Different people have different preferences. I respect people who can open source their app and feel no negatives about it. I’ve worked on enough open source projects to know it’s not for me.
I mean if I wanted to do it for selfless reasons I would do it but here I’m working on the project for my own enjoyment.
There are a lot of reasons why open sourcing the app would reduce my enjoyment of working on the app.
I’ll try to list some of them.
I feel pressured to be a role model. I understand people learn from open source code. This puts pressure on me because I feel like any code I publish needs to act like a good role model for learners. At this point writing code has turned into what I do at my job. Why would I want my personal hobby to turn into my job?
I’ve been writing code for a very long time and I’ve learned what I like and what I don’t like. Due to this I’m pretty anal and opinionated when it comes to my own code bases. This pretty much eliminates any chance id want anyone to contribute to my open source projects. Because again that would mean I’d have to review their code and we are back this hobby turning into my job.
I want full control of my own project and how the app is distributed. That means I don’t want people to fork it and then release variants of it. Honestly if that happens id just quit working on the app. So another avenue where open sourcing the project can only bring problems.
So if you look at all of this I stand to gain almost nothing from open sourcing the app and I pretty much just lose.