It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
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It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
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Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#2"It's insanely hard to make a kick ass _____"
One of the reasons mobile design is so hard is because you have to use 100% of the screen. Not only do you need to make it look good, but you also need to squeeze the resources of the phone. You have to worry about battery life, network usage, and storage space. It's a challenge, but it makes the end result a lot better.
The same rules really should apply to development on any platforms. Keep it light, simple, and focus on one thing.
Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#3There's no worthwhile "Dip" when it comes to making an iPhone app since it's become commoditized, and crowded. There's a lot of effort, luck, sweat, etc, don't get me wrong, but the cost/benefit ratio just sucks. You're better off putting that sweat to creating an enterprise app for Fortune 500 clients, or creating the next big social network.
Also, remember.. there's a lot of commotion over mobile, but in terms of monetization, it still lags behind web display, and search ads.. it's not even close.
Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#4I 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 two to get used to, but they pretty much disappear after that. The much talked-about memory management model is not nearly as daunting as bloggers make it sound.
> Designing hugely complex monolithic apps is difficult on the iPhone.
Well, OK. I don't disagree with that entirely. But design is always serious work, information architecture is an art and science, especially for highly complex applications. That said, your app is not Photoshop and a good designer can solve your problems. Photoshop on an iPhone would be Difficult. So would XCode.
> App store discoverability is poor, marketing around launches is unpredictable, betas and limited releases are complicated or unworkable, audience feedback is a big problem.
Agreed 100%...! :)
Good luck with your dev!
Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#5"It's insanely hard to make a kick ass _____" One of the reasons mobile design is so hard is because you have to use 100% of the screen. Not only do you need to make it look good, but you also need to squeeze the resources of the phone. You have to worry about battery life, network usage, and storage space. It's a challenge, but it makes the end result a lot better. The same rules really should apply to development o…
>>"because you have to use 100% of the screen"
I think the that kind of restrain on the user would make work on native mobile development side easier. All you would have to deal with is 2x views (portrait & landscape) vs all the possible combinations of web screen sizes.
Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#6"It's insanely hard to make a kick ass _____" One of the reasons mobile design is so hard is because you have to use 100% of the screen. Not only do you need to make it look good, but you also need to squeeze the resources of the phone. You have to worry about battery life, network usage, and storage space. It's a challenge, but it makes the end result a lot better. The same rules really should apply to development o…
>>"because you have to use 100% of the screen" I think the that kind of restrain on the user would make work on native mobile development side easier. All you would have to deal with is 2x views (portrait & landscape) vs all the possible combinations of web screen sizes.
>> 2x views
Yeah, your right. Even if you consider Android, it becomes just a bit more complicated.
Your point is very true for development (It's what I love about iOS) but for design it's a challenge.
It really makes you focus on the one thing. Take gmail for example. On the web, I can do 20 different things, but in iOS the choices are limited to 3-4. It's really hard to make things simple, so where you make the compromises is the challenge.
Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#7Are 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 any reviews for these apps, it's hard to imagine they spent much time on marketing, even just sending some free copies to bloggers to get their feedback and see if they might review it.
I'm not saying it's easy to hit points 1-3 above; it's not. But I wonder if a lot of indie app developers threw together something crappy in a few weekends of work because of all the stories out there about the big money being made, and then when it failed to materialize for them, they just gave up.
The App Store has gotten millions of people to collectively pay billions for software made by indie developers, which is amazing. But it's still a marketplace and the normal rules of any marketplace apply.
I would love for an experienced iOS developer making money to tell me if I'm wrong, and why.
Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#8I've found it far less insanely hard than what you need to know to make a kick ass web app.
Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>"because you have to use 100% of the screen" I think the that kind of restrain on the user would make work on native mobile development side easier. All you would have to deal with is 2x views (portrait & landscape) vs all the possible combinations of web screen sizes.
>> 2x views Yeah, your right. Even if you consider Android, it becomes just a bit more complicated. Your point is very true for development (It's what I love about iOS) but for design it's a challenge. It really makes you focus on the one thing. Take gmail for example. On the web, I can do 20 different things, but in iOS the choices are limited to 3-4. It's really hard to make things simple, so where you make the com…
I was trying to make the comparison to iOS (theoretically iphone/itouch) vs web. Whether you focus on a single native mobile environment or multiple, I kinda think the scales at least from the UX design perspective if not also the development side.
Re: It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass iPhone App
#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.
Granted, it doesn't have all the features of desktop Photoshop, but it looks like it has a lot of the features, and it has great ratings.