I am always curious about people having succesful businesses with desktop apps. There is even a thread that I started some months ago asking if there's anyone making a living out of desktop apps [0].
Can I ask you what kind of apps are you doing, and what are your prospects about the future of Mac development? I'm asking this mostly because I would really like to get back to desktop application development, but now I'm not really sure that I should target Mac natively, mostly because of all the buzz with Apple's bad decisions, etc..
I have apps in the Productivity and Utilities categories, all with retail prices of $15 or less.
I've no idea about the prospects for the future, but I'm not seeing any significant changes in the market at the moment. However, I am concerned with Apple's current actions (or lack of) regarding the Mac.
Thanks for your reply! Just another question, hope you can reply: are you targeting a specific subset of users (like developers, for instance), or you are implementing productivity and utility apps for the "generic" user?
There's a lot to be said for being an early entry to an app store that you expect to stick around even if early adoption is slow. I'd throw the Windows Store into that category, and while I've never used it I think the Mac store may be similar.
Even if your initial product isn't great, if store adoption is slow then your good-enough MVP has a chance to gain traction just by being better than limited alternatives. That gives you time to improve it if viable, and by the time better competition shows up you're well ranked because the early competition was bad.
As a possible example of this, was Instapaper so highly ranked and successful because it was quantifiably better than the alternatives (once they arrived)? How much of an advantage was its status as one of the first available apps?
For a different example that perhaps shows the advantage better, consider the Android "Exchange by TouchDown" which was one of the early way for Android users to connect to Exchange accounts, still available for the low low price of $19.99. Last time I looked a year or two back, it really hadn't kept up with the competition and in fact is often not needed at all on more modern phones, but it's still there with between 1 and 5 million downloads and a cumulative rating of 4+ on the older app. On the newer version that runs Android 3+ the same app has effectively cratered, but they've still probably sold a few million dollars worth of it because of its history.
I'm currently working on a desktop app that I plan to sell (for Windows though, not Mac) and I've gotten some interest (no sales yet but a lot of trials). I think you can definitely be successful doing desktop apps but you need to know the target market. Mine is Windows application developers so they tend to use desktop tools to get their job done, especially when it comes to building their product.
Enough to sustain my modest lifestyle and put some aside for the future. But people with Silicon Valley salaries would probably laugh at my income. I have no boss, no investors, no employees to worry about. Just me and my ideas, on my own schedule.
I don't develop for iOS/Android, but from reading about others' experiences with phone apps, I think it's easier to find a small but steady market on the Mac. People will pay for useful Mac apps. And the Mac user market is more passionate and engaged with 3rd party software than phone users are.
But conversely, you are never going to strike it rich on the Mac with an "Angry Birds" type megasuccess. Mac app aren't sexy like that. (It's good, because the more developers are attracted to the glitz of iOS, the more they leave the Mac market for people like me...)
Numbers-wise, consider that there are are 1.9million apps in the iPhone App Store and 31,000 on the Mac App Store.
