Maybe I'll build it... Don't worry, if I do it'll be for personal use, I obviously wouldn't release it and screw you over.
Either case, you seem to have an opportunity here. You should start with a business plan! Do not worry about the bugs right now.
An idea for business plan is that you can let people get a kickback for each purchase they referrer. You can start with the ones giving you feedback.
After some sense of market and estimated budget you should hire a freelancer. Not trying to offend you here, but you have been working on this for six month, a freelancer would probable be able to fix the bugs in six hours for $15 an hour or less.
If I was in the phone app business I would probably rip off your idea and have an app out by tomorrow :P
Check out Assembly.com as a potential option :) (this involves releasing under GPL)
Is the GPL compatible with distribution on the (Apple) app store these days? I remember that back in 2010 it wasn't, and Apple removed GNU Go from the app store after this was pointed out by the FSF.
The GPL license do not allow additional license requirement to be added, so apple would need addtional permission from the author before distributing the software.