SDK

A Developer’s view on iOS development…

First a disclaimer:

This is a personal view and opinion and should not be taken as hard facts, not everybody would have the same experience. I’m sharing this because I think it might be interesting to others.

Some background first…

I’ve been toying with Cocoa development since around 2003 and back then it was difficult getting any information on how to use the tools and it all came down to doing a LOT of reading and a LOT of pain to figure things out. Since then there’s been a lot of great resources that showed up on the scene and a lot of books has been written on the subject matter. Given that I am a sucker for punishment (hey I have to be; I’m a developer right!?) I ended up learning about a lot of the pitfalls and quick wins in the Apple development world. I’ve since trained other developers in the art of not shooting yourself in the foot etc etc…

Now for the bit you actually want to read…

When Apple announced the iPhoneOS 2.0 SDK I was registered and ready to go as soon as I was able to do so, living in New Zealand meant that at that point in time we did not have access to official iPhones that’s supported by Apple – and this made life interesting. I paid my subscription fees as soon as Apple would take my money because this was the next gold rush! With every new platform it’s normally a case of using it for a while to realise what is missing form it so you can develop the required software. Unfortunately it took me a while to realise what I’d like to have on it and low and behold there was nothing like that on the App store (at this point in time there was only around 500-1000 apps on the store so it wasn’t exactly hard). Being a consultant the thing that I’m the worst at and is the most important, is keeping track of my billable hours – this is also my least favourite thing to do but my life depends on it so to speak.

Time Tracker was born (if you’re that way inclined you can search for it on the app store) and it was meant to be the “be all and end all” of my time keeping woes. I designed and built it to function the way I do, and believe me when I tell you I function in strange ways. Given that I’m a unix geek at heart the application reflects this, it’s minimalistic does exactly what it needs to with the least amount of effort possible (get in and out quickly so you can carry on with the important stuff right!?). Of course as life would have it, during the development a few other applications showed up on the scene doing the same thing, and they were priced cheaper than what I intended on pricing Time Tracker (More on sales numbers later on). This almost made me give up and just buy one of those applications to help me keep my time and forget about Time Tracker.

So what kept me going, firstly I had a bit of down time in my consulting – it wasn’t enough for me to rush out and find more work so I figured I’d just wait it out till my regular client’s were ready to pass more work onto me. This was also the perfect excuse I needed to apply Cocoa in anger – as I’ve always wanted to. I must admit that it only took me around 60 hours of development to get a functioning version up and running, but it took about another 60 hours to deal with all the other supplementary requirements to have an app up on the iTunes App Store. Since it’s been on the app store I’ve not done too much to it but fix the occasional bug and breaking changes that Apple introduced with each new release of iOS. I’ve also spent a fair bit of time with customers having issues (and sometimes these are as a result of their device not Time Tracker – this could be hours wasted). To make life easy we can call it 250 hours spent on Time Tracker and these house are still counting.

Given these numbers I would have had to sell around 5500 units at an average of $4 per application just to break even, granted my pricing varied a little over the last 2.5 years but on average it would be about $4 per unit.

So the burning question is “How did the sales go?”.

To be honest I didn’t even recover half of my investment (I’m not complaining about this, I had fun doing it and it taught me a little bit more about Cocoa so I write it down to training). Next you’d probably ask me why I still have Time Tracker listed on the App store and that would be a fair question. I’m still getting a few payments from Apple once in a while for sales on the few small Apps I have on the store, it’s not much but it covers the fees I need to pay Apple every year to keep my subscription active, so it doesn’t appear to do any harm. This assumption is of course wrong because all it takes is one person to email me with a strange issue they are experiencing and I can waste 8 – 16 hours testing and debugging (sometimes there’s a real bug, but most of the time it’s not, as every good developer should; I always assume that I’m to blame and start looking at my creation to figure it out).

Another point of interest is that I created a Lite version of Time Tracker that I intended on giving away free. I quickly reversed that idea and have since been selling it mostly a the lowest price possible due to the other developers downloading it so they can give it a horrible rating and review (I’m not saying all the bad reviews are by the competition, Time Tracker is certainly not for everybody and I’m not ashamed to admit this either). I’ve also experimented with giving away the Apps for free for a few days to see if it would increase my user base, I’ve learnt that people will download anything just because it’s free but never use it. I could tell this from my upgrade statistics every time I’ve released and update.

Now it’s not all bad, I sometimes get emails from users who really get what Time Tracker is meant to be, here’s an snippet from one I received recently:

I have evaluated like 3-4 Time Tracking application and I think your version is really the best. It’s the cleanest and simplest – quick and fun to use. All others had too much really unncessary buttons and stuff – with the cost of usability.

I also get a lot of feature requests, but unfortunately it’s not possible to implement these as I’m already behind and spending more time on it is ultimately just stupid – new feature does not translate to more sales as it’s already a niche market.

So what have I learnt from this experience and what can you take away from all of this:

• The cost of product development is far more than building the product itself.
• If you’re thinking of building any old random application for the App store and expect to make a lot of money out of it, you’re probably wrong (then again you may get lucky – it does happen).
• Knowing how to build iOS software is actually valuable, as I briefly mentioned I train developers and I also build software for other companies (this is far more lucrative).
• People like free, but that doesn’t mean they’ll use it.
• People actually expect a lot for very little payment, some feature requests would take more than the 250 hours spent on Time Tracker alone.
• I’m not the best use case designer for Time Keeping tools – it might make perfect sense to me, but not many others think so!

So naturally you might ask if I’d do it all over again? The answer is Yes. The simple fact of having an App up on the App store has lead to a fair bit of other business. I’ve built some software on the iPad that will hopefully earn me a bit of money and make some people in the enterprise space very happy, it’s not up on the App store yet, but it will be and it will be free – the business model is completely different for this and I might even blog about it in the future. I’m also about to embark on another App store project with a team of great people and an idea that sounds like it’s got much better legs than Time Tracker – also this time I would not be designing and building for myself which will make a huge difference. I still think there’s a lot of untapped potential in the iOS space hopefully I can tap into some of this and do better in the future.

The bottom line is that even though I’ve just outlined a less than favourable experience, it’s not completely put me off the idea of building App Store Apps. It’s better to have tried something and failed than to never have tried at all.

If you’ve read this far and I’ve completely put you off building iOS applications, don’t be put off, build it regardless.

The absolute worst case scenario would be that you’ve learnt something new, this is never a bad thing!