Ask HN: Anyone making a living from Desktop apps? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living from Desktop apps?

#91

Post by brandoncordell » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 1:23 PM UTC

terhechte wrote: post #48

gawker wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mind if I ask how you go about learning how to build Mac OS apps? I've seen a ton of tutorials for iOS but hardly anything for Mac OS.

Not much to add, the other comments are pretty good. I learned the most from Apple's sample source code, and from reading through open source projects on GitHub. Also, my former company send me to WWDC and the sessions are pretty insightful, too. If you pay for an Apple Developer membership, you get free access to these videos, and many of them are worth it. Though nowadays it's mostly iOS. In 2007 or 2008 there were…

Are you interested in becoming a passive mentor for someone who has a decent grasp on core obj-c/cocoa concepts? I'm looking for someone I can bounce ideas and questions off of. I think InstaDesk is fantastic!

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living from Desktop apps?

#92

Post by forcer » Mon, Jul 30, 2012, 10:16 PM UTC

of course there are tons of companies, even big ones who make serious money from desktop apps. But each of those including ours, is happy that making money this way is not sexy anymore and all you startup guys focus your attention elsewhere so we can keep the market to ourselves :)

on a serious note, just look at download portals - like download.com etc. there are tons of very popular software and they all make money, either requiring users to pay or ad-supported.

Re: Ask HN: Anyone making a living from Desktop apps?

#93

Post by terhechte » Tue, Jul 31, 2012, 6:50 AM UTC

codyguy wrote: post #90

terhechte wrote: post #14

I'm a lone developer hacking away on a couple of Mac apps. I also have a few iPhone apps, but these generate little to no income. The Mac apps are better. Most notable is InstaDesk ( http://www.instadesk-app.com ) which generates my main income and I can live off it thus living the dream (i.e. right now I'm sitting outside in a small cafe, enjoying the sun, watching people, and fixing a couple of bugs for the upcomin…

Would it be okay to share some information on sales channels for desktop apps? Could certainly use some help there.

Hey, I'm really concentrating mostly on the App Store. In addition to that I did a StackSocial sale once (https://stacksocial.com/) and apart from that whenever a blog or any guy asks for promo codes for a competition / contest / event to host on his blog / site, etc, I always give them redeem codes so that people that get the app for free may hopefully share their love by telling friends. Also, once I gave away 120 licenses for a big instagram photo contest in NY. That gave the app a lot of traction since all the people that got the license were really good photographers who used Instagram a lot. So they in return told many friends and tweeted about InstaDesk, etc.

But that's really it. I do have a non-app store licensed branch of InstaDesk that would work with a license file system, but I'm only keeping that alive in case the App Store becomes too draconian. Just so that I always have a way out. Though that's becoming more difficult now with the iCloud integration.

Hope that helps a bit.