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Why I develop for iOS

chriseidhof.tumblr.com

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Re: Why I develop for iOS

#31

Post by palish »

bignoggins wrote: post #28
cageface wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking from experience, you can literally throw just about anything on the app store and it will make a couple hundred a month. That hasn't been my experience. My experience has been that once you drop off the "new & noteworthy" sales tail off pretty sharply. The app store is very competitive now.

very few apps make it onto new & noteworthy in the first place, so I don't consider that as a factor. From developers I've talked to, some have thrown pretty hastily put together weekend projects out on the app store and consistently make $5/day, which comes out to $150/month. If you want to make more than 1K/month, then yes, it is pretty darn competitive. Yes there are 450K apps on the app store, but if you have a w…

"If you are seriously looking to make some side income, and potentially even quit your job, I don't think there is a better option than iOS development right now."

"If you want to make more than 1K/month, then yes, it is pretty darn competitive."

So.. Do you make more than $12K/yr?

Re: Why I develop for iOS

#32

Post by blub »

chriseidhof wrote: post #3
eulo wrote: post #2

Should be titled, "Why I think I'm better than web developers". Gosh iOS devs love themselves, they seem to ooze ego. Incoming downvotes...

I think there are a lot more difficult problems getting solved in web development (e.g. in Big Data, scaling, etcetera) than in iOS development. I meant to say that it's harder to get started.

Big data and scaling are networking problems, which are indeed hard. Networking doesn't have to be done in a browser at all however... Web development is strictly what happens over HTTP and it's not as difficult as several developers have made it out to be in this topic.

The parts that are difficult are so because of poor tool support or weak libraries (browsers, JS).

Re: Why I develop for iOS

#33

Post by conradev »

cageface wrote: post #27
bignoggins wrote: post #14

Disclaimer: I'm a full time indie iphone developer. I'm an iOS developer for one reason: it is the best platform if you want to start your own business and keep writing CODE. Apple takes care of distribution, payments, marketing (via features and top lists), and some legal issues (you get a default ToC with every app). What this means in practice is that I spend roughly 80% of my time actually in the code, which is s…

Speaking from experience, you can literally throw just about anything on the app store and it will make a couple hundred a month. That hasn't been my experience. My experience has been that once you drop off the "new & noteworthy" sales tail off pretty sharply. The app store is very competitive now.

As a 13 year old, I put my first application on the store in October 2009, and all it does is play those mosquito ringtone sounds, and I still make ~$300-400 a month. It always manages to maintain the top 50 Entertainment in some random country.

EDIT: Top 50 Entertainment for iPad, Top 100 for Entertainment for iPhone. I would recommend making your app universal, even if it is just to make the app fill the screen. There is a much smaller pool of silly apps for iPad ;)

Re: Why I develop for iOS

#34

Post by bignoggins »

palish wrote: post #31
bignoggins wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

very few apps make it onto new & noteworthy in the first place, so I don't consider that as a factor. From developers I've talked to, some have thrown pretty hastily put together weekend projects out on the app store and consistently make $5/day, which comes out to $150/month. If you want to make more than 1K/month, then yes, it is pretty darn competitive. Yes there are 450K apps on the app store, but if you have a w…

"If you are seriously looking to make some side income, and potentially even quit your job, I don't think there is a better option than iOS development right now." "If you want to make more than 1K/month, then yes, it is pretty darn competitive." So.. Do you make more than $12K/yr?

Yes. Made ~75K last year. On track to triple that this year (I've released 2 more apps this year).

In response to below:

- How? Started off first app as a side project, released on app store. Got traction and went from there. Then started releasing more apps and each of those did well also.

- How long did it take you to reach this point? Released first app May 2010. Quit soul-sucking BigCo Dec 2010. Started traveling the world Apr 2011. Released second app last week (both are ranked Top 5 in sports on iPhone & iPad).

- Was luck a big factor? (Honestly.) - I think less so than for most apps. My app is pretty niche and I knew there was a market opportunity and took it. It was definitely not just throwing something out there to see if it would stick. I knew the market and knew there was pent up demand for my product because I am part of the community.

- Is your revenue spread evenly across your apps, or does it follow a power curve? Does your top-selling app account for around 50% of your income? - I have 3 apps. One accounts for 50% the other 2 account for about 25% each. Each of them are considered pretty successful by app store standards (currently all Top 5 in category).

- How did you market / promote your apps? - Did not do any marketing. Just released it and it grew organically.

- How did you decide what apps to build? (Probably the most important question.) - Built something that I needed to have, and I knew others would pay for. Much easier to do this if you have other interests outside of nerd-dom. Hint: Stop reading hacker news so much and get a hobby where the majority of participants are NOT technical.

- Do you have a "launch strategy"? Well, this is a bit of a cheat since I already have a pretty large userbase. But I have code in my app that notifies the user when I have a new app and links them directly to the app store. That's how I got traction for my 2nd and 3rd app. I'll give you an example of how powerful this is. When my 3rd app was released last week, iTunes rankings were broken. I did not show up AT ALL on the app store except via manual search. Despite this, I shot up all the way to #4 in spots purely on downloads from existing customers and (I suspect) word of mouth to their friends. Lesson here is to not just get customers, but get fans who will evangelize your product for you. That's probably the best advice I can give.

Re: Why I develop for iOS

#35

Post by dbattaglia »

Steko wrote: post #25
econgeeker wrote: post #5

All good reasons. My reasons are: -- The Apple frameworks are first class. In the past 20 years, there has never been a set of GUI frameworks that I've seen that was anywhere near as good as things are in iOS right now. (I've not looked at android, but it being based on Java doesn't fill me with hope. A lot of what makes CocoaTouch work so well is due to Objective-C.) -- You can write an app once and have it run on i…

I think you're prolly selling Android short and leaving money on the table in the process. All reports are that most code is fairly quick to port and the sheer number of phones is hard to ignore, even if many of them aren't app shoppers, there's still many many many that are and the app store will iterate quickly. Chrome sucked too at 1.0. If you don't want to deal with the backend on Android there are solutions that…

I'm kind of shocked that "all reports" would say code is easy to port between iOS and Android. Have any sources for this? For me its not even just the differences between unmanaged Obj C vs managed Java + XML, but also the overall development patterns used are fairly different (note that I'm not a professional mobile guy, I do .Net and web for a living but I've looked around at both platforms before).

Re: Why I develop for iOS

#36

Post by palish »

bignoggins wrote: post #34
palish wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you are seriously looking to make some side income, and potentially even quit your job, I don't think there is a better option than iOS development right now." "If you want to make more than 1K/month, then yes, it is pretty darn competitive." So.. Do you make more than $12K/yr?

Yes. Made ~75K last year. On track to triple that this year (I've released 2 more apps this year). In response to below: - How? Started off first app as a side project, released on app store. Got traction and went from there. Then started releasing more apps and each of those did well also. - How long did it take you to reach this point? Released first app May 2010. Quit soul-sucking BigCo Dec 2010. Started traveling…

Unsorted list of questions:

- Holy crap.

- How?

- How long did it take you to reach this point?

- Was luck a big factor? (Honestly.)

- Is your revenue spread evenly across your apps, or does it follow a power curve? Does your top-selling app account for around 50% of your income?

- How did you market / promote your apps?

- How did you decide what apps to build? (Probably the most important question.)

- Do you have a "launch strategy"? That is, when you finish making an app, and you submit it to the AppStore... Do you have any particular strategies? For example I've noticed a lot of developers write their app's description like: "Blah Blah says: our app is the bee's knees!" "Even your grandpa can't tear himself away from our app!" Etc. Does stupid stuff like that actually work? (Ok, those examples were perhaps exceptionally stupid, but you get the idea.)

Re: Why I develop for iOS

#37

Post by ams6110 »

MrScruff wrote: post #23
slowpoke wrote: post #12

You need to do memory management, need to work with design patterns, learn a new language, and more. While he does raise some valid points (with which I still disagree, but then again I wouldn't be caught dead on anything by Apple, so I'm biased too), this is plain and simply nonsense. Assuming someone knows neither Objective-C nor any language (including HTML) for web development, the learning curve is probably abou…

It's considerably easier (IMO) to get started in web development than in iOS development. Web development has a fairly gentle learning curve and I personally know a bunch of people that started their careers hacking in php. iOS development has a gentle learning curve if you already know C, which even some CompSci graduates don't nowadays. I don't think this was intended as a put down, it's just a fact that there are…

A Web App is more than HTML and PHP of course. There is an entire "stack" and if you're doing it all yourself you need to know something about all of it. You will probably find yourself needing to be at least somewhat proficient in: HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP/Ruby/Python or similar, Apache or IIS administration, Linux/BSD/Windows administration, MySQL/Postgres/SQL Server administration, some dialect of SQL itself, etc.

I'm not sure how that compares to iOS but my hunch is that you can pretty much confine yourself to learning XCode and the framework. The water may be a bit deeper right at first than just tinkering with HTML or PHP, but the overall domain appears to be more limited, at least so it appears to me (I have not done any mobile development yet).

Re: Why I develop for iOS

#38

Post by sid0 »

bignoggins wrote: post #14

Disclaimer: I'm a full time indie iphone developer. I'm an iOS developer for one reason: it is the best platform if you want to start your own business and keep writing CODE. Apple takes care of distribution, payments, marketing (via features and top lists), and some legal issues (you get a default ToC with every app). What this means in practice is that I spend roughly 80% of my time actually in the code, which is s…

you can literally throw just about anything on the app store and it will make a couple hundred a month

Do you think this is healthy in the long run?

Re: Why I develop for iOS

#39

Post by alexobenauer »

tzury wrote: post #6

Dear author, (OP as well) It is not clear from your website what type of applications you have developed so far for iOS which make it hard to "judge" your choice whether or not you were right about choosing native over HTML5. But I wish to remind us all that those two can, and in many cases should be combined. If we take Google iPad suite or Twitter formal client, they are iOS apps which render content through the we…

Most often webkit is being used because that's how you put multiple formatting styles in one UI component. It's the recommended by Apple way to do it. UILabel and UITextView will only be one font. You can't type this, then italicize the date. Instead, you just use UIWebView, pass it the string of html that formats your text the way you want, and you're off.

Re: Why I develop for iOS

#40

Post by aerique »

bignoggins wrote: post #34
palish wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"If you are seriously looking to make some side income, and potentially even quit your job, I don't think there is a better option than iOS development right now." "If you want to make more than 1K/month, then yes, it is pretty darn competitive." So.. Do you make more than $12K/yr?

Yes. Made ~75K last year. On track to triple that this year (I've released 2 more apps this year). In response to below: - How? Started off first app as a side project, released on app store. Got traction and went from there. Then started releasing more apps and each of those did well also. - How long did it take you to reach this point? Released first app May 2010. Quit soul-sucking BigCo Dec 2010. Started traveling…

edit: nevermind about disclosing your apps, just read your profile

Would you mind disclosing which apps you have written? Just basic curiosity, you can also mail me (see profile). I deduced most of what you're saying here and want to go on my own as well before I become an eternal wage slave.

I'm at step 2 of your list, my app is 80% finished so it's half done ;-). It isn't a weekend project and I want to polish it before putting it in the store.

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