Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fast, good, cheap. Pick two.
good and cheap?
Yep. The way to get a programming job done well and cheaply is to learn and do the coding yourself. That will not be fast.
Dear business people, an iOS app actually takes a lot of work
101–110 of 135 posts
Re: Dear business people, an iOS app actually takes a lot of work
#102I recently made an Android app for $150. Ad supported. Now with 1 million users. That's about 1/30th of what it has earned so far. Hard way to learn to value my own work more.
Ouch. Go to patio11 for counsel, collect $15k. ;-)
Re: Dear business people, an iOS app actually takes a lot of work
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Good for you. Most outsourcing projects don't go nearly that well. Which is a shame, but understandable. Why should the good Indian programmers work on the kind of projects people are willing to sell?
> "Most outsourcing projects don't go nearly that well." Do you have a source for this? I'm a "business guy", but I read the hell out of Hacker News. I hear this a lot, but it hasn't been my experience, whatsoever. Seriously, how is an outsider supposed to read these arguments as anything more than people on the inside trying to justify what they do and the prices they charge? Read that article again. It's written fo…
As a developer who's been on all sides of this equation (developer, contractor, and someone who has outsourced dev work), I have to say I agree with the poster above who said "Most outsourcing projects don't go nearly that well."
Here's my advice to any prospective outsourcer:
-You still need to do your job as a both a product manager AND a project manager. Failure at either one of these duties on your end cannot be rescued by developer skill.
-You need to be able to identify whether or not a contractor or firm is actually capable of doing the work you're asking them to perform. Have they completed similar projects in similar time frames? Do they have repeat customers? How experienced are their developers? Do they have experience in the platform you're developing in? Are they full stack or are they just building the mobile portion?
-Always understand that contracted labor will be less opinionated, and will be far more likely to take a "Garbage in, garbage out" approach to any requirements you feed them. A salaried engineer may provide some push-back on features that will cause the project costs or timing to slip, contractors (foreign or native) have a tendency to happily plug along and let time and budget slip and then just apologize after the fact. Remember: Every mistake YOU make will likely result in more billable hours for them, so they have a financial interest in not telling you when you've stepped in it.
-Requirements should be very detailed. If you hand them a PowerPoint slide deck with some notes your project is doomed.
Re: Dear business people, an iOS app actually takes a lot of work
#104I'm learning iOS development. I won't start this now, as there's alot more of iOS to learn, but what are the main languages/frameworks are being used server side to interface with iOS apps?
Ruby on Rails... Python... anything really that supports REST
Re: Dear business people, an iOS app actually takes a lot of work
#105Re: Dear business people, an iOS app actually takes a lot of work
#106This might be a stupid thought, but I wonder if there's a psychological issue at play for iPhone apps in particular where people subconsciously think small form factor = pretty simple = pretty cheap. Of course, the reality is usually exactly opposite.
"How can an app that costs $0.99 to buy cost $200,000 to build!?"
Re: Dear business people, an iOS app actually takes a lot of work
#107It's the same problem on Web Development. It's actually worse. As JavaScript and the DOM are quite hard to handle (cross-browser issues too) to build the simplest features and interactions. I found out that it's not worth it to mingle with offline-small business. Their budget is usually $1,000-$2,000. That's barely enough to buy a stock template, a couple of plug-ins, setup WordPress and customize it a little. The pr…
> It's the same problem on Web Development. It's actually worse. For me, on average, the same type of UI / interaction in iOS takes about 3-5x more to develop versus web.
Not to mention, it's much easier to update. In an absolute emergency, you can ssh in and close a div tag and your fix is live to every customer. With an iPhone app...
Re: Dear business people, an iOS app actually takes a lot of work
#108I agree with the overall sentiment of the page. A few questions to seasoned iOS devs: "With websites, you can simply add one more page, then create a link to that page when you needed. However, you can’t do that with iOS app, everything has to be set in the beginning, any changes might result in significant other changes that you might not be able to understand why." Isn't this what the Navigation Controller is for?…
He's writing for business people. Business people often request new features late in the game without knowing how hard or easy they are to implement. So a new feature may require a new or modified API on the server, for example, which means updating the server, updating the app to use the new API, updating the interface, getting the new app reviewed, etc.. Now if the change affects other things in the system, like a new way to cancel a record that all the other display logic has to respect, for example, you can end up modifying almost every part.
Re: Dear business people, an iOS app actually takes a lot of work
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe he might be talking about modifying a view, as he presents the example of adding an email button or a facebook one. It still doesn't make sense as you can use tools such as Interface Builder. The only thing that applies, you could still be building the view programmatically or need custom animations. That needs coding. And of course a facebook button needs to handle things such as authentication than an ema…
It still doesn't make sense as you can use tools such as Interface Builder. I was bitten by this on my first major contract iOS app, so I think I know what he means. Interface Builder will get you most of the way fairly quickly, which is deceptive. Then you start refining to try and match the photoshop mock-up for visual design, and find the built-in UI classes don't handle this. Buttons not supporting labels below a…
Thank you for this description. I've done a bit of Android work, but no iOS work yet. Most of my career I've done web apps, and my recommendation to my company is to do web apps instead of native apps for all of our mobile projects. You've reconfirmed my suspicion that native apps get into a lot of hidden complexity that's not apparent from the "Hello World" tutorials.
Re: Dear business people, an iOS app actually takes a lot of work
#110I can't tell you how many VCs and angels, all of whom should know better, would ask "why did it take so long to build your iPhone app" and "why did it cost so much to build" when they're not including the weeks/months it took to design it, plus build out a very complex backend of servers ingesting licensed data, all the application logic on the backend, all the API calls on the backend and corresponding API connections on the app end, and on and on. It's a big complex project.
The idea that you can whip up a very complex iPhone app "in a weekend or two" is naive and, dare I say, bubblethink.