Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App

georgesaines.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 93 posts

Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App

#11

Post by unoti »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #7

Are there many examples of iPhone apps that are simultaneously (and somewhat objectively): (1) beautiful, (2) easy to use, and (3) useful, that still don't go anywhere? I've been trolling around the app store for awhile trying to understand the market and what I see are tons of novelty apps, fugly apps (by anyone's standards), buggy apps, and apps that break usability in all kinds of ways. And judging by the lack of…

I'm an indie developer on Android, just starting to make an iOS version of my first app. My app is very well polished (look here http://www.pillowfightgames.com/jargoneer/) but it's still insanely hard to do marketing-- probably because I have no idea what I'm doing yet. Although the overall quality level of many apps isn't very good, good quality is still not enough to ensure good sales. Marketing is key, I think. I hope.

Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App

#13

Post by Macsenour »

Discovery is not the issue. The issue is keeping the app on the device. With so MANY apps new every day, the average person loses track of the new apps they downloaded, and they stop using the older ones unless they really are kick ass.

Spend less on marketing, more in making your app indispensable.

Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App

#15

Post by davezatch »

unoti wrote: post #11
ryanwaggoner wrote: post #7

Are there many examples of iPhone apps that are simultaneously (and somewhat objectively): (1) beautiful, (2) easy to use, and (3) useful, that still don't go anywhere? I've been trolling around the app store for awhile trying to understand the market and what I see are tons of novelty apps, fugly apps (by anyone's standards), buggy apps, and apps that break usability in all kinds of ways. And judging by the lack of…

I'm an indie developer on Android, just starting to make an iOS version of my first app. My app is very well polished (look here http://www.pillowfightgames.com/jargoneer/ ) but it's still insanely hard to do marketing-- probably because I have no idea what I'm doing yet. Although the overall quality level of many apps isn't very good, good quality is still not enough to ensure good sales. Marketing is key, I think.…

Ah, just searched the iOS store for Jargoneer after watching the video. Is there a mailing list or any way to find out when it's released? Looks awesome.

Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App

#16

Post by Tossrock »

mhansen wrote: post #10

Photoshop’s submenus, window management, and setting screens afford that software package a level of feature depth I don’t believe can be achieved in a mobile environment no matter how sophisticated and intuitive UI conventions become. I wonder if the author is aware of Photoshop for Android tablets - https://market.android.com/details?id=air.com.adobe.pstouch Granted, it doesn't have all the features of desktop Phot…

A tablet only app isn't the same beast as a smartphone app. You can throw a large number of menus onto a 10 inch tablet and gain functionality rather than lose it; try the same thing on a 3.whatever iPhone and you'd have an extremely cluttered, useless app.

Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App

#17

Post by nevster »

Tossrock wrote: post #16
mhansen wrote: post #10

Photoshop’s submenus, window management, and setting screens afford that software package a level of feature depth I don’t believe can be achieved in a mobile environment no matter how sophisticated and intuitive UI conventions become. I wonder if the author is aware of Photoshop for Android tablets - https://market.android.com/details?id=air.com.adobe.pstouch Granted, it doesn't have all the features of desktop Phot…

A tablet only app isn't the same beast as a smartphone app. You can throw a large number of menus onto a 10 inch tablet and gain functionality rather than lose it; try the same thing on a 3.whatever iPhone and you'd have an extremely cluttered, useless app.

There's also Photoshop Express for the iPhone. It's worth looking at to see what kind of design decisions they've made. http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/adobe-photoshop-express/id331...

Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App

#18

Post by glimcat »

quesera wrote: post #4

I disagree with two of your three points: (paraphrasing, fairly I hope) > Objective-C is too much work/too low-level for your app/required because the hardware is limited. Disagree. I wouldn't be disappointed to see solid Cocoa bindings in another approved language, but any programmer can learn C, and should. ObjC is a superset of C, and Cocoa is a beautifully consistent framework. The brackets might take a day or tw…

Photoshop is modular, not monolithic.

Designing a large monolithic anything is insanely hard. It's often best to design around it.

Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App

#19

Post by buff-a »

But the reason why developers are shackled to Objective C is to make sure processes finish in human time, and this is fundamentally a performance bottleneck in mobile hardware.

I use monotouch. Compiles to ARM assembly. Not seeing any problems.

For a generation of coders accustomed to limitless managed memory, high-level programming abstractions, and thousands of deeply functional opensource libraries, mobile is a step back to the Byzantine world of Commodore 64s.

Really? An 8bit 1Mhz processor with 64Kb? Or is it a 600Mhz 32bit processor with 262,144kb. Sure it doesn't match up to my i7, but when java first came out we had Pentium 90s. The lack of ObjC library support is changing as more developers pile on, and if you go with C# then that's pretty much solved.

(As a kid in the UK, you had a ZX Spectrum, a C64 or a BBC Micro. The next gen Commodore was the Amiga. The next gen BBC was the Archimedes. The Archimedes had the ARM2. Same instruction set as an iPhone... in 1988. I shipped a game on it. 100% Assembly. Much prefer C# to hand-rolled assembly, so its not just the new kids.)

Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App

#20

Post by glimcat »

ryanwaggoner wrote: post #7

Are there many examples of iPhone apps that are simultaneously (and somewhat objectively): (1) beautiful, (2) easy to use, and (3) useful, that still don't go anywhere? I've been trolling around the app store for awhile trying to understand the market and what I see are tons of novelty apps, fugly apps (by anyone's standards), buggy apps, and apps that break usability in all kinds of ways. And judging by the lack of…

The market was highly profitable when it was small supply / big demand and you had good odds that Apple would hand you tons of visibility. Now it's big supply with a terrible signal to noise ratio.

To succeed, it seems that you now either need a mountain of luck, or a killer marketing engine and a fair amount of luck. Mathematically, it seems unattractive compared to other ways of applying the same time and skills unless you have something you're obsessed with building and want to produce irrespective of the outcome probabilities.

E.g. a $1.99 app pays at $1.393, so you need to move 34893.75 paid copies in order to clear a $50,000 gross. For SaaS and the same target, you only need 208.33 customers at $20/mo. The capture difficulty is not identical between cases - but if you have good marketing and are assuming serendipity on either side, it's quite feasible to hit 208 customers. Furthermore, it's often easier to grow once you get there, and it's quite possible to charge at much more than $20/mo/customer.

Mobile apps are great, but not a "for profit" activity for me. I'm all for doing them for fun or ad hoc, and if that takes off - great. But it seems to be a very difficult business model compared to applying similar resources elsewhere.

Post reply on HN