Slashdot Mirror
Flip This App: Secondary Mobile App Market Quietly Taking Off
alphadogg writes "The practice of flipping is probably most familiar to the general public from reality TV shows like 'Flip This House' on A&E. The idea is to buy a house for a lowish price, fix it up a bit, and then sell it on to a buyer, hopefully at a profit. Now, the secondary market for Android and iOS apps is beginning to see the same pattern. App creators without the time or inclination to service or monetize their apps can simply sell them off for a flat, up-front sum of money. Buyers can then either tweak them as they like or not, and either attempt to monetize them themselves or re-sell the apps to still another party. 'Probably 80% of people who want to get involved in mobile either don't know how to code an app or don't know an app developer,' says the founder of one app trading site. 'So there's this massive demand, but kind of a little bit of a barrier to entry.'"
Flipping apps, investing in secondary apps? Soon there will be app-backed derivatives, and Wall Street will melt down over bursting of the global secondary-app bubble.
Nice right wing talking points there.
There is no evidence that "Community Reinvestment Act" loans ( the loans you are talking out your rear end about about without knowing what you are talking about ) are generally considered decent loans without a major percentage being defaulted on.
Instead it is commercial loans that are often underwater and being walked away from as regular business decisions (see: strategic defaults, it is always ok when businesses do it) and home equity loans, not CRA loans that were a major factor in the 2008 melt down.
For a good set of references on the actual facts see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Reinvestment_Act#Alleged_relation_to_2008_financial_crisis
Wax on, wax off baby!
There's two main problems with this. Firstly, a lot of app developers write shitty code. I've worked on some projects that I've inherited from fairly large, well-known app developers, and even they are pretty terrible. Secondly, these people buying the apps won't be able to make substantial changes because they can't code. So where does that leave them? Putting a new lick of paint on, doing some promo work, then trying to resell? There's not going to be much money in that.
The comparison with real estate is not apt. The people who buy houses, develop them, then sell them on have two things working in their favour. Firstly, they know how to actually improve a house. As the summary indicates, the people targeted by these app trading sites aren't in this position. Secondly, the demand for real estate is growing, yet supply remains the same. You can buy real estate, hang onto it for years, then sell at a profit without doing anything. That is not true of the app market. Every day there's more and more competition with apps. If you buy an app, hang onto it and don't do anything to develop it further, it will lose more and more value and eventually be worthless.
If I were to liken the app trading market to anything, it would be sites like Flippa. These are overwhelmingly made up of auto-generated sites populated by crap to sell onto shady SEO guys - just about the lowest value there is. Good luck applying that to a market where the barrier to entry is a review process that is notoriously finicky about quality.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha