Indie Developers’ Anthem: Craftsmanship

The following is from Xhacker's Base:

I am a person who loves feedback. After reporting bugs for so many years, the biggest gain is that I understand that "no one cares about you". Whether it is an operating system or an app, whether it is commercial or open source, whether it is a large company or a small company, reporting bugs is basically futile. I used to be very frustrated. But when I became a developer, I began to understand that human energy is limited after all. In order to develop, companies cannot really stop and improve the quality of software (Note 1). Whether it is Chrome or OS X, I have witnessed that the quality of software has declined as the number of functions has increased. Maybe this is the chaotic real world (Note 2).

I gradually realized that no one could take into account all my needs as an individual. Only the app I built myself was the most suitable, and only I could slow down and improve the quality of the software.

Sure enough. I just reviewed the apps on iOS and OS X and found that almost all of the most sophisticated and fun ones are from independent developers (Note 3):

Transit: Check bus schedules. The interface is very textured, and the author chose different colors for each city. From Sam Vermette (Note 4). If you are an iOS developer, you must be familiar with SVProgressHUD.

Soulver: A text editor that computes. From Zac Cohan and Nik Youdale of Acqualia.

Moom: A tool for zooming windows. From Peter Maurer and Rob Griffiths of Many Tricks.

LilyView: An elegantly simple image viewer, a bit like Picasa's Photo Viewer. From Taras Brizitsky, Val Komarov and Oleg Krupnov.

Sip: A sophisticated and user-friendly color picker from brothers André Gonçalves and Rui Aureliano.

Texpad: "Research is hard, writing should be easy." From Duncan P Steele and Jawad A Deo - two PhDs in theoretical physics who love Mac.

Letterpress: A cute interactive word game from Loren Brichter, the guy who invented pull-to-refresh.

Inboard: A tool for organizing design materials, better than Ember, Pixa, and Sparkbox. From Davis Siksnans, Gustavs Cirulis, and me. Don't rush to download it, the version on the website is too old and has a lot of bugs. The official version has been submitted and will be available soon. :)

Independent developers can’t stand other apps. They write apps for themselves, they don’t have deadlines or profit targets, they work meticulously, and they implement their own tastes and quality standards to the end.

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Note 1: I can't help but admire the greatness of Snow Leopard.

Note 2: As a developer, I am much happier than ordinary users. If the app is open source, I can modify the parts I don't like. Even if the author doesn't merge, at least I can use it myself. So I always think that if it can be open source, then open source it should be open source. If there is no real technical barrier, open source will not cause any loss. On the contrary, open source allows people in need to modify it and allows novices to learn, which are huge benefits.

Note 3: Other well-known apps such as Tweetbot, Reeder, Sketch, Sublime Text, etc. will not be elaborated on here.