If your product is that good , Apple does your free promotion on its sites,partners sites and Apple ad network sites for free, App store is just as beneficial to small players as large. You just have to create something remarkable and worthwhile to catch there attention.
It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
31–40 of 93 posts
Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 un…
I mostly agree, but take it from voice of experience, having web application available does not magically lead to two hundred people giving you their CCs and sticking around for a year. You have to roll up your sleeves and market. This is often much, much harder than making the actual application. (I think the App Store gets a lot of ink because people have this notion that Apple does the marketing for devs like you.…
Magically, no. But given the same marketing resources behind either, the SaaS case seems to be more reliably attainable. Or stand-alone software. Or contract work.
For SaaS, it's also important to model things like trial conversions, turnover, etc. which don't appear in a single-sale case. There are a lot of differences. But the odds still seem better there.
And of course I am completely overlooking the "what about ads" question, mainly because you need a ton of installs before that starts being a significant amount of money. Better than not, helps feed conversions, but doesn't change the equation for me.
Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#33Are 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.…
Hey, judging by the video I don't agree that your app is 'very well polished'. Check out Cut the Rope, that's the kind of polish that is expected from an App Store game.
Suggestions:
- Add a tweening for picking up and dropping letters
- centering of the board should happen automatically
- put the restart button somewhere else. It looks weird when you drop a letter on top of it and it appears behind it (e.g. the 'm' in 'seem')
- can't really tell from the video whether you already did this, but implement iPhone-like scrolling w/ momentum and bouncy behavior
Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#34> 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. This is completely false. You can get good performance with high level languages like lisp. It doesn't have to look like C to be fast and to be possible to optimize it well. The whole "writing low level code is faster" mentality is WRONG for 99%…
How is Objective-C a lot better than C++? What do you mean by "the software game industry is wrong too"?
Objective-C has a very sweet expressivity/complexity ratio.
Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#35"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." This made me chuckle. Maybe if you define "generation" as "this year's college output" then you might be right, but if we're talking "generation" as in the past lifetime of software development…
I don't think it's a lamentation over framework per se, but rather a step back from the web-hysteria of a few years ago, where you can pretty much, with a lot of elbow grease (aka Perl) tie together component A with component B and feed it into component C to do something cool/wicked/useful, where they're all giant open source projects.
Think of all the crazy things we did pluggin ImageMagick into PHP backed by giant MySQL instances.
This is no longer really possible with mobile. I recently pulled in some image recognition libs to my app, and it's an extreme struggle keeping a large, legacy, C++ lib from exploding all over a mobile device. We really are stepping far, far, back from the previous trend of writing code as if the metal they run on is but a detail.
Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#36> 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. This is completely false. You can get good performance with high level languages like lisp. It doesn't have to look like C to be fast and to be possible to optimize it well. The whole "writing low level code is faster" mentality is WRONG for 99%…
Performance bottleneck is a big issue, specially when you consider the level of graphics and AI in games these days. It is insanely clever, and would require parts of your game to be tuned in hand coded assembly, most games developers regularly hand code AI in inline assembly. The low level thinking is perfectly right, Games like mario,contra and others were even possible on a 8 bit machine with sound and graphics game loop and some AI because of assembly. Abstraction is good but not always. At some places you have to do a tradeoff. Also try writing a GLSL shader in java and then in Obj-C,C or C++ you will know how much better the latter are. This is why abstraction is not a good thing always.
Lisp is great i too agree even i like lisp very much, but a large part of the documentation available for Obj-C/Cocoa/Cocoa-touch is for Obj-C. That too apples documentation on the language and framework is the best available on the internet. Also Obj-C is a great language it is very similar to smalltalk and if you know smalltalk, Obj-C would be a joy to program in. Infact i felt Obj-C to be very similar to ruby conceptually.
Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#37I.T.O monetization, you can also take the route of not developing iOS apps for yourself and trying to sell them for $0.99. You can instead offer your services to mid-sized companies' marketing departments and build iOS apps for them. You won't make millions if it explodes in popularity, but what are the chances of that anyway?
Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 un…
This may be true for mass-market apps, but we have had a lot of success selling high quality, useful, niche-market apps priced $5 and up. The App Store makes it insanely easy for people to buy something that seems useful to them, whereas they would at least think twice before paying for a webapp subscription.
Somewhat in the same vein... a friend of mine teaches ESL classes for foreign US university students. He made a pretty basic app - it's not polished but it's perfectly functional - to help his students study vocab/tenses/etc. I forget now if it was free or $0.99, either way he didn't actually have that many downloads since it was only designed for his class.
That said, the students loved it. And, he could also update the app as the course went along. Finally, although he only made enough through App Store sales to maybe go out for a nice meal, it translated into promotions, bonuses and the like. So ultimately, it paid off.
My main point is: in addition to selling niche apps at a premium, there's also the opportunity to develop cheap/free apps that otherwise help you move ahead within a niche market.
Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 un…
I mostly agree, but take it from voice of experience, having web application available does not magically lead to two hundred people giving you their CCs and sticking around for a year. You have to roll up your sleeves and market. This is often much, much harder than making the actual application. (I think the App Store gets a lot of ink because people have this notion that Apple does the marketing for devs like you.…
[deleted]
Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#40> 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. This is completely false. You can get good performance with high level languages like lisp. It doesn't have to look like C to be fast and to be possible to optimize it well. The whole "writing low level code is faster" mentality is WRONG for 99%…
Performance bottleneck is a big issue, specially when you consider the level of graphics and AI in games these days. It is insanely clever, and would require parts of your game to be tuned in hand coded assembly, most games developers regularly hand code AI in inline assembly. The low level thinking is perfectly right, Games like mario,contra and others were even possible on a 8 bit machine with sound and graphics ga…
> most games developers regularly hand code AI in inline assembly
This goes against any game company I worked. If anything, many are moving the AI code to scripting. Last company I worked had all the AI done in UnrealScript. Before was a mix of UnrealScript and C++ and previous was C++ with bits of lua mixed.
Never did I saw a line of assembly related to AI/Gameplay code in these games. (I was a AI programmer for about 4 years before leaving the industry in 2009)