What a great article. When he mentions that Facebook and Dropbox were launching their own similar apps, it would be fun if in the end he would end up acquiring all of them, Pinboard style.
The 10 year old indie mobile app: what worked for the long haul
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Re: The 10 year old indie mobile app: what worked for the long haul
#12Integration tests that fire up a local server are not that unusual I find. I don't think there is anything unusual or "wrong" about that.
... But if you are counting how long integration tests take to run in single-digit minutes then either your app is really small/simple or your integration coverage is low! :)
I've worked on "state of the art" frontends at BigCos where integration/end-to-end tests are sharded across perhaps 10 test server instances ("local" in spirit, in reality technically not on the workstation), and even then it takes 20+ minutes to execute. They typically have to execute separately from the usual unit tests etc (which run automatically as part of the pre-push CD set up).
Re: The 10 year old indie mobile app: what worked for the long haul
#13Integration tests that fire up a local server are not that unusual I find. I don't think there is anything unusual or "wrong" about that. ... But if you are counting how long integration tests take to run in single-digit minutes then either your app is really small/simple or your integration coverage is low! :) I've worked on "state of the art" frontends at BigCos where integration/end-to-end tests are sharded across…
It’s fairly small, built by a team of 3 over the course of a few years. Probably less than 100 endpoints. Good coverage for the core, not for the rest. (Eg, zero tests for the main way the app makes money, photo books. )
Re: The 10 year old indie mobile app: what worked for the long haul
#14Taylor, I really enjoyed this post, and I shared it with my engineering team and also group chats.
At Wyndly, we're a software-enabled allergy immunotherapy practice (https://www.wyndly.com/pages/immunotherapy). I have a background in software engineering, and I had to learn that code wasn't always the solution. Better code doesn't mean better business outcomes for us! Sometimes I say "Every line of code is a liability!", because it's now something a small team has to support forever.
Your three bullets on how to build are something I agree with so much! Arguably, this is something everyone outside of an at-scale product should build while finding product-market fit and growth channels:
- Focus on building simple solutions that solve real, urgent user problems, in well-worn ways.
- Use battle-tested software and platforms that are stable and don’t change too much over time.
- Only integrate with third parties when it’s absolutely necessary for solving those real, urgent problems.
Thank you for sharing!
Re: The 10 year old indie mobile app: what worked for the long haul
#15>What’s changed the least? The “boring” technology. Postgres and Redis required zero hijinks to keep running. Even Django itself caused very little trouble when I upgraded from Django 1.5 to Django 4.0 in June 2022 — I barely had to touch my Django views! Most of the Django changes were in configuration and routing, and the most difficult single thing was migrating ancient Django 1.5 session data to the modern Django 4.0 format so users wouldn’t get logged out during the migration.
The older I get, the more I appreciate the value of reliable and relatively unchanging software components. Not that there isn't a place for innovation, but there's also a place for good things that endure.
Re: The 10 year old indie mobile app: what worked for the long haul
#16Taylor, I really enjoyed this post, and I shared it with my engineering team and also group chats. At Wyndly, we're a software-enabled allergy immunotherapy practice ( https://www.wyndly.com/pages/immunotherapy ). I have a background in software engineering, and I had to learn that code wasn't always the solution. Better code doesn't mean better business outcomes for us! Sometimes I say "Every line of code is a liabi…
Thank you! Glad you enjoyed it!
Re: The 10 year old indie mobile app: what worked for the long haul
#17I have over 50 ios apps that are over 10 years. It is amazing how competitors come and go.
I'm curious how profitable that has been over the decade?
It took about 10 years to make six figures, so not very. The overhead was just buying a mac so the iCloud handles private data and Apple is the server by handling the downloads.
Re: The 10 year old indie mobile app: what worked for the long haul
#18Yet another good example of why you should minimise 3rd party dependencies as much as possible if you want to minimise long term maintenance costs.
If you can’t avoid some dependencies then put a firewall between your code and those dependencies. The firewall shields your code from changes to the dependencies.
Basically:
Your code -> Interface -> Adapter -> 3rd party dependency.
So your code depends on the interface not the 3rd party code. And the adapter implements your interface by mapping it to the 3rd party dependency.