[curious_cat_163]

The comments on this post are interesting:

1. Some insist that the source code be made public.

2. Some insist that there be no in-app purchases.

3. Some insist that there be no analytics whatsoever.

Each of the above has some legitimate reason. However, do privacy-focused apps need to play by different set of rules?

If so, what special monetization models would make sense to folks on here? #AskingForAFriend

[MBCook]

I don’t have experience with the Android App Store, but normal subscriptions/IAP/initial purchase on iOS would protect the user info during purchases.

Apple tells you nothing about the user. You can choose to give them a UUID that they’ll echo back when you query their API about the subscription/transaction, but that’s up to you.

Apple will not give a name, email, Apple ID, phone number, location, or anything else.

See the data here: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/appstoreserverapi/...

[keepamovin]

I don't know, I think shotgun-style generalized criticism that doesn't always apply (or 'applies' but comes from a place of 'everything-should-be-free-entitlement' which is toxic to indie creators) is pretty standard fare for Show HNs. Not good, to be sure! But to be expected haha :)

[rajamaka]

Probably some sort of donation model that would result in a coffees worth of money for a 100 hours of work.

[manicdee]

- Patreon if what you're doing lends itself to regular updates - PayPal or other payment processor if your project could use donations - Subscription based Server As A Service for things that need data syncing between multiple platforms (eg: the public/client parts can be Free Software, the server part just exposes an API, and you make it clear what data is transmitted to the server remaining solely on the user's device) - Consultancy to assist with installation/training if your product is complex

[sevagh]

Menstruation consultant

[ogurechny]

I think this will be the model case for future historians to study software market in our pathetic times.

Period tracker app is something a programming student can do. (Maybe with some questionable choices resulting in potential data loss, but this can be fixed.) You don't need a degree to make basic cycle prediction, and you can't reason about anything else without real medical knowledge. So this is something that can be done once in open source, and put onto F-Droid for everyone to use (and, of course, it already has such apps). Something as simple as calculator does not need “cloud account”, nor internet connection at all.

But how are we going to make money on that? How do we grab data that can be sold from users?

So the snake oil festival starts. From cute backgrounds to “AI advice”, lots of nonsense gets invented to grab and hold user attention, and hordes of paid biological word generators pretend that they have never felt “safe” before using “this app”. Many choose to directly ask for sex and pregnancy planning data to be sure they are the first who can sell it. Everything is done to smoke-screen the fact that users are only needed to input as much data into the machine as possible.

“Privacy focused” is just one of such fake labels. It means “we will try hard to protect any data we can sell from other bastards who want to do the same”.

Needless to say, little data brokers just follow the example of platform owners who run the circus, and dream to become data mafia kingpins one day. They benefit from each other, so you won't find simple apps with no strings attached being recommended by the app stores, because they are Bad for Business™.

As for third party “analytic solutions”, in simple terms, you simply let them collect some data on your users to get some charts and generally useless information (useful information costs money — sometimes a lot of money; each time Google or Apple decide whether they should do X or not, it costs Facebook a large sum, and new agreements behind closed doors).