Ask HN: What's your Mac OS App side project? I'm curious if any HN'ers here have any fun mac os projects they've built or even have an income from? I feel like we hear a lot about saas and iphone apps, but not mac os apps as much. I have a mac os app idea, and I'm also wondering if anyone knows of a good book on building a mac os app business? Or perhaps a book on building an iphone app company would be sufficient and applicable to mac os? |
I have reached the top 10 in paid health and fitness apps a couple times. Revenue is probably in the low hundreds of dollars for lifetime, and the first year it was out it made very little. Second year it started getting some traction. (apple also takes 100 bucks a year to post an app, so first year basically lost money)
It's hard since I don't really use paid advertising. I made it in SwiftUI and used a channel called SwiftfulThinking to learn how to code it, besides that just other yt tutorials as needed :)
Link to SwiftfulThinking channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/swiftfulthinking Link to app for reference: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/20-20-20-rule-resteyes/id64493...
I think it is possible for sure to build a business around a MacOS app. It just has to be unique enough for people to want to pay for it, and you have to know how to get it out there (marketing). Kinda like the iOS marketplace, just smaller, but thats not really an issue if you're solving a relevant problem for Mac users. Lmk if u have other questions!
I initially used Go for the backend and web as the frontend, so it essentially works as a local web server serving a web page in the browser. However, I'm now rewriting it in Qt (C++) to make it easier to maintain and to make it into a native application instead of a local web app.
Quick questions for everybody here:
- How do you develop your apps right now, mainly cross-platform ones? QT? Would you enjoy a C++ cross-platform framework that binds directly (and well) to Cocoa?
- Are you using Electron? If so, would you appreciate premium modules for Electron that bring a lot more "native" Cocoa functionality instead of reinventing the wheel in JavaScript?
What would you wish a book on modern desktop app development would cover?
I have not published it via the App Store though. It's a direct distribution (via .dmg, but it's checked & notarized by Apple so I needed to pay $99/year fee to be able to do that). I'm using Sparkle to handle the updates.
More info here: https://support.apple.com/en-ph/102445
Still lots of work to be done, but we’re getting there. In the middle of a full redesign for the landing page and the app itself, so don’t mind the mess :)