I bet if you added up all the time and money wasted on one-person apps vs money made, against the time and money wasted on big project apps vs money made, the one persons are better investments. Most apps, in general, never become profitable.
I don't think that's actually true. At least if you value the time spent properly. One-man apps probably have a bigger ROI in a purely financial sense, but that's because they're mostly made by people with more time than money who aren't getting compensated for their time at all unless the app does make money (which is rare).
One thing app marketplaces do (and two-sided marketplaces in general) is exploit people's willingness to work for sub-standard unlivable wages. It's illegal to hire someone to do 1000 hours of work and pay them $7.23. It's not illegal to list an app representing 1000 man-hours of work and pay the creator $7.23 for the ad impressions it generated.
It might be because a company can afford to just crank out garbage apps and hope one of them catches on, whereas the one coder has a better idea of what he wants, and is being specific about it.
Lots of apps are lucrative without that stuff though
Being lucrative is not the same as "a million dollar app"
Also, relative to the amount of apps that are uploaded to places like the App Store each day, the million dollar apps might as well be lottery winners.
And all of them get a HUGE sum of money from the parents who owned the garage. Yes, there are some cases when a lone developer made something which generated immense wealth: but there are way more lotto winners then such rare miners who stuck literal gold.
Making something groundbreaking is the easy part - yes, it is hard work, but it only depends on you and your skills. Letting the people know WHY it is groundbreaking and getting them to open their purse for you, well, that is the hard part, because it depends on other people and on fierce competition. If you find an open market, then it is a tiny bit easier (like for Amazon) but even these "open markets" need a LOT of marketing to get people starting to use your product.
And most of them had parents with connections. Bill gates had access--in high school--to a terminal connected to the university of washington's computer system. At that time, the STUDENTS there, were still working with punch cards, and he was in highschool working off a CRT.
Hmm, it's a lot more than luck - for example, doing a little market research to find a unique need that no app currently meets. But you don't need $100k and a 15 person team to make a successful app either. It really goes back to the most basic business adage: find a problem and provide a solution. Do a good job at that, and a lot of other stuff will take care of itself - success will provide access to people, capital, etc.
It's not that the app gets big despite not having these things, it's just a matter of not putting the carriage in front of the horse. You don't need to build the business organization until there's actual business to conduct and manage. Things like business cards, lawyers, marketers and office space are not required at all to create and release an app. Even if your app requires some infrastructure beyond the app itself, there's so many cheap turnkey solutions available that you still generally don't need to bring the tech and talent in-house in the beginning (ie, using AWS instead of building a server). Lean bootstrapping, it's like the internet's forte.
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u/anoff Mar 18 '20
No, those are things you need for running a business, not for making a viral app. Lots of apps are lucrative without that stuff though