Can you call yourself an Indie Dev

As I’ve mentioned before I’m a big fan of indie devs. And one day hope to be in a position where I can make a living being an independent developer. One question that does cross my mind is can you call yourself an indie mobile developer when you don’t write native apps?

The obvious answer is yes, it really doesn’t matter if the apps you build are built using Objective-C, Java or JavaScript. As long as they sell and are good quality apps then it doesn’t matter.

But all the indie devs I know of seem to just build native iOS app. This is probably because the iOS market and app store were the first so developers went and joined the iOS market building native apps. There is a Slack channel for iOS developers, which I belong to. In this channel there are a lot of developers who are building apps for themselves either full time or part time. But all of them seem to be native developers.

I think that being a hybrid app developer would be a good thing for indie developers. When they create an app they can target both major platforms (and now Windows with Ionic 2).

I suppose the question is not what programming language you use to make apps but more how successful you are at shipping apps, marketing them and expanding upon them. I’ve posted a question of the Ionic slack channel to see if any developers there are independent it’ll be interesting to see the response.