Study an audience for their pains and worldview and what they buy. Earn their trust through writing and freebies. Then they will want to buy because it's from you specifically.

I can recommend https://30x500.com/

The business cycle from idea->software product->competitors is only getting shorter.

With this sort of app, I see popularity as your “moat”…

If Reddit is the top of your marketing funnel, win there. When I install a Mac app, I generally go with the one that’s most popular on the Mac apps subreddit, and has the most reviews / downloads, and has the biggest community. If everybody is recommending it, that’s generally good enough for me to try it. In that sense, once you have the lead, the winners keep winning, and the competitors eventually move on and do other stuff.

Again, congrats. It’s so cool to have built something people like.

With or without the advent LLMs, it's an uphill battle to build a moat around a small (but nice!) wrapper around the output of a command-line tool shipped with MacOS.

> what is the moat?

Increasingly, and sadly, it's online services with a monthly subscription and no data portability. Get users in with a generous free tier and pull up the drawbridge so they can't get out easily.

So to answer your question, LLMs have lowered the bar substantially

You didn't invent the need for this info, you were just the first one to put it on the app store.

Copying your story and (I assume) graphics is definitely a reason to be angry. Like others have said, look into the possibility of DCMA takedowns.

You could try and develop a brand and market it but I don’t think that would go well for something like this. Best case maybe you can game the rankings to stay number one but you’re probably up against professional app copiers.

So your moat is speed of innovation. Your basic app is copied. What new feature will enable you to stay ahead and drive sales? Or perhaps no feature can do that as the crowd grows so it’s on to the next app that doesn’t yet exist. What’s your new pain point?

IMO you should drop the DMCA hammer on the clones.

Regarding Reddit, it's a great place to find users but also copy-cats. Stick to posting "I built a thing that solves a problem" and avoid the bragging "I made $N in N days" indie-hacker style. The latter doesn't help the app anyways.

Moat: there isn't one for a utility someone can build in a few days. It can still be a good business - you seem to have marketing savvy which is a big part of it.

One suggestion, on your homepage - the "See USB Connection Information in Action" the screenshots are much too small. Nice looking app!

If it really can be written in a couple days (with or without AI) I would say you're lucky to make what? A few thousand dollars? (I'm assuming a top 100 app that got talked about sold at least 1000 copies for at least a few dollars each)

What's your definition of "successful"? Mac App Store volume is quite low, especially with upfront paid apps. You're likely averaging only a few unit sales per day, right? Maybe only one unit per day, and even that might be a generous estimate.

> A few open-source clones have also appeared on GitHub

Is your app open source? If so, that's probably why you're getting copycats.

> It seems that derivative apps with plagiarized descriptions and app elements are being approved without issue. Does this signal a shift in App curation?

No. Apple's so-called "curation" has always been terrible.

Just to explain, their app can be written in 24 hours, maybe in 4 hours with some vibe coding. This app does not provide more information than System Information app on macOS. And we are talking about it on HN. So yes, this is clearly to bring attention to the app, and get more installs.

I am surprised this submission has not been flagged.