Successive refinement not unlike in other crafts.

How are apps made? Painfully with deliberation or effortlessly without thought. Blind inspiration. Eight hours over a lazy weekend. Fifty grand a day. A million dollars a syllable. Do not look for the sense in it.

Apps mirror life in their unfairness. Time spent making an app in no way guarantees successes, financial or spiritual. Grizzled developers toil for years and ‘lose’ to the ‘chain-smoking geek’ in Vietnam with the twitchy bird. Guy doesn’t even want the money.
—Craig Mod, How are apps made?