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Why I develop for iOS

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Re: Why I develop for iOS

#61

Post by 5teev »

cageface wrote: post #56
conradev wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Th…

The average app makes about $500 over its entire lifetime, so you should be pretty pleased with this.

I'm pleased, too: my app is destined to be immortal!

Re: Why I develop for iOS

#62

Post by bignoggins »

cageface wrote: post #55
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…

My last app ( http://www.burgerkone.com/grainbender/ ) was on the New & Noteworthy music page for three days, and was as high as #17 in the U.S. iPad music apps store. Initial sales have been good but if it follows the trajectory of my other apps there's no way it will be pulling in $300 a month a few months from now. I think you've chosen your niche well. It's popular but under-served.

Picking the right niche gets you most of the way there IMO

Re: Why I develop for iOS

#63

Post by bignoggins »

leviathan wrote: post #58
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…

My last app submitted two months ago has made a total of $34, and it wasnt put together in a weekend, it took 6 months in design and development. So its not as easy sailing as you make it sound. I think you still need a lot of advertising if you want to make some money.

I'm not saying it's easy I'm saying the opportunities for indie devs are huge, certainly more so than webapps which seem to be par for the course on HN. And I don't think you need any advertising. All 3 of my apps have reached top 5 in their categories without spending a dime on ads.

Re: Why I develop for iOS

#65

Post by ejenkinsiii »

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 love Apple products, and am learning C++ on my own, alone along with web development, (huge task I know) but the one thing I noticed about apple these days is that if you create an idea on their platform and they like it, it could be an feature in their next upgrade with no compensation to you, also could someone please point out any other use case for Obj-c I come from a background of using/instructing with proprietary software and I despise the idea of learning a language for one platform and being locked in to that platform.

Re: Why I develop for iOS

#66

Post by randomdata »

flyosity wrote: post #51
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…

The only part of Twitter's native apps for iOS that use a UIWebview are when rendering a single tweet since in that specific use case, it's simpler and faster to render links that way rather than deal with rendering it via Core Text. Every other screen in the app is natively drawn. I don't think Twitter's app is a particularly good example. > "elite-ios-wiling-to-pay" customers are indifference about it They are? Are…

On the iPad version of Twitter, even the Tweets appear to be rendered with CoreText. The only place WebKit seems to be used is when you are actually looking at a web page.

Re: Why I develop for iOS

#67

Post by randomdata »

alexobenauer wrote: post #42
ams6110 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, et…

My last iOS app required the knowledge of Objective-C, the frameworks, HTML, CSS, & Javascript (because that's actually how you do formatted text, and javascript for event handling within that text), SQL for the local storage, PHP & MySQL for the server-side storage, etc. I'm not saying either is harder, I think that's a fight for cats, but I did want to inform to your hunch from experience. I think both web developm…

> because that's actually how you do formatted text, and javascript for event handling within that text

I would say that CoreText is the preferred way to do it. WebKit is pretty slow by comparison and leaves you with much less control over your renders. It's not a horrible solution if you are trying to share assets with other platforms though.

Re: Why I develop for iOS

#68

Post by tylerneylon »

I think the time for indie iOS developers as real contenders has passed. Yes, indie developers can still make great apps, but it's no longer realistic to compete with the production quality that is often seen in the top 10, or even top 50 on the app store. If you really want to work with a small team, you absolutely need a great designer who's as invested in the app as you are. I suspect that in the near future (if not already), even a great coder / designer team will have trouble competing with the distribution and marketing advantages of larger names.

Re: Why I develop for iOS

#69

Post by rgbrgb »

cantbecool wrote: post #60
conradev wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Th…

You play the whole young programmer angle often. Good luck with future development, though. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/stealth-tones/id334666404?mt=...

I think it's a good angle.

Re: Why I develop for iOS

#70

Post by alanfalcon »

leviathan wrote: post #58
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…

My last app submitted two months ago has made a total of $34, and it wasnt put together in a weekend, it took 6 months in design and development. So its not as easy sailing as you make it sound. I think you still need a lot of advertising if you want to make some money.

I've read your website and watched your preview video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKvYH_Qdp1Q) and I still have very little idea what your iPad app does exactly. It seems that it displays pictures from Facebook?

I'm not trying to rub dirt in the wounds, but I don't think you're doing a good job of creating a value proposition for many people.

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