Anyone making a living building desktop applications?

I do! I started earning real money after I created the first monitor control app for Apple Silicon (https://lunar.fyi).

I wrote about my journey to doing that here: https://alinpanaitiu.com/blog/journey-to-ddc-on-m1-macs/

I quit my job in April 2020 and nowadays I make desktop apps on https://lowtechguys.com/

Each app brings about $200/month in revenue at the start, then ramps up as I work on user feedback and telling people about the apps in whichever way I can.

For example rcmd (https://lowtechguys.com/rcmd) just reached $1.5k/month because it has a more complete feature set than it had in v1 and because more people are recommended it to their peers.

Yep. Been working on Polypane full time since 2019 as a solo developer. Electron based, available on mac, windows and linux, in x64 and arm versions. Its subscription based and I release a new update roughly every month.

It was a side project before that but I started charging for it when I went full time.

https://polypane.app

I'm not making a living yet, but I'm (as indie/solo hacker) building app (electron based) to make a living.

Linkkraft is an offline-first browser that helps you process large amount of tabs when you're trying to extract useful pieces from them.

Problem known as tab clutter/ tab overload.

How does linkkraft help?

1. It saves (locally) history as a graph where your movements interconnected. New movement is new entry. Linkraft visualizes the graph as a tree instead of tabs.

2. Linkkraft creates snapshot of page state for each step (DOM/text/styles/fonts, removes js). That works for usual pages and SPA (like twitter)

There is GC for such snapshots and limitations. So, you don't have to worry about removing not necessary snapshots.

Tree & snapshots complement each other. You don't have to deal with finding html snapshot in your downloads. Snapshots are integrated in the trails tree. When you open snapshot, you will get all context.

Currently, I'm researching for product market fit and for first 10 paying customers. Going to ask $15 per month for that.

(Eventually it will be a tool for hypertext collecting, note-taking, thinking)

https://arestov.github.io/linkkraft-notes/trails-tree-plus-o... https://arestov.github.io/linkkraft-notes/trails-tree-plus-o...

I made http://monoclesecurity.com a CCTV system for home and business use. I'm hoping to begin working on it full time very soon as I've been building it for the best part of a decade now.

I’m a game developer. Lots of work in that area but it’s hard work with lots of competition. Lots of time spent optimizing performance so you can run on weaker hardware. Insane user experience focus compared to web as well

I know quite a few people that make a living building desktop applications. They aren't doing it solo, but they have some interesting things. I know people working in making Airtraffic Control software, which they do with Java Swing. I know people doing vague defense industry things that they say are desktop applications, and I suspect the Defense industry and government has a lot of this.

I am planning to write neural-style-pt frontend with UI, because when I did command line interface for this convolution network a lot of people told me it not so much understandable as core python library. Command-line is for owners but for customers UI is much better to use.