Certainly not bad for three days work.

I either have to put enough time into the idea to do it full time or do a shitty job. I can’t win either way without incurring massive risks so I will continue to part time two jobs and invest the earnings from those wisely instead.

I’ve been making iOS software independently for almost 2 years now (https://heliographe.studio) and am about ramen profitable.

A few notes in case OP (or anyone interested in making some money in the App Store) is reading:

- you have to make the app free to download, and quickly demonstrate value then show a paywall if you want any purchases. Paid upfront just does not work unless you’re an already recognized product.

I had some apps that were paid upfront, and would mostly get $0 days. Switching to free to download immediately brought me to a slow but steady trickle of daily downloads, and from there you just have to work on your conversion rate.

- but that's still going to be pretty low, if you want any meaningful user acquisition, you're going to have to go look for the kind of people who might be interested in your product. The broader your potential audience is, the harder that's going to be (but that's why TikTok ads can work so well). In my case, choosing to focus on a somewhat niche area (tools for photography) is helpful; there's a strong photography community going on Threads and regularly posting on there yields good results (for now...)

- $2.99 is dramatically underselling yourself, especially if you offer a quality product that you put time to craft to your standards and has no tracking, no subscription, no ads, etc. You should play with pricing to see what the sweet spot in terms of conversion is, but in my experience it's always worth it to start at least at $4.99/$7.99 for these sort of utility apps. Of course, the design of your funnel/paywall will make a huge difference (ie you'll likely sell more of an app marked as $4.99 at 50% off, than just $4.99)

- learn about what makes for good App Store screenshots, descriptions, how keywords work, etc. Ariel from App Figures has some good videos on YouTube about what they see and what seems to work based on their data.

The days where you could make a little app, chuck it on the App Store for $.99, and have it just blow up are well over. If you want to make any money on the App Store (even if to just pay back for your Apple Developer membership), you have to put as much effort, if not more, in the marketing and promotion of your product than you put in the design & development of it. It's a grind for sure — and don't count on Apple to help you in any way (by and large they seemed more interested to promote games and dating apps with $49.99/mo subscriptions than small indies doing interesting things).

Good luck! Eager to try your app :)

And if they don’t keep updating it, it will stop working and the buy it for life idea commits the dev to maintenance that isn’t paid for either upfront or through subscription.

There are folks who make and give away a lot but some learn their lesson quickly and find ways to get people to put a reasonable amount of recurring payment into the app to make it even remotely sustainable beyond a hobby.

FWIW, AI may make this cost so much lower that this kind of thing can make sense now. Something to consider, I suppose.

Despite the fact that Apple tells you when your subscription will renew it doesn’t seem to help enough people. So they buy a scientific calculator app because they don’t realize that it’s built into the one on the phone and then end up paying five dollars a week for it. And even if they find out after the first renewal that means the app developer got five dollars (minus fees).

There’s tons of subscriptions out there that are just completely out of whack with their prices. And Apple just doesn’t seem to care.

Building for older models is possible using a collection of virtual machines, or even a multi-boot old laptop.

Well, you're mixing 2 things here: Apple's tooling support for older versions of iOS, and what developers choose to do.

Today, you can create a new app in Xcode, choose "iOS 15" as the minimum deployment version for your project, and you'll have an app that runs on devices going back to the iPhone 6S/first generation iPhone SE.

Even supporting back to iOS versions prior to that is fairly straightforward (you'll just have to edit a plist by hand rather than use the UI picker if creating a new project) - I have some older iOS 9 projects that still compile without any issues (just tested for the sake of this comment).

But to your issue of most apps not working on an iPhone 7 - that's because many developers will choose to only support iOS 16/17 or later (and the iPhone 7, a 9 year old device, stops at iOS 15). That's their choice though, not a failing of Apple's tooling.

> iPhone 7

I still have one as a TV device for me and my son to watch paw patrol. I can only speak for the set of apps I use on it, but as of a few hours ago they all still work (streaming, email, browser. no banking or other apps in that class). I am looking to replace it as it's no longer getting updates as of this march.

>This phone is not that old

Kind of very confused by this. It's 9 years old, it just stopped getting security updates three months ago. Is there anything even close to that outside of the iphone world? I do own android devices, I don't have anything android and nine years old that can turn on much less run an application.

The fact that this $100 yearly fee has never been adjusted for inflation, in a time when developers are easily shelling out $200 a month to use LLMs, makes this gripe all the more petty. Especially when software developers are still among some of the highest paid jobs on the market.

- gradle folder easily reach 7 or 8 gigs per project (more external dependencies = bigger) - Android/iOS emulator also need something like 7 GB (per device). Imagine if you have 3 emulators: Pixel 3 running Android 13, Pixel 4 running Android 14, etc etc

Also agree code deprecation is something often happen. Most of my experience is Android, and yes I've seen emails from Google saying something like "if you don't need this feature, don't call API X and use Y instead. Failure to comply to this within 1 month will result your app is taken down." Oh well..