This is a kind of naïveté. Experimenting at scale to sell apps and find what might be a viable business is pretty much all the AppStore offers developers. The lack of custom storefronts or advertising/marketing options makes this the only viable way to try to make money.
Just waiting til you've made the perfect app and only launching that would mean you were one of the most brilliant people in tech, having complete knowledge of your target market even before release.
And relative to your comment about not releasing 'low quality apps', you might as well tell people not to release their blogs on wordpress because all these 'low quality' websites are just re skinned versions of the same blog engine.
The value of the blog is not the engine it's the text. If their text is a blatant rehashing of someone else's content with SEO on top then yes, I would tell them to not put up crap online & try to find something of value to do.
I'm not saying don't try to release MVPs quicky to test the market, I'm saying don't log in to itunes, check out the top 10 games and then make cheap generic rip offs with different skins and optimized titles. The summery of what I'm trying to say is: do something you care about, in one way or another. It would be better for your mental health and probably also more likely to be a viable business. Don't be the ios equivalent of spammers & spyware-laden internet explorer toolbars.
I should say that I've been making a living as an independent developer for almost 3 years now so I'm not just talking out of my ass here.
Yeah but that is business. That is exactly how a good business man approaches business. Study the market, determine what is successful, emulate them but either more efficiently, to a new niche, or marketed better.
I mean the whole point of business is to maximize the return on your investment.
Now making absolute garbage may not be the right solution, and making incredible product that takes 5 years to develop is probably not the right solution either... finding the right mix is key
To me the advice sounded more like "don't spam the app store with useless crap" rather than "don't start small and experiment". Maybe it wasn't worded that great, but I agree with the sentiment.
Just waiting til you've made the perfect app and only launching that would mean you were one of the most brilliant people in tech, having complete knowledge of your target market even before release.
And relative to your comment about not releasing 'low quality apps', you might as well tell people not to release their blogs on wordpress because all these 'low quality' websites are just re skinned versions of the same blog engine.