What do you with old dead projects?
What do you with old dead projects?
Eg. I have some iPhone games which are still in the App Store but they are not getting any meaningful downloads and the potential revenue (ads using the now defuct Apple ad platform) is far away.
Do you delete it? Put it on github? Sell it? Write an obituary on your (that no-one reads)? Something else ...
Think of 'em every time I go to bed and cannot fall asleep.
Just out of curiosity, how many people use the app(s) still?
From itunes connect just now, over the last 90 days they got 158 and 10 downloads respectively.
The games are:
Fidus Fidus
Tilt Out
I've kicked around an idea before that's an SDK you plug into your app called DeathDay or something. When the app is no longer worth maintaining, you can flip a switch remotely and a 'Sorry, this app is no longer supported' message appears in your app - with a link to a competitor or similar app for users to switch to.
On the other side, it's a marketplace for app devs to 'buy' new users. So if I'm a game dev and see Fidus Fidus is shutting down soon with 500 active users, I can buy the space on DeathDay and pay, say $0.50 per conversion. So the original dev gets a couple hundred bucks, I get a lower cost per user than app store ads, and users get a place to go.
As an app dev, what would you think about that? I have built apps with thousands of MAUs that I had to shut down because they were bleeding me dry, but those users would have been worth something to someone - so I had the same question you have now
Well if you can get the existing users to convert; which I suspect will be pretty hard if you just disable an existing installed app. In particular for something like game.
But there might be something there. As the cost of user acquisition on iOS is very high and there are so many dead/unmaintained apps on that platform.
For me personally; there is also the vanity aspect. I spent so much time creating these apps and then selling them for a few dollars would just make things feel worse.
Yeah, I never followed through because it seemed more trouble than it's worth for most apps. In non-games (mine was a finance app) people would want migration of data - which would need to be coordinated, and for a few cents a user it doesn't really seem worth it for either dev.
The market of dead apps on the app store is massive though so I keep it in the back of my mind.
And I agree with the feeling... shutting down my app after years of work and ups and downs was totally disheartening, but selling it to someone for a few grand never even crossed my mind. It was my app, so my job to take it around back and put it out of its misery haha.
If you figure out a good solution let a fellow app dev know :) Good luck!
@EO created marketplace just for that https://1kprojects.com
I don't think 1kprojects is a "marketplace just for" old projects nobody is interested in anymore. Give @EO some credit!
I did not say that!
This is a very cool website. I haven't seen it before. Thanks for the link.
It depends but sometimes I've just decided to pull something down completely (whether it be an app or site) and then completely remove the cognitive load it can put on me personally. I think it's easy to start to accumulate projects and if you find yourself thinking about it a lot, what you should or could do with it, but don't find yourself taking action, there's a good argument to simply "kill" it.
I worked on a donation side-project a few years ago. When we shut it down, we open-sourced the Rails app (https://github.com/dollaraday/dollaraday_template) and wrote a post-mortem (http://dollaraday.co). Every once in a while we get emails from people who actually used the open-source app or were inspired by it. Worth doing!
What type of apps? I could promote them on my project if they are worth bringing back to life.
Putting it on github sounds reasonable, but why would you delete it or write an "obituary" that no one reads? Why ruminate over past projects at all?
I'd just use what you've learned and create newer and better projects!
An obituary on my personal weblog. For my own sake; sanity and sleep at night.
They are major units of work; took many months of my life. If I just let it go then I have nothing to show for.
I’m not sure what it’s called but some people bundle a whole lot of apps together in a package and sell it for a discounted price. Try to get in one.