Where is the money for mobile app developers in blockchain?

Where is the money for mobile app developers in blockchain?(hackernoon.com)

48 points by hammadtariq 7 years ago | 41 comments

paulsutter 7 years ago |

The only significant business in cryptocurrency is trading cryptocurrency[1], which is huge and very profitable. Non-cryptocurrency uses for blockchains haven’t taken off (mostly ideaware around immutability).

[1] https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/volume/24-hour/

wycs 7 years ago | |

Exactly, there may be non-pyramid scheme money in crypto but so far there is no evidence for it. Look at the daily average users for Dapps here:https://www.stateofthedapps.com/rankings

They are absurdly low. Like less than 100 users a day for anything that isn’t a exchange.

Many of these dapps have market caps in the hundreds of millions with a few dozen users per day.

paulsutter 7 years ago | | |

The failure rate for cryptocurrency experiments will be high, but I’m glad to see people trying. We’ll collectively learn from the efforts. Whatever the number of frauds doesn’t detract from the set of smart guys who are likely inventing something significant.

EDIT: I should have said "may be inventing". It's my opinion of a >50% chance that Vitalik's work will lead to something significant, for example. Some people will disagree and that's ok too.

aml183 7 years ago | | |

DAU tracking #'s are based on on-chain activities. We don't know daily active user #s for activities such as visiting the crypto kittie site and looking at different kitties.

basch 7 years ago | |

I think this is because at the end of the day, normal people dont care about decentralization or protocols.

Look at email and http. I can use any client I want to access email/web. Outlook, Thunderbird, Chrome, Firefox. We already had this sort of utopia. Anybody could spin up an smtp server or web server. But that involved a little too much friction. So Google and Microsoft offered ready to use email. And Facebook and Wordpress offered up ready to use web sites. Google and Microsoft could probably wall off their garden and people would just jump in, instead of run. Facebook went from jabber to proprietary. RSS has died and been replaced by the Twitter follow. Find me one non geek that cares about Mastodon/GNUSocial/OStatus/ActivityPub at a philosophical level.

When people talk about blockchains they either too narrowly focus on currency application or substitute it for the word database. Quite often on HN you see people comment "what does this really get you that a normal database doesnt."

Blockchains should be used when the goal is to distribute trust, allow non-oligopoly institutional verified participation, and minimize fraud. But we live in a world where _most people are perfectly comfortable just trusting the easiest to use Institution._

One application of blockchain potential that repeatedly comes to my mind is cab hailing. Instead of the Uber/Lyft duopoly, ideally there would be a "hail a cab" protocol, just like smtp/http. Something that works between any client that chooses to be compatible. Many many competing institutions could run their copy of the ledger: a ledger that holds driver, passenger, and client app trust ratings, route information, load trends, predictive driver placement, event schedules, all while facilitates payment. Any client could choose to ignore any part of the distributed database it wants, like Mastodon. Why is this better than the current situation? Because I could use Lyft to call an Uber driver. Cross app compatibility, standard hailing protocols, COMPATIBLE TRUST. Innovation in the client side features would skyrocket. When the protocol updates, everyone benefits. And because ride hailing doesnt depend on a social graph, unlike communication tools, lock in to one particular institution is much much lower. I hail a stranger, not a friend. I can swap my driving dispatcher app or cab browser at any time, just like I am free to flow freely between Chrome and Firefox. And unlike how I cant browse the facebook/uber database with anything besides facebook/uber made apps.

But no one cares. The majority of the world is ok just trusting and paying 2-5 institutions to handle trust and money transfer and data security in any one particular space (banking, communication, ride hailing.) We have already seen email and sms give way to fbmessenger, whatsapp, snapchat. IRC gave way to Slack. We have gone from a world where clients are inter-operable, to silod. We seem to want this. And until the benefit of cross compatibility and distributedness reemerge and permeate into general culture, Non-cryptocurrency uses of blockchain will be few and far between. Because the big institutions can offer something thats already "good enough." When something is good enough, people dont go looking for better. Blockchain and mobile app developers need to give the general public a UNIQUE benefit, and a reason to care, switch, and stick with open systems.

(Another interesting application of blockchains could be to the yelp/foursquare/tripadvisor/opentable/dining-rewards/loyality space. One protocol to handle menus, reviews, and reward points, instead of a separate incompatible reward app and shitty non mobile website for each damn restaurant. Another, and different component of trust in this ecosystem would be verification of authenticity vs spam.)

(Another application of blockchains, shared accounting systems between cooperating firms. General contractors and sub contractors all working off one distributed database for all ERP: general ledger, finance, forecasting, budgeting, cost management, change management, orders, invoices, contracts, ach, settlement, project schedules, purchasing, inventory, time and attendance, manpower, deliverable, shipping, materials, manufacturing, drawings, BIM (revit) etc, union tracking, payroll, training, safety tracking, SHARED analytics! In this scenario, the threshold for trust can be lowered ala https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/announcing-microsoft-... As of right now, if the general uses primavera or plangrid, you use primavera or plagrid. The subcontractors end up using a litany of incompatible tools across isolated projects. Each ERP and accounting system uses dual entry and every firms duplicate each others efforts. Massive redundancy, coupled with very foggy visibility into whats actually going on. Interoperable ERP with shared triple entry accounting would be a worldwide gamechanger. But construction isn't sexy enough for most of Silicon Valley fad chasing, and the scale of Enterprise ERP is too massive for anyone but the big dogs. I dont see SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft opening up their products to each other anytime soon.)

perl4ever 7 years ago | | |

I think "no one cares" is the wrong way to describe the situation. People demonstrably do care about the efficiency provided by a few trusted intermediaries, because that's what they prefer. If you have decentralized solutions, then you multiply the work that needs to be done to coordinate.

orasis 7 years ago |

This author has no spine. If you want to be an entrepreneur, stop chasing fads and start creating real value for people.

bdcravens 7 years ago | |

> stop chasing fads and start creating real value for people

The two aren't mutually exclusive. The best startups combine the two: solve real problems via what's hot and attain virality and investment attention.

econochoice 7 years ago | |

Plenty of entrepreneurs have made a lot of money chasing fads. Web 2.0, NoSQL, microservices, etc.

UncleEntity 7 years ago | | |

How many of them made a lot of money chasing a literal fad -> foodie shots?

My great idea is to make a blockchain version of HN and instead of karma you get HNCoin, just need a 100 million dollars and a top-100 userbase...

nostalgeek 7 years ago | | |

You are mistaken, these aren't fads but buzzwords. Web 2.0 is the web of API, NoSQL existed well before the term was invented and microservices are a valid software architecture since it's not a question of size but an organizational concern. Even "severless" is just the good old worker queue system. And yes, buzzwords come and go but nothing behind these are fads.

Itaxpica 7 years ago |

This article is basically a laundry list of why any legitimate money and most legitimate developers are and should be extremely wary of blockchain. Lots of buzzwords, big promises, and smoke, no real problems solved or paths to actual profit other than “I dunno, sell some tokens I guess”.

gm-conspiracy 7 years ago |

Any good resources for proof-of-work pseudo-code?

I am having trouble wrapping my head around the implementation, not theory, of blockchain (ledger entry based on previously hashed ledger entry).

Like, how is the beginning of the ledger created/determined? Is that just a nonce/IV?

How is each entry calculated and/or verified based on the previous entry?

foepys 7 years ago | |

You create a so called Genesis block on which everything is based. Maybe include a timestamp (in case of Bitcoin a newspaper headline) to prove that you didn't pre-mine and you are done. The Genesis block is then distributed with each implementation for bootstrapping the verification process.

You calculate the hash of each block (which includes the hash of the previous block) and check if it matches the hash in the next block. Each block also includes the difficulty of the network at the time to prevent mining more than x block per hour. The difficulty describes the "format" of the hash of each block, e.g. the hash in hex format needs to have 50 times 0 at the beginning.

gm-conspiracy 7 years ago | | |

Thank you for the response.

So, fundamentally, is everything just how many zeros prepend the "unique" hex string (for proof-of-work)?

luckycharms810 7 years ago | |

Worked through this about a year ago, but at the time I wrote it, it worked interchangeably with Bitcoin blocks. https://github.com/ltavag/blocks/blob/master/block.py#L68

dane-pgp 7 years ago |

One of the under-explored uses of the blockchain is as a decentralised permissionless append-only log for tracking custody and authenticity of physical products. This is also an area where a mobile app is well suited, since users should be able to add to the log and check values on it wherever they are, and ideally with a quick snap of a QR code or tap of an NFC tag.

Imagine that a mass-produced tech item from China came with a QR code certificate authenticity, which the end user could scan to check that the item had been made by a specific factory and a specific company. (The company could also add extra metadata to a blockchain to detail how the goods travelled and which are the approved importers).

The QR code should presumably have extra information in it which ties it to a serial number baked into the silicon of the purchased item, but there are other ways (based on double-spend prevention) that you could confirm a given QR code hadn't merely been duplicated.

chatmasta 7 years ago |

As an entrepreneur, my problem with blockchain is that it consumes the image and focus of your company. With blockchain, it seems like it’s all or nothing. You’re either a “blockchain startup” or a “tech startup.” You can’t be a tech startup that just happens to use blockchain in a part of your product. It becomes the focus of your pitch and any hype it generates.

The irony is that for a “blockchain startup” to succeed, it must be solving a problem that exists independently of blockchain, for which “blockchain” is simply an implementation detail. There is most likely a way to solve the same problem your blockchain startup is solving without blockchain. If there is not, I would suggest you might be solving a non-problem.

Adopting “blockchain” in any public way forces you to focus on a deceptively non-critical aspect of your business. The more you integrate your product with blockchain, the more your company depends on the success of crypocurrency in general.

For example, consider you’re building a marketplace for Wordpress themes backed by cryptocurrency. You end up creating a convoluted scheme to fit your desired solution to the problem, when a simple network of payments on existing infrastructure would suffice (and indeed has sufficed for years before blockchain). In focusing on blockchain as a payment or distribution mechanism, you are causing your product to depend on the success of the blockchain ecosystem as a whole. You need people to use cryptocurrency in general, so they can use it on your marketplace without friction. Put another way, unless your product is truly category-defining, nobody is going to learn how to pay with ethereum just to use it. The success of your product depends on the wider adoption of cryptocurrency in general.

So as a blockchain startup you are betting on two things. One, that your company can succeed in solving the problem it sets out to solve (a risky bet in itself). And two, that the larger blockchain ecosystem will evolve as a wider market of people adopt it and know how to use it with your product. Your success is tied to two independent variables instead of just one. That seems like an unnecessary risk IMO.

russdpale 7 years ago |

I don't see many use cases for phones outside of wallets. Even that is a bad idea because phones of all varieties are so insecure. Mainly because people don't update their phones for a myriad of reasons.

HN hates blockchain, so I doubt you will get a very good answer here. I am blockchain admirer but I just don't see a lot of use cases on such an insecure device outside of perhaps social media where you control your own data. Reading the blockchain, sure.. writing to the chain? Not ideal.

amelius 7 years ago |

Where is the money for mobile app developers, period?

I've yet to see the first person in my personal network reaching a state of being able to make a living from mobile apps (and obviously, I'm excluding the survivor-bias stories from the media here).

davidmurdoch 7 years ago | |

I know the guy who made the unofficial Tesla app. He's doing very well now.

Personally, I had an app that was on its way to allowing me to transition to focusing on mobile app development full time. But it turns out you need a license to perform money transference, which was what my app was... and luckily Google shut me down before I got into high volume and any legal trouble.

To your point: my second app was a super expensive (for me) colossal failure.

I know another guy who nets about $200k USD making puzzle apps, though that also includes web apps started in the mid 2000s.

Fnoord 7 years ago | | |

You "knowing a guy" means nothing. The point is that the signal to noise ratio is extremely low. Not in useful apps, mind you, but profitable apps. Why? Competition.

scarface74 7 years ago | |

Raises hand.

I made plenty of money in mobile app development before. My secret? Work for a large company that does business to business apps that do large 4000-10000 device deployments that are willing to pay 6-7 figures on an implementation.

Chasing after $0.99 purchases is a fool’s errand and winning at that game is no more assured than winning the lottery.

vbsteven 7 years ago | |

Freelancing for clients provides good money for mobile app developers.

There is too much luck and handing over control to appstores or betraying your users involved to reliably make money on your own apps.

sodafountan 7 years ago | |

There's definitely money to be made from mobile, I had a nice little passive income stream from my Windows Phone apps before it went under.

Also, developer salaries for companies that are hiring for mobile are always high

Animats 7 years ago | |

Where is the money for mobile app developers, period?

About four years past. That ship has sailed. The top apps are now all from the big players.