Is it worth it?

If you can make something that's better than what's available, it's worth it. If you can make an app that solves a problem that someone has, then it's worth it as long as you are able to satisfy the need and benefit from it in some way, either monetarily or some other benefit.

It's not the ability to make an app that will net you the big bucks, but the idea itself.

I am pretty new to this but from what I see, there is a dire need for web developers and the like. Allot of apps aren't making money but allot of these apps are only made by a small minority of people with the ability. My strategy for making money for this is simple looking at small businesses seeing where there suffering and using web development to solve there problems, then of course i could name my price. Think out the box good ideas are important but there's just not enough man power to get all these ideas going that's where you could fit in. But again i am new what do i know.

From the point of view of Return on Investment (ROI) of the time and struggle you put in, I'd say there's much higher ROI with Ruby on Rails or PHP than there is with iOS.

What say you ... Ben Jakuben Amit Bijlani Randy Hoyt Jason Seifer

Being an indie developer is and has always been difficult. This is true for web development and mobile development. It's like studying to become a musician and wanting commercial success. One does not guarantee the other.

Can you make a good living working for someone or as a freelance developer? Absolutely. It's the one career that gives you the most upside, flexibility and creativity.

James Barnett you mentioned ROI. I don't think you can compare web dev to mobile dev. They are both in high demand and your learning curve is completely dependent on how good you are at picking up the concepts and implementing them. The technology in our industry moves so fast that no matter what you choose you cannot stay stagnant, you have to be a life long learner. I think the ROI is proportionate to the time and effort you put into this field. I also think the ROI is independent of the language or platform you choose. In my opinion, it is all based on mastery. If you can demonstrate mastery of a particular language or platform then you will be rewarded accordingly. But mastery takes a lot of time and effort.

There was a thread on here recently about former blacksmith that became a Rails developer.

Over the course of 9 months he managed to spend over 800 hours on learning programming and got a 70k job out of it. I think that's probably pretty common for Rails developers, if you manage to get close to the 1,000 mark then you can probably find a good paying job.

Thanks so much for the info! Didn't expect a response like this hahah.

flexibility, good pay, high demand in a ever growing market and you can work at home.....sounding like were not wasting our time man. keep at it, i know it can get rough some times learning new languages and then having to learn another i was a big fan of flash as3 and it died out, but learning one object oriented language is just what you need to get you going. I don't feel that I wasted any time learning it even though its not as relevant, it got me in the direction of html and that got me in the direction of ruby on rails.