Vignette: add photos to your contacts by searching public social media profiles
This is going to come off as quite bitter, but the more I listen to podcasts like ATP, the more it angers me how incestuous the Apple indie community is. There are about a million of these kinds of utility apps in the App Store. Many are potentially useful to thousands of people like this one. <i>None</i> of them get widespread podcast coverage, writeups on Techcrunch and Macstories, and trending posts on HN. This is exclusively fame and personality driving sales, and yet nobody on these shows seems to want to acknowledge it.<p>Worse yet, this might make fledgeling indie developers believe that they, too, could make a living with their first or second projects. But I know from experience that merit isn&#x27;t nearly enough: getting even a single journalist to pay attention will require weeks or months of unanswered e-mails to everyone you can find—and even then, only if you&#x27;re lucky, and your app actually does something incredible.<p>Perhaps the unstated prerequisite in this market is that if you don&#x27;t have a network, your app almost certainly isn&#x27;t going anywhere, no matter how good it is. And if you know a bunch of people within the Apple indie community, you&#x27;re going to have some degree of success, no matter what. I recently released an app that performs an important task substantially better than all the existing competition, and yet getting anyone at all to pay attention is like pulling nails. It&#x27;s hard not to feel dejected when you see a newcomer with a comparatively simple app enter the stage and immediately get widespread acclaim.<p>As a long-time fan of the show, I&#x27;m happy for Casey&#x27;s success (because he&#x27;s a genuinely nice and well-meaning person), but I&#x27;m probably going to have to stop listening soon. This release is just an absolute distortion of the app developer experience, and it ticks me off that everyone in this sphere is acting like it&#x27;s completely normal. In reality, almost anybody else would be lucky to make $100 from the lifetime of an equivalent app, and nobody would be donating $5 to you just because they like you.