Ask HN: How to Make Money from Open Source Mobile App?
10 comments
Just sell it in the App/Play store. (Unless something restricts that in store policies,) you can still provide an open source license and the code in Github while charging money in the stores.
I'm willing to bet most people will rather pay small fee to have it installed from store and have automated updates than compiling it from the sources and running it themselves.
People who want to fiddle with the code or get the app for free can use the code and compile it themselves and people who value ease of use, can just one-click buy it.
I'm willing to bet most people will rather pay small fee to have it installed from store and have automated updates than compiling it from the sources and running it themselves.
People who want to fiddle with the code or get the app for free can use the code and compile it themselves and people who value ease of use, can just one-click buy it.
Also, most people aren't developers, and if you don't have the paid Dev account, you can only run for something like two weeks before you have to reauthorise it from what I remember - I think Apple introduced it to make it more difficult to run things like emulators for the average consumer.
What would be the license to prevent other devs cloning it (and putting/selling on app stores themselves)?
I don't think any such thing exists because then what does the community benefit from. A no-clone licence is pretty much a 'You can look and build for yourself and make PRs for me' deal.
"and use". Why not... And this has implicitly happened/happening to many open source projects - people are downloading (or "buying disks") from the original author anyway. e.g. back then, I doubt anyone would buy an Emacs distribution from other person than RMS - so why not have a license which would enforce such usage - this is just an alignment to fact.
I'm a former iOS developer and even I don't care enough to save a couple dollars by compiling my own app, when I could get auto updates from the app store. I don't suspect it'll hurt your sales with customers too much in that sense because they aren't making this choice.
I'd think more about other developers taking your code, slightly theming it differently, and selling it in the app store for a dollar less than you.
If you're ok with that, then go ahead. And no license in the world will help simply because you actually have to mount a legal challenge, and who's going to pay for that?
I'd say a better strategy to scratch your OSS itch is to make the underlying libraries OSS, but not the UI, that way you have some kind of value proposition you're offering.
I'd think more about other developers taking your code, slightly theming it differently, and selling it in the app store for a dollar less than you.
If you're ok with that, then go ahead. And no license in the world will help simply because you actually have to mount a legal challenge, and who's going to pay for that?
I'd say a better strategy to scratch your OSS itch is to make the underlying libraries OSS, but not the UI, that way you have some kind of value proposition you're offering.
In my opinion, it's fine to just include your monetizing code in your repo. You can use config files or environment variables or something to hide private details. As long as the ads you publish are fairly standard, I don't think anyone would mind - and it also leaves people who really don't like the ads the option to compile an ad-free version. If you really wanted to curry favor, you could even post a separate ad-free .apk release on your repo and just push a version with ads to official app stores.
This is what I currently do with my app. The code is open source, it's free for anybody to build and install, the build steps are simply clone and build with Android Studio. I upload the debug .apk as a GitHub release with no valid keys (so no ads), but there are ads at the bottom of the screen on the play store version.
It makes a little change every month and I've not had any complaints about the ads, except to offer a pay-to-remove option, which I mostly just haven't gotten around to yet.
It makes a little change every month and I've not had any complaints about the ads, except to offer a pay-to-remove option, which I mostly just haven't gotten around to yet.
From what I've seen work, most of the OSS projects make money off of 'convenience'. This can be split up in many different tactical things, from consulting to charging for hosting, support, etc.
Ad supported or consulting services related to it.
You can also dual license it - for instance, put a public facing GPL version on Github and a private proprietary fork with proprietary extensions (such as advertising embeds) that you put on the App Store.
You can also dual license it - for instance, put a public facing GPL version on Github and a private proprietary fork with proprietary extensions (such as advertising embeds) that you put on the App Store.
But some extra bucks wouldn't hurt, so how do I make some (coffee money) while making the App Open Source?
It's a feed reader, so not the next billion dollar idea