Ask HN: Would you pay for iOS components?

[esad]

Dear HN,

I decided to extract a part of functionality from one of my iPhone Apps and make it into a library and sell it a secondary product. Now, as factoring it out into a general use library is not really trivial, I thought I'd ask for some advice before proceeding.

I've put a small mockup page here: http://getsuperpin.com/

Do you think this could be a viable business? Would you buy such component if it saved your time? How much do you think I should charge for it?

Thanks!

[MartinMond]

I've just talked to esad (he's sitting right next to me at the local cocoaheads meetup), what the component does is use a separate R-Tree like data structure to keep track of MapView annotations and perform clustering/display and it seems to deal fine with ~50k annotations on an iPhone 3G. Esad's using this in his local search app http://www.oeffnungszeitenapp.at/

[pmjordan]

One of my/our side projects is actually basically the same concept (different components), with a similar backstory (except they grew out of contract work - and yeah, I retained copyright), but a little further along. You can actually already trial and buy our components at http://appuicomponents.com/

We've been too busy to actually promote it since launching, but also not really sure how best to go about it. We get a bit of organic search traffic, but it's not enough to make the effort worth it so far.

I actually searched for components like ours before embarking on the projects that needed them, and would have happily paid for them, assuming source code was provided. The iOS platform isn't that stable and I'd be very worried about relying on the developer to update the component(s) fast enough in case of breaking changes. I don't know whether that means there's a sustainable market out there, but I do know some people do make a decent amount of cash with it.

One thing I haven't seen elsewhere are trial versions. We provide an x86-only binary + headers for free, which means it only runs in the Simulator.

[austintaylor]

Would it be open-source? With an open development process? I could see paying for a library, but I can't see building on top of something maintained by a single developer that I can't fix myself.

[esad]

Good point. I haven't really thought about this, but one problem that I see with distributing source code is avoiding that it appears on piratebay after a while, on the other hand I can understand that it's a must for some developers.

Could sources be sold as an additional feature? I'm thinking of having two versions, binary and source which would cost like 3x as much. What do you think?

[runjake]

PlausibleLabs.com, run by Landon Fuller (noted Mac & BSD dev) & others, do it.

Clickable: http://www.plausiblelabs.com