Can someone explain the value of such a list, am I missing something? Don't get me wrong, your project is neat and I enjoyed looking through it, but I don't understand how anyone would try to sell this or pay money for this.
I've never bought an app that was one-star, but over time many of the really useful apps I used were sold and did one-star kinds of things.
One app kept track of my car info (vin, insurance, mileage, fillups) and was useful. But one day it was sold - uploaded my data and put it behind a login.
"[but] did one-star kinds of things." That is a great line (seriously). I will probably end up working that phrase into something at one point, which is why I have this post bookmarked, so I can "hat tip to m463 on HN" when I do.
P.S. Do you remember the name of that auto app? Name and shame! ;-)
Another app I had that got worse was camscanner - a scanner app that would take a picture of a document and create a .pdf out of it.
It was sold to tencent. The "privacy policy" - when you could access it (broken links) was written in broken english that basically said it did anything it wanted with your .pdf files.
The kinds of documents I would image to .pdf were extremely sensitive personal documents - think w2, documents with SSN, etc...
At least apple notes eventually added a version of camera to .pdf (though it wasn't obvious how to use it when it came out)
Camscanner was one of my favourite apps! I had even paid for the pro version back before it sold. Then when it sold that actually meant nothing, and now I have a "pro" app that is useless essentially.
If anyone has good alternative suggestions I'm open, I haven't tried to look as I don't use it much anymore.
As an app developer, I spend a lot of time trying to find the right opportunities for apps to build. I'd happily spend $50 to cut down research time by a few hours.
I remember a story on Startup Podcast (by Gimlet media) about an atheist who looked at top 100 apps, and realized that there was an opportunity to build a better Bible app.
So, sometimes market research is very valuable. This risk you have for "solving problems you personally have" is that you can end up trying to build infra tooling like new databases.
The strategy is to take one of these apps and build a better version of it. The market demand is there, validated through purchases. But the market is unsatisfied with the current solution. So if you can build a better solution then you have a well defined valuable product
Can someone explain the value of such a list, am I missing something? Don't get me wrong, your project is neat and I enjoyed looking through it, but I don't understand how anyone would try to sell this or pay money for this.