I had the fortune and grit to build and release something on my own. It took years and a lot of pain. Then came the pain of supporting it in production. I generally regret putting myself through this and I do look back. I do think it is worth trying something, but you need to be careful what exactly you are building. Too many times I got lost in details or spent way too much time on things that were not worth it. Also, giving up sooner when you see it doesn't work can be a good thing.
+1 I did a few android apps in the goldrush years and building the app was the easy part, and this was before Claude code.
The hard part was the customer and technical support. Huge time and energy sink fielding those requests - some totally lucid and well written, some incomprehensible, some just kinda sketchy obviously looking to manipulate/exploit/whatever you, some from people using phones and software versions you've never heard of, some from people using a totally different app than yours, some who think you are Google/apple/Microsoft and please reset their password to hunter2 etc etc etc. Then you have the endless API churn and mandates from the app stores etc about what you can and can't do, what SDK needs updating for whatever, new requirements, new deprecations etc etc etc.
It was maybe 10% coding and building something, with the other 90% just dealing with "customer service" bullshit that gained you basically nothing (and certainly not making you any revenue).
I made some small time hobby money, but obviously I pulled all the apps eventually and never looked back really. I would not recommend doing this to anyone if you have a stable job that pays reasonably well already. Keep the day job, it's less hassle.
We need more of these stories. A week or two ago game engines came up where I see so many wanna-be indie devs effectively throw away their chance at shipping before running out of money by spending time making an engine instead of getting to the game by using an existing one. The comments were generally "so what if they had fun". My reply should have been "it would be nicer to have shipped and kept the fun going longer than not ship because of wasted time and therefore have to give up the dream"
I had the fortune and grit to build and release something on my own. It took years and a lot of pain. Then came the pain of supporting it in production. I generally regret putting myself through this and I do look back. I do think it is worth trying something, but you need to be careful what exactly you are building. Too many times I got lost in details or spent way too much time on things that were not worth it. Also, giving up sooner when you see it doesn't work can be a good thing.
+1 I did a few android apps in the goldrush years and building the app was the easy part, and this was before Claude code.
The hard part was the customer and technical support. Huge time and energy sink fielding those requests - some totally lucid and well written, some incomprehensible, some just kinda sketchy obviously looking to manipulate/exploit/whatever you, some from people using phones and software versions you've never heard of, some from people using a totally different app than yours, some who think you are Google/apple/Microsoft and please reset their password to hunter2 etc etc etc. Then you have the endless API churn and mandates from the app stores etc about what you can and can't do, what SDK needs updating for whatever, new requirements, new deprecations etc etc etc.
It was maybe 10% coding and building something, with the other 90% just dealing with "customer service" bullshit that gained you basically nothing (and certainly not making you any revenue).
I made some small time hobby money, but obviously I pulled all the apps eventually and never looked back really. I would not recommend doing this to anyone if you have a stable job that pays reasonably well already. Keep the day job, it's less hassle.
We need more of these stories. A week or two ago game engines came up where I see so many wanna-be indie devs effectively throw away their chance at shipping before running out of money by spending time making an engine instead of getting to the game by using an existing one. The comments were generally "so what if they had fun". My reply should have been "it would be nicer to have shipped and kept the fun going longer than not ship because of wasted time and therefore have to give up the dream"
what if the fun for them is the game engine? because game devs are customers too, it's technical product dev.