Here we go

The talks I enjoy most at developer conferences are the ones where developers talk about their apps and the money they’ve made. Sadly there have been very few during the conferences I attended this year.

Recently, Dan Counsell started blogging about the monthly growth of Realmacsoftware’s blogging platform Typed.

I’ve been following Dan ever since I started using Clear. That was some years ago and Clear is still one of the apps I use on daily basis.

With this blog I’m going to join Dan and talk about my apps. The plan is to do a post at the end of every month to discuss income and some posts in between on all the work that goes into maintaining and improving them.

The apps

My apps are in the Navigation category. They are a collection of cycling and walking apps that are focused on a concept called knooppunten. Knooppunten (I’ll refer to them as ‘nodes’ from now on) are a network of numbered signs by the road. Every node has a number and they are linked to other nodes. The roads between nodes are often quiet, as much away from traffic as is possible, through green areas, along water, through forests etc.

In short: these networks guarantee that you’ll be cycling or walking through nice areas, often away from traffic.

Some years ago Tourism Flanders released open-data sets for the cycling and walking networks in Flanders. Similar networks exist in The Netherlands.

There’s a very large eco system built around these networks. There’s paper maps available and many authors have laid out routes on these networks and written books about them. These networks are *very* well known in the cycling and walking communities.

As a result, my apps have been doing ok. I can’t live off them, but the numbers are certainly interesting enough to discuss. I’ve been monitoring their income since 2014 and with 2015 coming to a close there’s plenty of numbers to discuss.

Join me next time, when I’ll be publishing income numbers for 2015 and the plans for 2016.