<story><title>Ask HN: What is good business advice for independent mobile app developers?</title></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>lwansbrough</author><text>This is probably not what you&amp;#x27;re looking for, because it&amp;#x27;s very specific practical advice, but it&amp;#x27;s particularly valuable all the same: check out SKStoreReviewController on iOS. We utilized it and our reviews grew from ~250 in the first ~5 months to over 27,000 two months later. Of course there has been growth with our app, as well, but the scale at which we saw reviews come in after implementing the UI was incredible: over 1k new reviews within hours.&lt;p&gt;I say all this because ratings have a huge impact on your app store listing position, and any small developer can benefit from such a boost immensely.&lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#x27;re building on Android too, this functionality unfortunately doesn&amp;#x27;t exist, however we have also seen a considerable boost in reviews after implementing our own UI which asks users to review (and allows them to press a button to go to the store.)</text></comment>
<story><title>Ask HN: What is good business advice for independent mobile app developers?</title></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>cageface</author><text>As in selling your own apps? Seriously my advice would be give it up. You can make a good living writing apps for other people but the app store is a very very unfriendly place for indie app developers. Your odds of making enough to keep food on the table are much better in other niches.</text></comment>