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How To Make Money As an Independent Developer
itwbennett writes: A new survey of 13,000 developers in 149 countries by U.K.-based research company VisionMobile compared, among other things, the most popular versus the most lucrative revenue models for four groups of developers: those focusing on mobile apps, cloud services, the Internet of Things, and desktop apps. Among their findings for mobile developers: While advertising is by far the most popular revenue model, only 17% of developers who rely primarily on advertising make more than $10,000 per month from their apps. By comparison, 37% of those who make their money by e-commerce (selling real-world goods and services) make $10k per month or more.
The same advice was given to me back when MS-DOS and Windows was king. Make utilities, not games. A game only has a small chance of making it big, and even then, you have to make sure to keep your market share or else someone will make a clone and grab it all, like how Candy Crush took over Bejeweled's market niche.
Utilities, on the other hand, tend to have a long tail. They may not be blockbusters, but they can be a constant, reliable source of income. For example, Raymond Lau's StuffIt for the Mac is still kicking, similar with WinRAR. Make sure that your utility is in its own territory, and doesn't fall completely within another group, as there are plenty of unarchivers.
There are plenty of niches for a utility these days written for smartphones or tablets... a few examples:
1: PGP/gpg encrypting/decrypting and key management. Yes, there are other utilities out there, but using iOS's KeyChain or Android's KeyStore coupled with the fingerprinter scanner as a way to confirm signing/decryption once the key is unlocked is something not done yet. Using the OS to securely store keys isn't as secure as a HSM, but it is far better than just leaving them sitting on a drive or filesystem, even if they are encrypted.
2: An implementation of PhonebookFS. That way, the same directory on a cloud provider can have many different layers of files, and even if all the layers are known, there is still chaff for plausible deniability.
3: A utility that archives loads of files to Amazon Glacier (preferably with some sort of encryption.) It also would retain a robust index, so if a file needs retrieved, it can be gotten with as little data having to be downloaded as possible.
4: A utility similar to #3, but can work with any offline media, so if one is using the program on a computer, it can burn DVDs, and keep an index to find files (with their creation times) no matter where they are. The only thing similar would be Retrospect, but they have very limited support for optical drives, and zero support for USB BD-R drives.
5: A superset of utility #3 and 4, but is able to cycle and copy files automatically to new media every so often (and cloud providers can be considered media). This way, something sitting on a corner of hard drive forgotten eventually winds up being copied onto newer media, to minimize the chances of bit rot and time killing the data. Error correction records and redundancy are important as well. Pretty much a "meta" zpool scrub that would occasionally prompt for offline media, check and copy it somewhere.
6: A utility that does a share split of a public key among peers/clients of the app. This would either expire access to a file (where requests for a key would be declined after a time/date), or deny access before a certain point in time. Because it is distributed, an attacker would have to create a bunch of nodes that hopefully are the ones chosen for stashing the pieces of the decryption key.
This would allow one to guarantee that data is expired and inaccessible after a time (financial/hospital archives) as well as ensure data that should not be seen until a future time is kept secure.
7: A duress mode utility that can do proper notifications and shutdowns if triggered.
tl;dr... there is a lot more for app writing than just trying to get a game out.