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Costs of running a macOS app studio business

notes.alinpanaitiu.com

41–50 of 220 posts

Re: Costs of running a macOS app studio business

#41
post #19

I am surprised there is so much money to be made in such simple applications. Kudos well done

I am quite sure that the author of this post doesn't mean it bad, however, I don't want this post to give people the wrong impression that the money asked is not worth it. Far far far from the truth.

I am learning Swift/swiftUI (as a backend guy with little previous experience with frontend/UI programs, okay) and building apps for OSX can be very painful. Starting from outdated docs (basically no books about OSX development since ... 10-15 years? or more?) to the new fancy ways of doing things with SwiftUI (that sells the promise that "you do it once,..." and it will work exactly as they planned to when you sell *Hello World* apps).

It's not the use case itself to be hard, but the fact you need to support multiple operating systems (which as you might know, Apple produces every year a brand new model, so imagine the fun), or that maybe the specific API you rely on (from Apple, not some random guy out there) has some weird memory leak because it's written in C++ or Obj-C, who knows last time someone touched it. And Apple is updating everything but that specific thing, so you need to build something around it. I don't even want to start on the lack of libraries for Swift - a lot of open source libs are outdated, bugged, last commits 1-2 years ago, which means you either have to fork and fix, or well, you do it yourself from scratch.

Nowadays selling software for OSX has basically nothing to do anymore with the idea or use case itself but all the toil that the poor developer has to put with up. I learnt that most apps on the App Store deserves some money (sometimes they ask for a lot, nothing to say, but that's their business model).

Re: Costs of running a macOS app studio business

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I'm not that upset that no one wants to work with an old guy (that's me), and I was forced to retire. I still get to play with software, but on my own time, and on my own schedule. The difference is amazing .

How is that not actionable discrimination?

I imagine it’s a lot harder to sue an industry for not hiring you than it is to sue your employer for firing you.

Re: Costs of running a macOS app studio business

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I'm not that upset that no one wants to work with an old guy (that's me), and I was forced to retire. I still get to play with software, but on my own time, and on my own schedule. The difference is amazing .

How is that not actionable discrimination?

If they're in the US, only provable discrimination is actionable, and you'd have to hire a lawyer.

Re: Costs of running a macOS app studio business

#45

To add context, it seems like the CoL of Romania is ~45% cheaper than the US [1]. Which seems like would make for a very comfortable lifestyle with that income. [1] https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/cost-of-living/united-states...

Yeah but people’s budgets are not made fully of restaurants and groceries. The bulk is made of housing, cars, phones, goods, clothes, which cost the same as western europe for the most part. In some cases I find food in the UK cheaper. Petrol is also comparable. While far from London the real estate market in a large city is comparable to say Manchester or similar. I doubt people writing apps live in areas where a ho…

Housing prices are controlled by local supply & demand; there's no way housing is going to be remotely comparable between let's say the UK and Romania; the majority of properties would stay empty forever if they were priced like in the UK.

Same thing for most consumer goods - they have a (very low) base price and the rest is pure profit margin which is adjusted according to the local purchasing power. Consumer goods in Romania would be much cheaper than in a Western European country; whether by existing manufacturers lowering their profit margins to match local purchasing power, or other manufacturers managing to fill this gap in the market by selling at more affordable prices.

Re: Costs of running a macOS app studio business

#46

I am a paying customer and regular user of Lunar and Rcmd (for which I might have paid more than 12 bucks, just sayin) and I am pretty sure I saw Clop on Setapp and was thinking of trying it. I’m glad to have the opportunity to give feedback: your app and website design aesthetic really makes you stand out from most of the “popular Mac app” authors (you know who you are), which have a very much Web1.0 look and feel (…

Thank you! Wow, that’s.. I’m glad to read all that. Warms my heart.

Re: Costs of running a macOS app studio business

#49

To add context, it seems like the CoL of Romania is ~45% cheaper than the US [1]. Which seems like would make for a very comfortable lifestyle with that income. [1] https://www.mylifeelsewhere.com/cost-of-living/united-states...

Yeah but people’s budgets are not made fully of restaurants and groceries. The bulk is made of housing, cars, phones, goods, clothes, which cost the same as western europe for the most part. In some cases I find food in the UK cheaper. Petrol is also comparable. While far from London the real estate market in a large city is comparable to say Manchester or similar. I doubt people writing apps live in areas where a ho…

Rent in Romania is similar to Western Europe? I thought the income levels were very very different.

Re: Costs of running a macOS app studio business

#50
post #13
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Was surprised to see him complain about a 15% business / income tax.

The problem for me is not having to pay that tax. The problem is that we as Romanian citizens never see anything good done with them. And that's why I feel the need to complain. We're out of communism for more than 30 years but the mentality of officials has barely changed. People are dying in dirty hospitals of infections that they didn't have before getting there (see Colectiv 2015). Analphabetism is higher than in…

Btw, Ceausescu was executed on this very day, December 25, thirty-four years ago. I was in the 3rd grade and our very distressed primary school teacher told us that some bad people in Romania have overthrown the Communist Party rule! That was the first political information session I ever was put into, and, luckily, there weren't much more of them later due to the dissolution of the USSR.
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