Day 2: This is Day 2 of writing for 30 Days

You know what’s better than making an app from scratch, buying a prebuilt app!

Sometime in August of 2021, I was getting a bit frustrated with trying to build and simple ball drop app. In my vision, all I would have needed was to layout a rotating background then add some obstacles and add gravity to the ball. Every time the ball went out of the screen it would end the game. Scoring would be done by the amount of time you could stay in the game state. The key to the game would be the movement of tilting the phone left and right to move the ball. The mechanics made sense in my head but I had a bit of an issue articulating how the accelerometer and gyroscope should interact with the game. So after a few disappointing conversations, I went to a site called flippa.com where you can buy apps outright.

Being the first time buying an app, my only concern was finding an app that was cheap so I can experience the process. Luckily I stumbled on a Ball Drop App (actually several similar apps). The app was actually designed a bit better than I had thought of it in my head and had a few extra features like getting points through coins. Still, the key functionality was missing being able to control the ball through the accelerometer and gyroscope. The app had a button system for left and right, but starting bidding price was $1, and it was already in the Play Store (not Apple and I found out later why).

I place my first bid and felt the excitement of buying something that normally takes 3 to 6 months to develop on my own. I got up and walked around for a bit thinking about all the tweaks I could make to the app and building an empire off of $1 apps. I chuckled a bit thinking about the “yesterday me” and how all he wanted to do was build apps. When I could use the same strategy as Warren Buffett in his early days of buying crappy companies, or as he puts it the cigar butt approach. “A cigar butt found on the street that has only one puff left in it may not offer much of a smoke, but the “bargain purchase” will make that puff all profit.” 

When I came back I noticed that there was a higher bid right after I placed my bid. Weird, because there was very little action before I place my bid. No worries I place another bid and waited, a few moments later the same bidder outbid my amount. Okay at this point I am wondering two things, is this a robot bidder or is this the owner’s other account and they never wanted to sell their app for cheap and that’s why they didn’t set a minimum bid price to lure you in with a false sense of security. Well, I decided to place one more bid and if it was outdone by the mysterious bidder I would move on. Place a bid and once again outbid came in quick. I moved on, knowing the auction ended in a few moments. Later in the day, the auction was over but I found the app still on the site with a note next to the mysterious bidder profile “banned for policy abuse”. Hmm, I contacted the seller directly since I was now the only one in the market for this particular app. I said before you put the app back up for auction how about I just give you $65 dollars for it right now, seeing the last bid was $50 this seemed fair. The seller countered with $75 and I agreed.

We exchanged a few more messages and sensitive information like PDS numbers, Interstitial, Banner, and APP ID. Maybe best for another article on how to transfer an app to another person. But after about two days of transferring files and IDs, the app was in my possession.

Oh about the Apple part, I knew I bought the code and working app for an Android phone but the seller had the same code available for iOS. The issue was the code was super old and when I tried to deploy it in the App Store it was rejected for outdated code. The code was still using some Objective-C code and we are on Swift 5.1.

Well, that’s it for now…