--- title: "Apple has paid David Barnard every month since 2008. He never made \"tech money\" doing it." description: "David Barnard built one of the most-loved iPhone apps of its era and has still never made more as an indie developer than he does as an employee." language: "en" publishedAt: "2026-09-10T13:05:00.000Z" updatedAt: "2026-09-10T13:05:00.000Z" category: "Growth" categoryUrl: "https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/growth" canonical: "https://www.revenuecat.com/blog/growth/david-barnard-launch-center-pro-launched-podcast-2026" --- # Apple has paid David Barnard every month since 2008. He never made "tech money" doing it. David Barnard built one of the most-loved iPhone apps of its era and has still never made more as an indie developer than he does as an employee. ## Table of contents - [His dad refused the bridge loan, so they sold the Honda Accord](#his-dad-refused-the-bridge-loan-so-they-sold-the-honda-accord) - [Camera+ taught him the search trick that made Mirror](#camera-taught-him-the-search-trick-that-made-mirror) - [Launch Center Pro went to Phil Schiller, ended up inside Shortcuts, and never paid a tech salary](#launch-center-pro-went-to-phil-schiller-ended-up-inside-shortcuts-and-never-paid-a-tech-salary) - [Eighteen years in, he finally shipped an app himself](#eighteen-years-in-he-finally-shipped-an-app-himself) - [Guest links](#guest-links) In June 2008, David had an app ready for the App Store's opening day and no way to ship it. He'd applied for a developer account within hours of the form going live, but Apple was processing applications slowly, and he'd skipped WWDC that year because spending roughly 20% of his family's $20,000 investment on a trip to San Francisco felt irresponsible. Attendees, it turned out, were getting accounts approved on the spot. [Video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olIJliFfjNk) So he did the only thing left. He went through the session slides, found the Apple evangelists who'd printed their email addresses on them, and wrote to six of them. Not a demand, he says, more a plea: "Please, I beg of you, tell me what I need to do." He led with how much he loved the platform, and linked to the newspaper photo of himself first in line for the iPhone in San Antonio. One of Apple's most senior evangelists didn't email back. He called, and they talked for about three hours. He promised to get David an account. It still didn't come through in time. Trip Cubby, a mileage log for taxes and reimbursements, missed the July 10 launch and shipped in August. David is clear-eyed about why the call happened at all. Apple wanted developers who cared about the platform, and his email showed one. "If I had said, like, I'm broke and I'm desperate, that's a very different email." It's the same rule he applies to pitching journalists and, today, to booking podcast guests: pitch what matters to the person reading, not what you need from them. ## **His dad refused the bridge loan, so they sold the Honda Accord** The first month on the store brought in about $5,000, which sounds fine until you remember Apple hadn't yet made clear when it would pay, and each region had a payout minimum over $100. David had already run out of money. So he asked his dad, a commercial real estate investor, for a bridge loan against the receivable. His dad said no, and gave him a reason David hadn't considered: "this is essentially a payday loan." As David recounts it: "If I give you this 5,000 early, then by the time October comes around, you're going to need another 5,000, and then you're just going to be in the cycle of needing money every month." It was September 2008. His dad, property-rich and cash-poor as the market cracked, was broke too. David and his wife sold her Honda Accord for four or five thousand dollars, became a one-car family, and made it to the first Apple check. He calls the missed launch and the "crappiness of everything" formative: "Had it been day one, my whole life story probably would have looked different and not necessarily for the better." ## **Camera+ taught him the search trick that made Mirror** David never ran paid marketing. "I've never done paid in 18 years." What he did instead was watch the top 100 obsessively, and around 2011 he became fixated on a question: why had the smart team behind Camera+ given their app such a bad name? "Camera plus is not a brand. Like, people are going to type camera and then spell the word plus." The answer was that they were smarter than he was. Apple's search gave a huge boost to exact-match names, and it ignored symbols. Type "camera" and Camera+ was an exact match. David estimates the app made $10 to 20 million on the back of that, and it sat near the top of the results for years. He had a mirror app, built in a weekend by repointing the kaleidoscope code of an earlier app at the iPhone 4's new front-facing camera. It was called Mirror by App Cubby. He renamed it to the single word "Mirror" plus an obscure Unicode symbol that looked roughly like a mirror, chosen because "Mirror+" and "Mirror++" were already taken and he didn't want to be quite that obvious. Downloads jumped almost immediately and stayed there: "a pretty tight range between, I think like seven and 10,000 downloads a day, every single day." He sold Mirror in 2017 for over $400,000, having made over $1 million on it. It's still the top result for "mirror." He's a little embarrassed by how well a mirror app did, and also correct that it was a good app, with a full-screen view, zoom, and a white border that brightened the screen in low light. Charlie's metaphor: search traffic is a raging river, and if you can put a pipe in it, you siphon off a steady flow you can build a business on. David's point is that more surviving indie developers than admit it have exactly that pipe underneath them, whether by luck or design. ## **Launch Center Pro went to Phil Schiller, ended up inside Shortcuts, and never paid a tech salary** Launch Center began as a hack. Persistent notifications could be made to stick in Notification Center, so David and his partner Justin built a quick launcher that lived there, using URL schemes to open apps with context: call your wife, jump straight to Instagram's camera. Their tagline was "Launch actions, not apps." Apple rejected the notification trick. They shipped the in-app launcher anyway, Federico Viticci championed it, and Launch Center Pro followed, with a grid of tiles and a tap-and-drag gesture for folders. Getting Launch Center Pro approved, David heard later from an Apple employee, went all the way to Phil Schiller, because of the rule against mimicking the home screen. He's grateful, and also frustrated: "the fact that the app that really kicked all of this off had to go all the way to a senior VP to get approved is in some ways kind of ridiculous." Kicked off what? Workflow. The Workflow team had asked to integrate; David replied that Launch Center Pro might compete on their core product; they decided to compete instead. Workflow became Shortcuts. Then there's the JSON file. Launch Center Pro had spent hundreds of hours building a database of URL schemes, much of it submitted by developers through a form. It sat in a public S3 bucket. David later found the same file, structure and all, in the Workflow binary, and after Apple's acquisition, in the Shortcuts binary. "Things that I typed into a JSON file were part of what Apple shipped in one of their system apps." He considered the copyright question, decided it wasn't a road worth going down, and wears it as a badge of honor. Now the money. Launch Center Pro was featured by Apple, covered by TechCrunch and The Verge, and sat in people's docks for years at $3 or $5, with $0.99 sales. "There were plenty of people who only ever paid us a dollar for something that they put in their dock and used every single day, multiple times a day." At the peak, he and Justin each made maybe $150K in a year. Over its life the app grossed a little over $1 million, gross, before Apple's 30%. Across 18 years David estimates he's paid Apple well over $1 million in commission. And the line the episode opens on: he never made more as an indie developer than he does as a RevenueCat employee. There's one decision he'd take back: not shipping a paid update around iOS 10, when Justin was pushing for it and David didn't think they had enough to justify it. The subscription switch years later, iPhone-only, landed on a community that had moved on. And there was the Zapier deal, early enough that Zapier could only offer stock. Justin didn't want stock in "some Silicon Valley company." By David's back-of-napkin math, it would be worth $50 to $100 million today. Charlie puts the point plainly for anyone listening who thinks the well-known indie devs must be rich: "there's a very wide variance on the amount of money people are making, and it's not connected to how well known they are in the community." ## **Eighteen years in, he finally shipped an app himself** David never learned to code. He bought the Hillegass Cocoa book in 2008, got a quarter of the way through, and hired a contractor at $50 an hour. Every app since has meant a partner or a contractor and the question that comes with them: is this feature worth a dollar-for-dollar return on a programmer's time? He's never run an onboarding A/B test on his own apps. Paywall tests only happened because RevenueCat made them easy. This spring he vibe-coded Grit Method, a habit tracker for character built from a paper journal he'd made for his kids years ago, with four daily prompts: do a hard thing, avoid a trap, be grateful, help others. He did the design with AI tools, added the staggered animations and back-swipe polish a contractor would never have been asked for, and had a blast. "It's been really fun to be able to just YOLO prompts and get a build like minutes later instead of like days later." Then he did what he tells everyone not to do. It's made close to $2,000. He spent $2,000 on a UGC platform. He hasn't submitted it to Apple for featuring. "I just fell into all the same traps that I preach against on Twitter," he says. "I did nothing. I did none of it." He was too burnt out from building, and within days he'd started vibe-coding the next app instead. He has two more Xcode projects open right now. Also [in this episode](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olIJliFfjNk): what he'd write into a partnership agreement after watching a 50/50 split slowly unwind, the sequencing mistake that held back Weather Up, why he thinks Launched is dessert and Sub Club is vegetables, and how *The Design of Everyday Things* ruined every cup holder for him except the one in his Kia EV9. If you make it to the end, reply to the episode post with one word: "Usability!" ## **Guest links** - [Sub Club podcast](https://www.subclub.com) - [Sub Club on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@SubClubPodcast) - [David Barnard on X](https://x.com/drbarnard) - [Weather Up](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/weather-up-accuweather-data/id1196015787) - [Grit Method](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/grit-method-show-up-daily/id6772582252)