How come there aren't as many profitable indie mobile apps?
How come there aren't as many popular and profitable indie mobile apps? Different from indie web apps/platforms where many have become profitable at some point (Think Nomadlist, Coderpad, RemoteOK, etc)
my hunch is that mobile apps are not profitable in general. expensive to develop, more difficult to monetize, google & apple taking a whopping 30% , more difficult to iterate designs due to app store reviews, and less ubiquity. Why would an indie spend so much time making 2 mobile apps, when they already have a website that works in every phone? It's a matter of time and constrained resources
"Why would an indie spend so much time making 2 mobile apps, when they already have a website that works in every phone?"
Hard to argue with that.
There's a big barrier to entry in mobile - the App Store.
You'll want/need to rank high in App Store search and browse to get a lot of downloads. And the issue is that you need downloads to rank higher.
Unless you find a never-been-thought-of-before niche, this issue can most easily be solved by dumping cash into ads.
Of course, it's not impossible to do this w/o money, it's just really hard. You can try to build in viral loops, create web traffic to your app, etc. But it requires a lot of work for an indie dev - before you know it, and it's super easy to waste time on the wrong things here.
Also, consumers hate paying for things. Businesses have a budget for SaaS and expect won't balk at $1000's per month in subscriptions. I can't tell you how many times I've been told that $2.99/mo was way too much for an app... 😅