Making money and trust issues in smartphone development market

I was asked an interesting question recently so I decided to write a bit about it here:

TWO QUESTIONS:
1. If APP games are so popular and we know they ARE, why aren't developers simply doing them and making all the money?

2. How do you choose a development company that you can TRUST, work with and establish a long term relationship with. I was referred to O Desk and they seem to be reputable?


1- App games are indeed popular and people love them, but it is also relatively inexpensive and easy to make an app game too, which means the app stores are full of thousands of games, which dilutes up some of the good games that are just hidden beneath the hordes of aweful ones that are out there. People trust the Top 25 or recommended lists from Apple for example, but to get there you either need to have gone viral (which doesn't usually happen all by itself either) or the app's popularity was pushed up thanks to getting strong distribution from an expert company. To make money, you must get more exposure than the average game out there, which means you have to use some creative strategies to get there, not only let it sit there and hope.

2- Building TRUST in a company can be done 2 ways by my own experience:
--> Trial and error in working with companies until you find one that works well and you like.
--> Get referred a company by someone that you already trust. Most likely your trusted friend won't refer you to a company that you won' trust yourself either.

As far as ODesk, Evite or Freelancer, these systems can be used to find devs using trial and error. My own experience with these systems to find good devs at the budget I wanted was that I got a really good hit after the 3rd try. It cost me $3000 off a simple game port and about 8 months of interviews and work to get there. That translates to be ALOT of money. Best to get a referral to avoid all these problems IMO.

I've been coaching a startup much in the same situation as you are now and she has 3 app games started with 3 different companies. So far, after $10 000 spent, there seems to be 2 out of 3 that seem to be "ok" but the products are not completed yet so it remains to be seen..... it is often in the last part of the app creation that you see the true colors of the devs as they have likely already received more than half of the promised funds and to get the second half of the funds they need to do most of the work that would make the app KING in the app store (if properly marketed that is).

Its always unfortunate to have to choose another dev once you've already spent a month or 3 waiting for an app to be properly completed. And to add insult to injury, if you give the unfinished source code to the next devs on the list, likely it will shave off only 25% of their time spent or less as its often less time consuming to recreate most of the code done by another developer than to reuse what's already been written, so you end up paying almost full bill, again, just because the first devs didn't deliver on promises.

The big problem is trust is earned, so at some point, you just gotta do a leap of faith until you get the right people that can actually do the referring for you. Then you don't have to worry about these things anymore.