Mobile App Bro

I'm dropping stuff on the TL that others like to keep secret or paywalled.

AppStore Veteran.

60+ apps published over the years.

Follow for the juice 🧃

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

While I understand your perspective as his friend/business partner, the push back I will give is the idea that it was not for the making of money. It had a pre programmed price increase to begin with.

He can be 'full of so much love' and also so much greed too, we are all human. I am most definitely money motivated.

Pretty much everything every indie does is the making of money, I just don't like pretending like its completely not about it, that feel disingenuous. We all can't be obsessing over MRRs and revenues all day long and pretend then we don't care about the money.

Marc is definitely money motivated, to a much higher degree that the average person I would argue, which is what makes him successful to begin with. So much of what he does is centered around money and the making of it, to argue otherwise would be wild to me.

People outside of this indie bubble would certainly look at someone who auctioned off parts of their body for a race as being pretty money motivated, I don't know how you can spin that. Who even thinks of that? 😂 Only if their brain is highly tuned on aggressive and highly effective monetisation strategies. He's a monetisation savant.

My point is that I dont really care, to me its all okay, I just dont like the dressing up of it all like its so noble and selfless.

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

I don't know about you but I'm getting real tired of all the false morality people try to spin on here.

Just like the oasis guy who spun his whole situation into a david and goliath story when he was the one who created his own mess.

Marc here tried to make even more money off his audience, as is his prerogative, but it backfired.

It happens Marc, but to twist it into some misguided noble thing you tried to do is so hilarious to me

Like dude, who are you trying to fool? 🤣

[Marc Lou @marclou]

I made a mistake.

When Jack and I decided to organize this $100K Hackathon, my biggest concern was cheating.

Unlike a regular hackathon, everyone participates from home. And because the winner is whoever makes the most PROFIT (not revenue), there are so many ways to manipulate the numbers.

So I added a $99 entry fee.

One thing I’ve learned from building businesses is that people tend to be more committed when they pay for something.

I thought it would filter out spam, attract serious builders, and make the competition fairer for everyone.

But I completely missed the other side.

3 years ago, I was a living with my apps. Today, I’m financially free. My life changed so much that somewhere along the way, I lost perspective on what $99 means to someone else.

For someone in India, someone struggling to pay their bills, or someone trying to make their first dollar online, $99 can be a lot of money.

And those are exactly the people I want to help!

I’ve spent years sharing what I’ve learned, reviewing random people’s landing pages, and organizing free meetups around the world. Not because there’s money to make, but because I genuinely love seeing people build things and succeed.

And somehow, I was so focused on keeping cheaters out that I didn’t realize I was also keeping genuine builders out.

That’s my mistake.

So I’ve decided to make the $100K Hackathon completely FREE :)

Everyone who already paid got a full refund.

I’m still worried about cheating. That problem hasn’t disappeared, and Jack and I will have to figure out better ways to verify profits and keep the leaderboard fair.

But that’s our problem to solve.

Thank you to everyone who shared their thoughts. Sometimes you need people to remind you of things you’ve forgotten.

I genuinely hope this hackathon changes someone’s life.

❤️

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

@awilkinson @muddikwok Brother, by your logic your business is most certainly doomed, there no way around that

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

No true, I have apps where Google Play is the highest revenue, higher than their iOS counterparts, just depends on the app

[max @MaxHirsch13]

Don't even launch on Android.

Instead, spend that time perfecting your IOS app.

The ROI isn't there for Android, trust me.

And the users are so annoying

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

oh damn it might be worse than I thought 🤦‍♂️

[Raymond Calitri @50not49andahalf]

@MobileAppBro Really hard to dish out any sympathy when you read the details of the insane hubris here.

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

Nevermind this kid hasn't learnt a thing 🤷‍♂️

Going to war? You posted false statements, dragged it and got sued. It happens but this attitude, while honestly a good marketing strategy, is what got him in this mess in the first place.

[Oasis @oasishealthapp]

We are going to war for you against Big Food

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

Hate to be that guy but I’m pretty sure I remember this dude was being pretty unapologetic and indignant about the whole situation when it actually happened, and it took him a long time to actually retract, this feels like a rewriting of history.

Still sucks to be in this situation though, looks like he’s taken strides in his business to be a lot more accurate and hope he finds a way through this, but let this been a lesson that it’s never a good idea to mess with somebody else’s business, life is not a movie or an exercise in social justice, in real life people get sued and lives get ruined.

This could potentially follow him for a good portion of his life if the people suing him have enough vitriol but I would hope they just do enough for him to learn his lesson, settle out of court and make him do something utterly embarrassing to settle the score.

Absolutely wiping out a young guy whose real crime was hubris and ego for the rest of his life feels excessive to me.

If I was him I would offer to pack up shop, hope that resolves it and live to fight another day.

[Cormac @cormachayden_]

to be honest

everyday the past couple months I've thought about quitting and shutting down oasis.

i’ve never believed more in oasis: my consumer health startup powered by transparent product testing, but...

our revenue is down 85% since april this year and our legal bills keep growing

a billion-dollar cpg company is suing us for $255 million over a social post where we incorrectly stated the amount of heavy metals in their electrolytes. we corrected it within 24 hours and offered to boost the correction to reach the same audience. their legal team said they weren’t interested.

our defense costs tens of thousands a month to present our case and could reach 6 or 7 figures if the case continues without a settlement

the odds are stacked against us. without outside help, i’m honestly unsure how we get through this

yet I cant get myself to stop. and neither can our team, who have chosen to keep working without pay.

oasis has never been better, faster, and backed by more verified lab data with our social content now being exclusively positive.

we’ve also launched consumer and brand testing so shoppers can test their own products and brands can improve their quality and oasis scores.

revenue isn’t down because customers don’t love the product. in fact, our conversion rates are among the highest of any consumer health platform. it's because we put our remaining resources into engineering, science, and independent lab testing.

we also take time to share accurate, valuable information that benefits our community long term, rather than chase downloads with inaccurate slop.

earlier this year, with a growth team, we did well. now I handle all growth and content myself to cut costs.

i and so many of our customers and team, believe the world is better with oasis in it.

we haven’t operated perfectly this year. no company pursuing a big mission does, but we’ve listened to all feedback and improved accordingly.

i’m not sharing this to ask for pity, but rather for 2 reasons:

1. to show what founding a company can feel like behind the scenes: difficult, uncertain and sometimes terrifying

2. to possibly reach the right people who can help us survive and help us carry on the mission of empowering consumers and raising the health standard for everyone.

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

If they eventually turn this into a means of discovery like the direction ChatGPT plugins have taken, then the new ASO has just arrived

[Michael Gorbach @mgorbach]

Big news for our developers! We are shipping a developer preview that dramatically expands the capabilities of all apps to integrate into Siri. So excited to see what you folks do with this.
https://t.co/kbKcVB3FiB

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

Multiple companies have done exactly that though.

And It's not complicated to an agent, that much i am certain of.

I did contend that the scale could be the only thing you could make an argument of difficulty, but building for your own apps where you don't have to account for any other apps is relatively trivial now

And to your point building a B2B product is a completely different discipline to building consumer. The GTM is far more important really than the product itself imo and they benefited from early entrenchment and the YC label.

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

This is where everyone is especially wrong, because as I've detailed in other posts, its more vauable over time because its constantly watching, not just the endpoints itself but also X, status pages, the RevenueCat and others teams posts and myriad of other things and will automatically fix and deploy.

You also totally overestimate the difficulty of these issues, I've used revenuecat for years and when I look at the engineering blog posts and also past operational incidences they are not that complicated at all in the grand scheme of things. At least for agents with this level of intelligence.

You could make an argument on the scale of supporting lots and lots of different apps but for just one/few apps, its actually not that hard. I know people who've never used these platforms and rolled their own storekit implementations successfully for years.

It feels to me that most devs haven't yet fully explored the power of always on agentic teams. It's surprising but means that those who do have unbelieveable leverage, I thought everyone just understood this but it seems that a lot don't

[Dan Loewenherz @dwlz]

the agents will solve your point in time problem, but when there's an unexpected app store outage at 3am, or there's some undocumented change to how receipts are being processed, or any number of things, you're going to be out of luck.

i'm sorry this came off as giving permission, you can do whatever you want. i just think it's a bad idea and not worth your effort. spend the infinite token machine on things you're uniquely skilled at.

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

I am trained as engineer though and have spent well over a decade in the space, which is why i can speak with so much conviction because I know exactly what it took before to do this stuff and what I've been able to do now.

What i feel like is being reflected are mental models that don't fit into the new world we are in.

It's night and day and I don't think most people understand how much everything has changed.

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

When the execution of anything is just a sentence away, then everything becomes as hard as well written senctences

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

App developers who are sleepwalking thinking AI agents have human level limitations where certain things in software that have been difficult/complicated for humans, will also be the same for agents are gonna get steamrolled so hard.

Wow, people are clearly not ready.

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

Dude, naive? First of all I’ve already done it 🤷🏽‍♂️ and run over six figures through it already this month, hundreds of thousands of users with pretty much no issues.

This post was not asking for permission to do anything because my point is I’ve already done it, I will uno reverse you to think you are naive to not realise the tidal wave of AI agents that has already swept up on our shore.

I might be just a little ahead of the curve on this than you but I would challenge to to take an afternoon with opus 5.5 or Astra and see how far this rabbit hole goes.

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

Nobody wants to talk about it, but you can easily replace products like Superwall and RevenueCat with a opus 5.5 built version in < 1day.

You can also then set an agent to just follow whatever updates they made historically, the blog posts they made about their infrastructure and decisions. And make it follow all the change logs and releases and just copy them to compress all the learnings they accumulated.

I even made it look at past incidents, how these companies responded and implemented the same things and safeguards.

I know because I've done it across all my apps, and actually I've been replacing every single part of my stack with my own. Analytics, customer support, attribution etc.

For example there was a dude on here that recently released a customer support SaaS that could proactively reach out to users on the paywall and even present offers and stuff. I just piped his launch video into my agent and and hour later I had my own version.

Im not even selling it, its all internal.

This has me thinking about the fact that software as we have known it has changed forever. The only thing I pay for now are things that go to the "bare metal" as possible, like cloudflare or email infrastructure.

If you make software, you are effectively selling to the uninformed or lazy. Which in a way bodes well for consumer so long as create a specialised experience. Because unless presented to them on a platter, like with artifacts or instant apps that just appear, most consumers are not going to go out of their way to make custom software.

But software for developers to me is about the dumbest business to be in right now unless you are willing to accept lower margins. High margin developer software feels like a dying idea.

The people most capable and informed about using agents in the way Im using them, are going to be the greatest flight risk to any product that tries to extract large margins.

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

Bro but what im telling you is that it actually doesnt take that much time at all 😂

Thats the disruptive part

You can literally give an agent computer use access to any saas and tell it to iterateively clone and test it and it will.

And more significantly, Opus 5.5 is the first model that I've found to have both the intelligence and usage capacity to be able to do this completely end to end with minimal intervention but coupling it with subagents from the other labs create a rock solid result.

And I just did it in the waiting time when waiting for my other agents to finish working on my other apps, ive taken poops longer than I've spent on this 😆

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

He is saying this while I have already done what he is saying can't be done easily, and its already been processing well over 6 figures a month.

And I did it quite easily is my whole point, the server side stuff was so trivial it actually made my head spin because I used to hate doing server side stuff and thought it was so scary and complicated.

One prompt and a few simple specialised adversarial sub agents, that each address different aspect of a server (cost, scalability, security etc) and you can have a fairly robust set up. And you can just tell one agent to all of it for you or act like an "expert" in that field and ask it what an expert would do, and what I also do is also get Astra, Grok, Muse Wonder to review and all have a back and forth with each other, even have other agents do penetration testing, load testing etc.

And all of this just started from one prompt of me trying to figure out how you could even begin building things like these. This is well beyond trying to one shot a whole platform but rather building through the lens of an expert or large team.

What im seeing is that there is still a skill gap that im sure will close as developers like me get more accustomed to the idea that they effectively defunct now and decide to get out of the way.

This is your sign that you need to get waayyyyyyyy more ambitious with the things you get agents to do.

[Kendall Gelner ᯅ @kendalldevdiary]

No Bro I have not been "hypnotized" I just know what it takes to set up and maintain a server if you do not have one already. I am currently writing 95% of my iOS apps using AI. I know what it can do. But you are just ignoring the thought and care put into the paywall helper solutions, it would take you ages to even think up the features to ask for they already have.

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

Im afraid this is a skill issue, one I'm sure you will figure out in time.

There is a reason Elon said in a interview that companies closer to 100% AI will vastly outperform others.

My agents watch every single transaction & function call 24/7, they watch all the support channels from appstore reviews, emails, in app support even on X.

They watch for every AppStore incidence either officially or anecdotally across everything because it has access to the whole stack down to the exact lines in crash logs, events and device information.

I've sometimes had to wait hours for RevenueCat fixes during incidents but issues for my new system usually get resolved quite quickly.

I haven't had to troubleshoot a single thing because its self healing, and these are across hundreds of thousands of transactions a month across all kinds of geos and across iOS and android.

If anything breaks or it encounters a edge case, it just fixes it itself, tests itself and ships itself. Whether its 2am or 10pm.

Also Apple is the 'payment processor', not RevenueCat, they only exist due to the previous complexity of StoreKit that would be time consuming for individuals but certainly not for an agent.

They are effectively a wrapper that does things that were previously tedious but not particularly complicated in the agentic scale of things.

And all this probably took like 20 sentences max to set up, and probably 2 sentences a week to maintain if that.

I wrote way more sentences in middle school.

[David Zinland @DavidZinland]

Having been an AI-native CTO for a few years now, I’d highly recommend against doing this. My team works hard to build bespoke replacements for SaaS when it makes sense, but replacing tried and tested solutions like @RevenueCat carries so many unnecessary risks and headaches it would make your head spin.

Payments and analytics are some of the most security-sensitive parts of your stack, and they’re the worst places to cut corners. Polymarket just got hacked through a newer analytics provider that wasn’t properly secured. Now imagine that happening to something you built in a day.

Payment processing has also been the bane of my existence since we started. Tools like RevenueCat let me worry way less about the reliability of our product. Whenever you build something, you have to ask yourself if you want to be troubleshooting this VITAL part of your app at 2am when it inevitably breaks. I’ll gladly keep paying for RevenueCat knowing one of the most important parts of my app is working reliably 24/7.

Shipping is easier and more empowering than ever, but that’s made us want to deliver faster than we can keep up with. Every system you own is one more thing competing for that time.

Just because you can build it in a day doesn’t mean you should own it forever. Build what makes your product different. Pay for what keeps it running, so you can focus on delivering value to your users.

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

The LearJet crash makes me reflect on the idea that sometimes the thing you want the most, could be the very thing that leads to your end.

I know a lot of entrepreneurs frustrated they are not at the destination yet, but maybe not being at the destination is the very thing keeping you alive.

Its like TV/Movie stars who get all the adoration and fame they sought, but end up addicted to hard drugs or families that get torn apart or resort to betrayal and even voilence once life changing sums of money get involved.

And for a long time its been my goal to fly private, but who knows, with the high accident rate of private flights, the day I step on a jet could be my last, the thing I wanted the most could be the very thing that ends me.

This LearJet incidence ofcourse is an exceedingly rare event in particular but it still made me ponder.

Rest in peace to the passengers 🙏

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

This is the guy who was on the LearJet that crashed.

From a business perspective, what a legend, may he rest in peace.

[Adam Robinson @RetentionAdam]

2019: I want a $25m ARR biz w/ &gt;35 FTE.
https://t.co/ANEPscKEA7 today: $23m ARR, 27 FTE.

2024: $10m ARR w/ 3 FTEs is the dream.
https://t.co/MvqDOarpoh Today: $9.5m ARR, 3 FTE’s

Today: I want a $1B ARR 1 man startup.
https://t.co/jbtMoQoTij in 2028: …to be continued...

[Mobile App Bro @MobileAppBro]

@iamworkingdaily No you are not thinking about this correctly, the agent will maintain everything, automatically and far more responsively than a person could