I just spent the past several months, off and on, writing a new native MacOS app. I did this because I wanted the app for my own use. For every ten app ideas a developer has he/she might start working on one. They will probably abandon most of these “scratch an itch” projects.
I wanted this app. I built this app. It works well. I’m shipping it. I doubt most developers would have bothered and that’s sad. What the app does isn’t really important with regards to this pessimism.
It’s a tool to create, edit and view GPS map data. You can use it to plan trips or view maps imported from your other devices. I think it works pretty well and for the features I’ve currently implemented it does what I wanted it to do. You can read more about Cartographer on it’s own site
The point of this post is the sadness around releasing what I think is a useful and well done Mac app today. I doubt it will get much traction even as I continue to refine and improve it over the coming weeks, months and years. The main reason for my pessimism is the app is not free.
I probably could have shipped this weeks ago but I’ve been debating the pricing all that time. A free app is likely to see hundred of downloads if not more. A paid app, in the App Store, is usually all but ignored without intense marketing efforts and even then you have to fend off the anti-subscription trolls. Most developers would like to provide a fixed price and then upgrades for larger app updates. They can’t. Talk to Apple. We’ve been asking for years.
We’ve come to a point where the world expects to be given everything for nothing. You’ve probably heard the adage if the app/service is free then you are the product being sold.
The big companies can afford to give things away in order to capture your data which they then sell. Some of these companies never even have a plan to make money and exist solely so their founders can build up the user base and dump the company floating away on their golden parachutes while the users and most likely the staff get shafted. So many products and services today are nothing more than honey pots to amass users data for sale to others.
Hard not to be pessimistic when you feel like you need to do the “right” thing and are swimming against a very, very strong tide.
I set out to write an app I wanted to use. There are web tools that do what my app does. Some are very good, until they aren’t. One I have used for years was great, adding new features all the time until they stopped. Advertised features have almost never worked and I’ve experienced and reported the same bugs for years. I’m not alone, forums are filled with people asking for alternatives.
Then there are products, similar to mine, I have not used that are well regarded until some vultures bought up the business, lay off 90% of the staff and it’s just a matter of time before the service is killed. It happens all the time.
Developers used to use native tools to build apps for the specific target platform. Now most development is for the web. Some things work fine and some even perform very well but many applications could benefit from being native to the platform they are used on.
The problem is it’s really hard to make honest money from software development right now. People are just going to cut development costs in an effort to make any money at all. That leads to a lowest common denominator platform choice and users miss out.
This is ignoring the recent vibe coding trend that I am certain will give us some great software any day now.
I also build things for myself because of the privacy issues which are becoming more important every day. I don’t want my data used to train AI. I don’t want Facebook to have a file on me in spite of never having a Facebook account. I am the thickheaded user who will delete an app or quit a service the minute they “update their policies” to something I find questionable or outright hostile.
My app stores its data on the users computer. That data doesn’t go anywhere to train anything and I’m not selling it to anyone. It does what I feel is right. You know, the way all software used to work.
This is not just nostalgia for some golden age of computers and apps. We used to see lots of indie developers or even larger companies pumping out interesting things all the time. They usually charged a fair price and were rewarded with some level of success.
It wasn’t until things like Google with Gmail, etc and the App Store started a race to the bottom. Google is happy to host your email as long as they can read all of it to better target ads to you and sell a user profile to anyone who wants it. The App Store seems to only “reward” free apps that do much the same or shady and outright corrupt apps that just charge you for things they can’t do.
So my pessimism around releasing what I believe is a good app that would be useful for many people is based on all this. I am sure if I try really hard and market well I can find a core audience of a few people. Is it likely to have been worth it for someone else to build this app if they personally didn’t want or need it? Unlikely.
This is why I think we are seeing a dearth of new, interesting, native apps for any platforms. It’s a race to the bottom or worse.
So if you too are fed up with all of this tech dystopia, enshitification and what not and might enjoy using a native MacOS GPS/mapping app or just want to print out a map you created (my app can print, like a Mac app should) perhaps take a look at Cartographer.
I have a long road map and perhaps I can get that core group of users to help me decide what direction to go. If not I’ll keep scratching my own itch and adding what I need to the app. I’m just crazy and stubborn enough to keep coding in spite of my pessimism.
