Hacker News Reader

Comment by fleitz | Hacker News Reader

It's really a question of profit.

Why would developing an app for app store in XYZ jurisdiction be any different than the US?

If you have a single convenience store in the US it's probably the same business decision in Australia.

Everything that makes Australia "small" and unique provides niches that will never be filled by American iPhone devs, for example I'm sure there is money to be made in the Australian trucking sector which appears to me to be very different than in almost every other country.

View on HN

The main reason is population size.

For bricks and mortar retail (or most industries), costs scale with population size: a larger country requires more stores.

For apps, there is one relatively fixed development cost, no matter how many customers you have access to. It costs roughly the same to build the app whether you've got potential customers numbering 1 million or 100 million, so you're likely to get a lot less bang for your buck in a smaller geographic market.

There is a Tim Hortons app in Canada, we have roughly similar densities, 2.9/3.4 per km^2

Would you rather build an app for the US market, or Liberia, yet Liberia has a higher population density.

It sounds like you want to build store finders, to me this would mostly be boilerplate with a few images and a different location db for each store.

Build one store finder and then go shop rates around that reflect the fact that they are all the same. Heck it could mostly be done in HTML which means you can do a jqTouch app instead of Cocoa Touch.

Is there something about Australian businesses or addressing that would make abstracting these details impossible?

The Tim Hortons app in Canada is a great example - having such a large network of stores, partially in the US, makes it possible to share costs over a large number of customers. The same is true of any large company with access to a large number of consumers (in Australia or elsewhere).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com