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Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

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Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#21

Post by pavlov »

jventura wrote: post #9
pavlov wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anything that touches a lot of files?

Ok, but what kind of business niche would that be? You can also touch a lot of files on a webserver, although it would be a pain to upload them.

Sure, a lot of people keep their stuff on somebody else's servers — a.k.a. the cloud — but there are still users who have plenty of local files: music, photos, code...

That's a wide range of users, so I don't have a specific product idea, but seems like some kind of opportunity may exist in this niche.

(If I had a product idea, I'd probably try making it myself — native desktop apps are much more fun to make than web.)

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#23

Post by pc86 »

Osiris wrote: post #16

I have a side-project ( https://batterybarpro.com ) that's a native Windows application. It brings in $400-1000 a month.

This looks really cool, and I'm particularly impressed that it's a one-time purchase for lifetime access and you're still able to make this much off of it (and at a very reasonable price point). Congrats all around.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#24

Post by Osiris »

jventura wrote: post #18
Osiris wrote: post #16

I have a side-project ( https://batterybarpro.com ) that's a native Windows application. It brings in $400-1000 a month.

This kind of small tools is what I've been thinking of doing lately. It should not consume much of your time after you deploy it and there's not need to have a server and dealing with people's data.. Small question: how do your users find your product?

When I first started, I was posting about it in various laptop forums and running Google Ads. Having a free version was extremely helpful (there are hundreds of thousands of free users). It spread via word of mouth pretty quickly.

After a while, I just stopped all marketing efforts and now it's all just word of mouth/google search.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#25

Post by boppo1 »

fsloth wrote: post #10

A large fraction of computer games are mostly still "desktop apps". Lots of single person indie success stories there, such as "Papers please" or "Stardew valley". Seminal example in this genre is probably Minecraft (which of course expanded to a team before acquisition).

I don't know how much longer this will last given stadia and xcloud. I've been playing on them and if they improve over 5 years' time, I could really see them becoming the standard.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#26

Post by emteycz »

Wistar wrote: post #14
jventura wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would look for a niche that can't be done in browser What kind of niches would that be, beside audio/video and other cpu intensive things?

Something that requires absolute real time responsiveness?

There are web-based (in browser) CADs and DAWs... What sort of application would be more demanding?

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#27

Post by alibarber »

I have worked professionally for a company that made desktop apps for film production (VFX), and also internally for studios in their R&D departments and those were also almost entirely desktop based.

Outside of professional work, I’ve jumped right back in to Ham radio over the Corona times, there are lots of desktop applications in use there (DSP mainly) but usability and support for hardware (both devices, and platforms) is hit and miss and I have a few ideas for making my own versions as side projects. Several of these are paid - so do you have any hobbies or niche domains you’re knowledgeable about that you could explore?

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#28

Post by eldelshell »

ducharmdev wrote: post #13
jventura wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would look for a niche that can't be done in browser What kind of niches would that be, beside audio/video and other cpu intensive things?

On my current team we work on a cashiering desktop app, that needs to interact with local devices for processing checks and credit cards. Although almost everything reaches out to an API at some point, I'd generally say desktop apps are still relevant in cases like this.

Bluetooth PoS printers are a bitch to work with and good luck doing that from JS.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#29

Post by amerkhalid »

jventura wrote: post #3
high_byte wrote: post #2

desktop does not imply "not SaaS". I'll add that today most desktop apps are headless Chrome. that being said, I actually do web, but were I to go desktop I would look for a niche that can't be done in browser, even though today you already got access to most APIs & hardware...

> I would look for a niche that can't be done in browser What kind of niches would that be, beside audio/video and other cpu intensive things?

Pretty much any webapp can be replaced with local desktop app for security and privacy concise people. Some of things I wish had desktop version:

1. CRM - I don't want to store private customer data on 3rd party servers.

2. Budgeting app - Used to use Quicken but it moved to web and I switched to Mint because it is free. I tried some free opensource apps but experience was not smooth. So I am sticking with Mint for now.

3. Trade analysis apps - Sites like TradingView or TraderVue are great but I don't want to put too much effort in there. I rather have my trading data stored locally on my machine. As a programmer, I export CSVs and run them in local Jupyter notebooks but I think a more user friendly version should be high in demand.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

#30

Post by SuboptimalEng »

Atomic Edits[0] is a desktop app that helps YouTubers (like me) automatically remove silence in videos. It went viral on Reddit[1] but I realized later that building a video editing app with Electron (and not C++) was a bad choice. Library support video/audio editing was lacking.

Recut[2] is an app that basically does what Atomic Edits aimed to do, but actually succeeded. I think it's because it was a native Mac app which meant it had access to better libraries for editing videos. (That or I gave up too early on Atomic Edits.)

Orbital[3] is desktop app that allows you to search, filter, preview video files on your computer like YouTube. I posted on some subreddits and it had potential but I realized it wouldn't be enough to sustain me. It could've worked as a side-project (if I was working as a SWE) but being as my main source of income was from YouTube ad-revenue, it wasn't worth it.

VideoHubApp[4] is a desktop app that does what Orbital aimed to do and actually earned a couple thousand dollars. It was started a few years earlier and was built with a similar tech stack.

All that is to say, I made desktop apps that had potential, but didn't have the funds to see them to completion. Of course you could say it would be different if I had a SWE job + funds, but then I may not have had the time to learn React + Tailwind + Electron and complete these apps.

[0] https://github.com/SuboptimalEng/atomic-edits

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/webdev/comments/ohbl6i/i_made_a_des...

[2] https://getrecut.com/

[3] https://github.com/SuboptimalEng/orbital

[4] https://videohubapp.com/en/

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