I am a member of a gliding club with 150 members, and we want to have our own iPhone app. Requiring a member login, the app would be usable only by members of the club, and it would be used by an estimated 20-30 people.
Is it even possible to disribute such an app to non-jailbroken iPhones? According to my research:
It wouldn't be accepted on the App Store due to "limited audience".
Even if we were able and willing to pay $300 for the enterprise distribution model, Apple would likely not accept us as a company.
Ad hoc distribution would be fine for us except for the expiration time associated with apps distributed in the manner.
Are we at a dead end?
Thanks.
Edit: In case anyone is wondering why I didn't just ask Apple directly: I did, and their answer was, "We are unable to advise you with respect to the Apple Developer Program that best fits your needs."
I'm not 100% on your question.
But depending on your requirement, pretty much everything you need can be achieved as a web app, with the correct coding behind it i.e. CACHE MANIFEST you could make the app function similar to the a native app, available offline and can be saved to any iOS device through the browser.
Give me a shout if you need more information.
Hope it helps
Gary
You could always try to make the app a little more "global"? Perhaps offer some free stuff for Joe Bloggs to use, but tucked away you have your real motive... that way you can get it released legitimately.
I've seen some real disasters in the app store that shouldn't have made it, and I'm sure Apples screening isn't as intense as we might think. (example: that flash light application, when pressing a sequence of buttons it would enable free tethering).
Best of luck!
Yup. You seem to have all the options laid out pretty clearly, and there's no other way to do it. Except developing for android, and just distributing the application freely and without arbitrary restrictions.
Sorry.
Ad-hoc distribution would give you about 90 days expiration time, i think, whereas enterprise would give you a year. Though gaining enterprise status in the eyes of apple is easier said than done.
Even if we were able and willing to pay $300 for the enterprise distribution model, Apple would likely not accept us as a company.
You don't have to be a company to apply for the enterprise account, you just need to be an organisation with a DUNS number.
Related
I need to create and App that will run in the background and will monitor the user's behavior in term of applications installed, opened and deleted.
i.e Application will save the information in the database that at what time user has installed/opened/deleted an application in iphone.
I wonder if its possible and Apple will allow this??
I tried to google on it but did not get anything, i know if its possible then it would be possible by multiasking only??
Can any one please help me on the same.
Brn
Not possible. Your app can only run when the user chooses to (except for a limited sub-set of tasks like VoIP, etc).
Your app can know nothing about other apps.
iOS apps are sandboxed. I wouldn't say impossible but certainly not allowed. You'd have to find a security hole to give you root access first. Oh, and notify us when you do ;).
Edit:
Maybe it wasn't clear in my post but I was at least half joking. Not sure why you want to do what you want to do. I can imagine the following scenarios:
1) Your company wants to monitor everything their users do on their phones. In that case I would either
a) lock them down and only allow app installation through a company portal (enterprise distribution is possible in iOS) OR
b) forget about iOS alltogether. Blackberry would probably be closer to what you want, although I don't really have experience with that platform. Also, its future is not sure.
2) You're trying to do something illegitimate. Because of iOS's locked down nature it won't be easy. See how few successful attacks there have been in the last years - and that's for a highly successful platform where an attack could be high paying both in terms of money and reputation.
Does anyone know if there are rules against rating your own app in the app store? I would assume that most people would give their own app a 5 star rating if there were no rules - but maybe I'm wrong. Does anyone know for sure?
Sure you are a developer, but because Apple does not allow you to purchase free copies of your app and review, you are also a paying customer. And in Apple's customer user agreement, you are entitled to review anything you purchase.
It's probably not the most ethical thing, but just be aware that if you actually write a review, people can see what other reviews you have written and put two-and-two together to figure out that it's the developer writing reviews.
Most of the crApps out there do this using 50 different iTunes accounts and it's rather deceitful IMHO, at least on that scale.
Something like that would be covered in the User Agreement which is under NDA so it might be hard to get a definite answer.
I did read of a case where an App developer was banned for making fraudulent reviews and ratings which meant his 1600+ Apps were removed. Throughout the forums there were many accusations of other developers doing the exact same thing in a smaller scale that were never banned. So in a nut shell you can get banned for it, but it could be common practice amongst some App developers, just don't get caught.
Look at it this way: Either there's a lot of ratings, and a single rating by yourself won't make a big impact, or you're the only rating, and people will look at only a single rating and not think it's representative enough.
I don't think there's any advantages that outweigh the fact that it's bad form.
We're days away from submitting our first app to the appstore and
last night I was horrified to hear that it does not work on
jailbroken devices. I got a few seconds with the device and saw the OS version, and free memory available (36MB, I guess that's low).
Should I care?
Presumably jailbreak users can buy the app and write scathing reviews.
If so and jailbroken iPhones are common, then the iPhoneJB becomes a de facto shadow-platform that I'm obliged to support.
EDIT
I got some ball park figures, sounds like I should care about the new de facto shadow platform. So either I can try reducing memory requirements and cross my fingers, or get out the credit card and go get me another iPhone to jailbreak.
With around 2.3 million jailbroken iPhones, it is a significant portion of the market. I have a jailbroken iPhone, but most of my apps are from the App Store. I vote yes.
This is a similar issue to what many web developers run into: should they support Internet Explorer 6? While as of this writing 14.9% of the market still uses IE6, many web developers choose not to support it because it is difficult and takes too much time. My own experience was that supporting IE6 caused 50% of my work; that's obviously not a good trade-off.
As Jergason mentioned, there are 2.3 million jailbroken iPhones. Obviously that's a large market. But compare that with the 30 million iPhones total sold as of March 2009. You could probably find better numbers to compare, but assuming those numbers are roughly accurate, less than 10% of the market is jailbroken. Look at how much work, money, etc. it's going to take to support jailbroken phones. I don't know how much work it would take, but when it comes to money, my guess is that simply the cost of getting a jailbroken iPhone to test on will be more than 10% of your revenue (iPhone dev tends to be a small-scale operation, but I don't know the nature of your product so I could be way off-base here).
So my vote is neither yes nor no: do the research and get more detailed stats than I've provided here. When you have your information, don't spend a larger percentage of your revenue supporting a segment of the market than that segment is as a percentage of the whole.
Of course you don't have to support anyone you don't want to! Ultimately, as others have noted, it's a business decision.
In my experience, you'll spend a disproportionate amount of time supporting users with jailbroken handsets. I spent more than twenty hours tracking down one problem that only affected jailbroken phones and even then only found the solution entirely by accident.
Having said that, some of my most enthusiastic (or at least vocal!) users have jailbroken handsets.
At the time of writing, about 25% of users of my free version have a jailbroken handset and 10% for the paid version.
In the end I try to support all users but I do put a higher priority on users with vanilla handsets. I'd draw the line at users of cracked versions, but I have no reason to suspect that's the case.
Incidenally, technically you'd be in breach of your iPhone Developer Program agreement if you used a jailbroken handset. And 36Mb sounds like a lot of available memory for anything other than a 3GS.
The accepted answer to this question seems fine, but I thought I'd add one more (technical) issue to consider.
If you don't at least test your app on jailbroken devices, you may not be aware of some security vulnerabilities. If your app contains any kind of sensitive information, you might want to make sure it can't be easily accessed on a jailbroken device. This might include protecting users' data, or protecting the corporate data on the back end.
Jailbroken phones allow a user to ssh into the phone, and browse any file on the filesystem. The sandbox is nullified (App Store apps will still be limited to their own sandboxes, but non App Store apps will be able to read and write the sandboxes of other apps, including App Store apps).
NSUserDefaults used to store sensitive information, for example, are easily exploited on a jailbroken device.
Even the keychain can be subverted on jailbroken phones.
It would be nice if you didn't have to worry about this, but at least through iOS 6, you really do need to worry about it. So far, Apple has not been able to (or maybe doesn't want to) completely prevent jailbreaking, so it's a real-world vulnerability. Ignoring it is probably not doing your clients or users any favors.
Do your market research. Do you expect to sell to alot of users with jail broken iPhones? Then you need to decide how important that revenue is to you...
I finished building an app that allows beaming of photos, contacts and text clips over Wi-Fi
IPhone to IPhone and IPhone to desktop.
I want to decide on the feature set of the lite version of my IPhone app. I also want to come up with a pricing model. So the question is, which of these components should be free, and for which I should be charging for ?
For example, the lite version could have all features except the ability to interact with the desktop version - that is, it would work IPhone to IPhone, but not IPhone to desktop. The paid version would be able to beam to the desktop. In addition, the desktop version would be free, so you could share it with family and friends.
Alternatively, there would be a single free IPhone version and I would charge for the desktop app. The only thing here is that I would have to setup server side code for managing registration codes.
One reason to make your desktop app free and the iPhone app a paid product would be to take advantage of Apple's app store and their payment processing, hosting, etc. While I know 30% seems steep for what Apple provides, it is nice to have that part of the business be handled by someone else. For example, you will never have to deal with credit card processing or have to issue refunds - Apple does all that for you.
I like the mechanism that is more suited to viral distribution and giving people a good taste of all the features, before they are sort of convinced to go for the paid version. The marketing value of an app that can be freely tried out once one user recommends it to another, is invaluable. If someone recommends a product to me and I have to pay for it, then I probably would put off trying it till alter when I have learned more about it. However, if it is free, I can download and try it without feeling like I need to do more research prior. Once I like, and am hooked on it, then I will want locked functionality that I would have to pay to unlock.
I'd stay away from selling, payment processing, and reg code management, if your expertise is in coding - you'd make yourself more money writing more code than writing reg code management utilities...
Good luck.
I'm not sure charging for either is the best idea. If you keep both tools free, you get people trying (and liking) both apps. Viral distribution will ensure a decent user base. Once people use both tools, they're more likely to pay for the next part, which is the connector software.
I like your idea of three parts: a free iPhone app (Let people share photos on their iPhone), free PC app (There are hundreds of photo viewing apps, free... Don't try to charge for them, that way lies pain) and paid connection between 'em.
That way:
You get people using your iPhone app virally (To share with each other's phones & try out the application)
You get people using your PC app virally (Because the cost to try is nearly null)
The connection can be sold through Apple's iStore, so you don't need to do the money handling side
You could even make the connection component a subscription, but as an end user I hate that idea unless I get some additional functionality from it being a subscription (Like free hosting).
What does it mean that I have to "apply"? Can day say: "No, we don't like your nose. Do something else!"? Did they do that in the past?
I've been investing now two full months worth about 20.000 USD on learning for iPhone programming, and I didn't apply yet...
I've never heard of them rejecting an application for developer license. But I've heard plenty of stories of them rejecting code. That's the much larger risk with Apple's stranglehold on the iPhone marketplace.
There is no reason for them not to accept you as a iPhone developer. There is no situation that I know of where they have denied the application provisioning for testing out on the iPhone. They can and will deny your app submission to the app store in some cases. Usually those cases include:
Using copyrighted assets which you do not have a license for
Competing with one of their apps (mail client was the only one I know of)
No value added (yet another "flashlight" app - pretty rare)
Opening the iPhone to scripting attack through download.
Does not conform to their UI guides
The last of these is the trickiest. A friend of mine had his app rejected because he used a UI widget in an unexpected way. This is pretty subjective IMO but they did tell him exactly why they denied it and accepted it when he fixed the issue.
Also about the 20,000, I can't agree here. In addition to learning and bettering yourself as a programmer, you are assuming that you would be paid for every off hour you spend learning - not very realistic.
Apple has a right to not accept your app at their wish, so you have to take a risk.
Yes they could. That's the risk behind developing for any tightly locked down environment.
Of course in practice they are unlikely to reject you for no reason.
And you're already taking a gigantic risk by investing $20k into iPhone development. I can't help wondering if this is a saturated market, although there have been a few well publicised success stories, everybody and his dog are now working on a bejeweled clone, and lets face it, even people who buy iphones are going to be looking a reduction in spending on pointless trivia soon with the market the way it is