Why so few add ons for QuickBooks Online?

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I use QuickBooks Online to manage a service business that I own. Really I am more of just an investor, as the onsite general manager takes care of day-to-day operational tasks. However, I do take care of payroll and other accounting tasks. I certainly feel the pain of many of the limitations of QBOE. No inventory tracking, no purchase orders, no IIF import, no PayPal integration, and many other missing features make my life hard. So I went looking for 3rd party solutions.

I have used QuickBooks Pro since the late 1990s. There is a huge base of add-ons. When we needed extra functionality for QuickBooks Online, I naively assumed there would be a similar set of products. What I found was just the opposite. There are only a handful of add-ons even listed for QBOE, and most of those don't seem very full-featured. The ecosystem is nothing like the QuickBooks Pro ecosystem. At a basic level I understand. There simply are not as many users of QuickBooks Online as for the desktop versions. So most developers focus their efforts on the desktop. That's fine I guess, but it doesn't solve my problems. So I ended up developing my own solution. That is what OE Companion is all about.