"I thought I was doing these guys a favor. The apps I wrote would have cost about $50,000 each if I had charged for my time. I basically donated $500,000 to the Android community. That’s how I saw things."
This is where i stopped reading - the author is a bit delusional.
Yeah, he clearly wasn't thinking straight on that one. Even if the time he spent on the first app was worth $50k, he said earlier that he created the other apps just by changing the YouTube channel on the first app and repackaging. Definitely not $500k of work by any stretch.
"The app was simple. Launch it and it display the videos for a single YouTube channel. I made the app, and it was really nice and a pleasure to use."
I'm assuming his hourly rate is $50,000/hr. Did he do anything other than wrap the web page for the channel in a web view? I'm not familiar with Android, but on iOS, you can accomplish this without writing a single line of code, everything could be done inside Interface Builder. I can't imagine it's any more difficult on Android.
he probably factored in all the time he spent learning to build the first app, and then multiplied it by 10...if he's an independent developer i'd be very hesitant to contract him given his poor billing techniques
On the other hand I would be quite hesitant to hire a developer to build a customized video player for tens of thousands of dollars if he was going to go on and sell that same code to others for $200 a pop.
Neither approach is right. There's nothing wrong with the write-once sell-many approach, that's basically all of non-custom software development. You shouldn't be charging for your time to learn, either. His 10 apps aren't worth $500,000 in any universe. Maybe you could argue that the entirety of the development was worth $50,000 and value each app at $5000. Maybe. I wouldn't argue that, but someone else could...
It gets close to an interesting question (using multiple Google services can result in a domino effect if you violate the TOS of one).
But it raises so many peripheral points, and is so full of whiny after-the-fact juvenile justifications like the one you noticed, that it's impossible to filter out the interesting part.
This is where i stopped reading - the author is a bit delusional.