Marcus Cavanaugh: 2011 Drake iOS Talk

2011 Drake iOS Talk

Here are the notes for the talk I gave at Drake’s 2011 iPhone Development class:

Code Resources

  • Stack Overflow for questions
  • Search for "iPhone _____ library": popups, audio, networking, JSON, Facebook, Twitter… many of the results from GitHub (an open-source code sharing site) will be good.
  • Here’s a list of 10 iOS libraries.
  • If a popular app has a cool UI widget, someone probably cloned it as open source.
  • If you’re writing a lot of code that isn’t for the main feature of your app, chances are, someone has already posted code for it and there are questions on Stack Overflow about it. Don’t reinvent the wheel.
  • To brush up on major iOS libraries, check out the iTunes U talks. I used Stanford’s.
  • Apple’s documentation is great. XCode 4’s documentation browser is also great.

The App Submission Process

  • If you’ve figured out how to get certificates and provisioning to work, you’re 90% of the way there.
  • Expect a week for every update. Best to submit and forget about it.
  • You might get rejected. (Crashes, Private APIs, violations of Apple’s terms)
  • You can expedite the process for good reason, but use sparingly. They won’t do it often.
  • Apple’s reviewers don’t test for old iOS versions. If yours breaks on an old version, you’ll hear about it in bad reviews. Consider only developing for the latest iOS (set your build target to iOS 4, for instance).

Building a Business

  • Do math; with a couple of solid apps, you can live off the money.
    • Pricing: $5 x 70% = $3.50. Sell 20 apps a day to make $25,000/year. (Or two apps with 10 sales/day).
    • Don’t sell for $.99 or less. You’ll go broke.
  • Sales can be unreliable if your app isn’t popular.
  • Lots of categories are saturated with apps. Don’t make another gimmick app unless your gimmick is new. Popularity is everything. Browse the categories on the App Store to get ideas. (There’s the Mac App Store too.)
  • Try as hard as you can to market your app.
  • Subdivide sent out 300 physical letters to band directors across Iowa. It seems to have paid off.
  • Get people to post reviews (either by asking users in-app, or word of mouth).
  • Track your sales with something like AppViz.
  • When all else fails, you could write apps for other people. Charge $100/hour. (Tell them that ahead of time.)

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