How much does it cost to develop a mobile application?

Having gone down the Blockchain rabbit hole for several years, my mind is constantly searching for new use cases for this revolutionary technology. The possibilities are endless.

So why have more established companies not gotten in on the action, more specifically why have there not been a flood of applications for platforms like Steemit?

These are some of the questions that have been occupying my mind for months, as I have been working on an app I keep asking myself, if the ideas seem so obvious and the potential is so great why has no one else done it?

Spread the Love Far & Wide

Last month I wrote a post in a similar vein that discussed delegation and the centralisation of “Proof of Brain” on Steemit. In my view delegators are taking a gamble on several projects (which may pay off or may not). You can read more about my thoughts on this here

https://steemit.com/steem/@eroche/rethinking-delegation-spread-the-love-far-and-wide

Today I am going discuss the level of community (and Steemit Inc) support for developing applications for the Steem blockchain.

Inspiration

After Steemfest last November I was inspired to build a mobile application and business for the Steem Blockchain. It has been a rewarding journey and the support and encouragment I have gotten from the community has been immense. The app is ready to go but before I release it I would like to write a bit about the financial cost of developing an application for the Steem blockchain and lay out my experience for the community.

Without more support people/businesses will just not develop applications for Steem. There is little economic incentive to do so!

The following analysis is a breakdown of how much a handful of projects have made from the community by posting announcements and updates about their projects on Steem. This is effectively the community direct funding these projects have received.

Post Earnings (by Year)

Screenshot from 2018-05-31 16-13-01.png
x axis is Post Payout in Dollars

This analysis looks at the total post value, I have not adjusted for the SBD FX impact. I don't want to focus here on precise figures or specific projects. The figures are ball park but they illustrate the order of magnitude of money that is specifically directed by the community for development of applications.
Not all funds raised will be included here, some projects may have gotten extra donations or used other accounts to raise funds. A good example here is @furion who got a community donation earlier this year for the SteemData project from a post on @transisto’s account.
This analysis also does not include all fees, beneficiary rewards, curation rewards and other monies that projects have raised. It is solely based on announcement and update posts. These other earnings depend largely on delegation and use and I would categorise them more as ongoing earnings rather than direct funding.
It is worth nothing some witnesses have developed applications and part of their proposal as witnesses has been their work for developing applications so they will have been funded via their witness earnings.

Dedicated Funding

Dedicated funds provide assurance and incentives, they let people build business plans and also help them structure and focus their projects which increase the chances of success.

Other Projects

How are other Blockchain Projects incentivising Development?

The Ethereum Foundation has funded 22 recipients for a total of $2.84M in May
The worker proposal fund for EOS is expected to be $400m in the first year, at the current price.
Both of these projects also organise regular hackathons and provide other incentives for developers to use their ecosystem.

Not all of the funds for these projects will be directed at apps however, it does put into perspective the resources other projects are directing towards direct funding

Why don’t we have funds and projects like EOS and Ethereum on Steem?

I can't think of a worse scenario than if people working on Steem become solely motivated by money but we need to enable the passionate advocates, visionaries and innovators to dedicate their time and energy to Steem.

Steem

We do have some projects on Steem @jerrybanfield provided a summary a few months back

https://steemit.com/steemit/@jerrybanfield/10-ways-to-fund-a-steem-growth-project

There a few potential sources of funding on the list by Jerry which are attractive for raising significant money, let's examine a few of them:

The Crowdfunded Marketing Protocol.

The most raised here is around 10k according to the post by @steemitblog but considering the cost I experienced of developing an app that level it is quite low. Have a lot of applications used this funding method?
Looking through the tag #growth-ideas I don't see many proposals and to be fair to entrepreneurs they may not wish to publish their ideas to the public before they even get started.

Budget Proposals

This is is another option spearheaded by @jerrybanfield. I am not sure if this is still going but again people may be slow to use this for various reasons.

The Real Cost

The mobile application I have been developing is for Android and I got quotes for a fully functional app of anything between 3.5k euros to 35k euros. I know these figures are ridiculous but they do illustrate a point.
You get an idea of how much money some of the big companies will spend on developing applications and what we are up against. It probably explains why companies are slow to enter the development space for Steem. How can we support more development on Steem?

Project Supporters

This last graph gives an overview of the top 5 supporters of the projects listed above and how they have spread their votes for each of these projects.

The natural group to take the lead on funding directly or via voting and or organising proposals would be Steemit Inc. and the witnesses. We can see some support from them in the above graph.

Sharing

Should Steem Applications with Large Delegations allocate a small portion of their voting to support other apps in Steem Land that may be beneficial to the community? After all a rising tide lifts all ships!