I remember a few years ago reading about MicroISVs, it was a term created by Eric Sink it stands for independent software vendor. I always liked the idea of being a one man/person software shop. Being your own products, making a living for yourself.
When the app store was launched there were hundreds of developers now using the app store to make their living, the Indie Dev movement was born.
Like I mentioned I’ve always been a fan of this indie dev movement. I liked reading blogs from developers like David Smith, Daniel Jalkut, Marco Arment and of course John Saddington who created DeskPM the tool I’m using to write this post.
While I was always a fan of these people, I always had the plan to eventually become a Indie dev, spending all day developing my apps (usually from the beach) making a comfortable living from my own apps, but I’m a web developer. I have no Objective-C experience. So making apps for the app store was just a dream.
Now thanks to platforms like Ionic, NativeScript and AppCelerator a web developer like me can start building apps for the app store (both Native and Hybrid). This is great, but there is another thing that was holding me back the horror stories of developers trying to make a living on the app store and failing (as a family man with a mortgage I really can’t take the risk).
But after listening to David Smith and Marco Arment’s new podcast Under the Radar in the episode about Work/Life Balance David Smith mentioned that you shouldn’t just jump into Indie Development from working full time. He said that it took a few years of building apps in his free time until he could make the move over to full time indie. Using this balance between consulting and his own apps, he eventually moved over when he was making enough to go full indie with his own apps.
So now with tools that allow you to use web technologies to build apps there is no reason why I shouldn’t start this slow movement over to becoming a Indie Dev/Micro ISV owner (sounds like a good theme for this blog)