Something I've noticed about every iPhone app I've tried is that they all have places where they seem very slow and unresponsive. It's true of the games, the free apps, the pricy, popular, "professional" apps, and even a couple of Apple's built-in apps. They all seem to have places where they take many seconds or even a minute to respond to screen touches; bog down and show a spinning beachball for seconds at a time; "queue up" input so that a button press appears to ignored only to actually do something ten seconds later like a poorly made DVR; and lock up for so long that the OS watchdog just kills them.
Because these perf issues are so widespread it seems to me that there must be some common performance pitfalls some system gotchas that are coming up over and over again for lots of different people. I'm not an iPhone developer myself, so I'm canvassing the community's opinions:
What are the most common performance mistakes on the iPhone?
Or, what human factors of iPhone development make it too easy to ship with poor performance?
I think that the performance issues are a matter of perception. Apple has employed animation throughout every aspect of the iPhone's interface, which produces the impression of a smooth, responsive device. The slowdowns you refer to appear much worse than they might be because they stand out from the otherwise fluid interface. If you compare the total execution times of these tasks to similar applications on other mobile devices, I'd guess that the iPhone implementations would still come out near the top.
There's always room for improvement, though, and I'd expect that many of the tricks people have learned in the last year will lead to faster, more responsive applications. Even the development tools themselves are advancing, and that should make it easier to diagnose and deal with performance bottleneck. I know I keep learning new tricks every week for squeezing a little more out of the CPU, GPU, or onboard memory.
I'm still surprised by how quickly people have shifted their expectations as to what handheld devices can do. I'm the author of an open source application called Molecules, which does 3-D molecular modeling on the iPhone. A little over ten years ago, these types of renderings were being done on dedicated SGI Irix workstations. A few weeks after the launch of the App Store, I started receiving emails from people complaining that the application was a little jerky when they tried to manipulate molecules with over 20,000 atoms in their structure. In a very short time, people went from treating these devices like phones and music players to viewing them as portable computers.
Memory management is a bit of a beast.
But I think the biggest problem is this: How long can you afford to polish a product that will sell for 99 cents and compete with tens of thousands of other apps and has unknown revenue potential in a rapidly changing market?
The iPhone is a GREAT little device, but the competition for mindshare is fierce and expensive.
As mentioned before the ratio of profit/time spent in development would explain it.
More technically, I would say that the lag you see is created on startup when apps are either getting data over network or calling home to check for updates and so on. Additionaly it may be created with initializing application like loading large amounts of data from database/files, loading gui components and images, drawing and so on.
Similar to memory management this all can be solved by designing operations to run in background, lazy loading and so on but that requires more time, time is money, you don't get much for 99C app which may or may not sell at all.
It is interesting that so many times it is pointed out in professional articles (no ref...) that we should not care anymore about memory and speed because desktops are getting faster with more memory. What people tend to forget is that at the same we're trying to squeeze more power from smaller and smaller devices that are running with smaller resources.
Most web pages for example are nowadays designed to load huge amounts of animations and images and, unlike some, are not tweaked at all for performance but do just okay on desktops. Those web pages have no chance of loading on mobile device. The same goes for applications, designing a fat big framework (or gui widget library) for desktop will make it ultra difficult to port the functionality to sleek mobile device be it iphone, some fruit berry and what not.
As in other things in life, you get what you paid for.
My 99C.
I think the biggest issue is that it's impossible to determine the speed of an app without actually running it on the device. Developers perform most of the basic app testing in the iPhone Simulator (which can run up to 1000x times as fast in my experience). Some operations that take a split second in the simulator might require a progress indicator on the phone, and by the time you realize, it would require a lot of effort to go back and add (and in some cases thread) the operation in question. As Noshredna pointed out, it's generally a 99c app.
The iPhone's processor is also just fundamentally limiting. I've seen several nice looking apps that try to do very impressive things without accepting the constraints of the platform.
This is sort of a side note, and I don't want to start the mobile platform wars, but I've found that iPhone Apps are generally more responsive than Android apps...
Well, because maybe you deleated the app and install again because something wrong happens to it, so it must took awhile, it took me about 2 or 3 days to get full loaded so be patient, it will come eventually. Also maybe your iphone doesn't have any more spaces for your app, or your app is quite heavy, try and delete other apps so it will have rooms.
Related
I build websites for a living and have a very accurate way to cost them.
I am being asked to price an iPhone app for viewing real estate properties that is virtually a website on an iphone.
I need to know roughly how much more/less it would take to build.
Here are the screens.
Home page
View all houses (about 20)
Click on house for details
View images, floor plans
Add to favorites
The app is hard coded, nothing is downloaded from the internet.
There is nothing particularly "iPhone-y" about the application - no complex visual interfaces, no GPS functionality and so forth.
Could someone give me a rough estimate as to how long these apps take to build compared to a website for an experienced developer? I am not talking about a newbie, someone whose has plenty of iPhone experience.
It takes no time at all for simple static content. Actually, I would say it takes FAR less time than a website (Interface builder is WAY faster than CSS).
For an experienced developer, it would take a couple hours, max.
There's learning curve time and individual project execution time.
After you've learned the tools and the process, wrapping a simple web site or web app into a self-contained iOS app might only take a fraction of an hour.
Learning curve time is harder to forecast. A consultant might be able to walk you though the process in a couple hours. But some developers have spent days debugging their way though developer certificates, provisioning, the build process, and the App store submission process the very first time.
I know this question is not programming related, so for this I made community wiki. Developers are the best guys to answer the question.
I am addressed to those that do development on devices that runs on batteries, like phones, gadgets etc. Probably you are constantly develop for them, and therefor they are always plugged in and charged at 100%. We develop mainly for smartphones and we have devices that were always above 90% charged in the last month or so.
If a battery is always charged, it degrades it life cycle, so what steps you do to ensure decent battery drain to maximize the life of the batteries.
I think you're talking about "battery memory" which affect NiCd batteries. Most devices use NiMH or LiIon, which doesn't have the problem.
Keep it unplugged sometimes. For a laptop, you can use the laptops battery just fine. For a mobile device like a phone, this is a little more annoying because you are trying to upload to it fairly regularly (but not constantly).
Use the spare. Have a 'dev' battery that you use when constantly plugged in. When done developing and ready to show off your new fart widget to all your friends, just swap the battery out.
Here's a good write-up on Lithium-Ion batteries too:
http://www.batteryuniversity.com/parttwo-34.htm
I'm developing for mobile phones so often that i have phones only for the purpose for devloping of them. So I don't care about the battery. And if I'm missing to seen a low memory screen, I use this app, to get the feeling back ;)
I don't really see a problem. If you're really professional you need 1 or even more (e.g. to simulate network etc) mobile phones for the sole purpose of developing. And if you use the phones also for your private purpose, the the battery will decrease anyway during your spare time.
There's nothing you can really do about it.
With some older devices, it was possible to use them with the battery taken out if the charger was in (how most laptops currently work), but this is very rare.
The best you can do is to unplug it whenever possible (there must be times when you're coding for long periods of time or doing other stuff and don't need the device plugged in).
Also, don't charge it overnight if you know it will be in the charger the next day.
Remember, though, many new devices use Li-ion and Ni-Mh batteries now, which are much more reliable than their Ni-Cd counterparts on this front, so you are unlikely to see deterioration as quickly.
To minimize the loss of Li-ion battery capacity over time:
Keep your devices not plugged as long as possible to have minimal charge level.
Keep your batteries as cool as possible.
You can also remove batteries if your device doesn't require them to operate and store them in a cool place.
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I want to know how difficult is to develop on iPhone plataform. By difficult I want to mean:
Effort in terms of programmer versus software complexity. To be clear: how many programmers are needed to develop a medium sized app on iPhone?
SDK learning curve.
Hardware and other non-programming related stuff affecting the development
How easy is to sell iPhone software. To be specific: is easy to sell an app on itunes? does it cost something? I'm confused about how to sell that apps on iTunes store...
any one has experience on advertisement supported apps? please tell me... how has been that?
thanks
One programmer (a good all-rounder) can easily do it. Once you have done your first app you will be surprised to see what sells and how little actual programming there is in some apps. The reason you have to be a good all-rounder is that the apps that succeed have it all - design, inspiration, execution. Consider involving a designer if your taste doesn't match what seems to be popular. Don't expect to ship anything with standard UIButtons, on the store it stands out like the proverbials. Normal practices are essential, e.g. revision control, issue tracking and all that good stuff. It seems to matter more the higher level an API you work to.
SDK learning curve - not so bad. Initially you struggle with why a NSArray can't take another value, but inside 1-2 months you'll be subclassing things all over the place. However read below, don't try to do too much custom stuff...
You need an Intel mac, you need at minimum an iPod touch to submit an app - try to submit without testing on actual hardware and you will miss something, and it will be rejected. You don't have to have the latest Mac OS or Xcode to get started but you probably do for store submission. If configuring choose more RAM over more processor speed. An SSD is essential. BIG (or multiple) screens are, as with any coding task, a big advantage. The new 27" iMac would be a great development machine. It's hard to go wrong with current Macs, I have had good experiences with an 11" Air and a mini, they're not that much different from a Mac Pro as far as development goes once you have a big monitor plugged in.
Selling is not so hard. Provided your app isn't complete rubbish and doesn't get 10 1-star reviews right away sheer numbers will get you some sales. To make it big is hard, and you will need to investigate marketing, review sites, twitter, youtube, in fact to your all-rounder programmer skills you can add marketing director. The noise on the store (sheer number of applications) means only a truly stellar application (i.e. featured by Apple) will stand out in the absence of any other effort. There are probably plenty of apps on the store than in 2008 would have made their developers rich, these days they are lucky to sell 1000. The cost is $99 to join and after that you get 70% of sales revenue while Apple keeps 30%.
Additionally...
With the context that I am a C/C++ programmer who has spent most time programming embedded devices and handsets, with almost no C#/STL/Java...
Here's what I found easy/good:
Xcode (although I admit getting started was jarring coming from Visual Studio)
brevity - what you can do in just a few lines of code is amazing
Stanford CS193P iPhone programming class on iTunes University - great intro, free!
WWDC video sessions. Not cheap but probably worth more than what you pay in terms of in-depth knowledge. I've been to similar developer conferences that were more of an excuse to stay in a nice hotel and do some duty-free shopping but if I'm not at WWDCI will feel like I'm at a severe disadvantage. The big benefit of getting to WWDC is the people you meet, this and lab sessions are what you win if you get lucky in the ticket lottery. All the technical presentations you get for free on video these days.
Here's what I found hard:
knowing just what storage classes to use in a certain situation. My first huge performance problem came from using indexForObject on NSArray with hundreds of thousands of objects. Obvious now but who knows this the first time it happens to them?
"letting go" of preconceived ideas about what a UI should do. Don't go laying out a .xib until you have used at least 20 iPhone applications and have some idea of how things are usually done. Doing things otherwise is not only likely to be harder, if your idea is too far against Human Interface Guidelines chances are it will never be accepted to the store anyway.
Xcode debugging messages - do google these because they are cryptic at first but when you find other people explaining them they start to make sense after a while
Here's what I found completely perplexing and got working through trial and effort:
Apple's on-device provisioning process
actual submission to the App Store
So far I have one small game on the store. It's not a particularly good game unless you really like that kind of thing, and only scrabble nerds do, but it still has 10 sales after 1 week and that's with no publicity at all. I did it to get experience with how the store works and by that measure it was a success. In learning curve terms it took me probably six, seven weeks full time from opening the first Apple doc to submitting the game, but today I could do it in about two days.
edit: Incredible to think that this answer is now more than two years old and that people still vote on it. Well I didn't become an app store millionaire but many people have and it can still happen even though we now see some big companies producing very polished apps with large budgets. What's the secret ingredient? Passion, which brings attention to detail. If you love your app there's a good chance users will also.
I didn't get to WWDC 2010 but I did get to 2011, 2012 and 2013. Keep at it, independent developers - you will almost certainly not do well enough on your first app to retire, but you will be working on an awesome platform, growing fast, with an incredible community behind it. You can make a good living by yourself. And if you do give up your independence the job market is very, very good.
more edit: Did I mention CocoaHeads? Find your local iOS programmers and find out about CocoaHeads. If there isn't one consider starting one. Either you will discover opportunities (i.e. projects, or even employment) or you will discover people to hire when you have succeeded and can't be a 1-person shop any more. Not to mention the useful free education speakers at these groups represent.
Swift is now perhaps less weird than Objective C seems to a programmer coming from some other language. I do think it's the right choice if you're beginning, Apple are clearly pushing it as the future and it has gotten much better since introduction in 2014. You may find learning Swift is an advantage, if you have that option - many developers are stuck supporting existing projects in Objective C.
iOS continues to grow and be an interesting and fun platform and I don't think it's slowing down. OS X is keeping pace. I'm still very happy I made the choice to do this back in 2009. Come on in, the market's fine.
We have started developing about a year ago and currently have two OpenGL 2D games on the market. My experience so far:
Simple application can easily be a one-man show. For a medium-sized application you are likely to manage with just one good programmer, but usually there are other people needed, such as a graphics designer. This highly depends on the nature of your application.
A bit steep if you have no experience with Objective-C and Cocoa. C knowledge helps, as does knowledge of some OO and computer language concepts. Even then you’ll spend some time getting used to their way of doing things. (Which is usually well-thought, but often different from what other people/languages/stacks do.)
The biggest non-programming issue is the crazy provisioning and review stuff. It takes a while to get used to all the profiles and certificates and signing voodoo. You are going to hate it, but will get used to it.
Selling the app is hard. You either have to be one of the lucky ones to make it into the featured apps on the device or you have to be some big title or your application has to be something with a clear audience (like Geocaching) or you will have trouble getting a decent coffee for what you earn. (I am over-simplifying here, but it’s mostly true.) The selling process itself is pretty much painless – $99/year and Apple gets a third of what you earn.
Depends what you mean by "medium-sized". Also depends how long you want it to take. In general, to make a decent app, you need a combination of things: programming skill, artistic skill, design skill, and business knowledge. Most people don't like to do all of those things. I'd guess that the majority of iPhone apps only have a single actual programmer, though. You can tell the ones that were written by a programmer who should have gotten some help with the other aspects.
Depends what you already know. It took me a month before Objective C stopped seeming really bizarre, and I've used lots of different languages.
The hardware isn't a problem unless you don't already have a Mac, an iPhone, and an iPod Touch. The biggest non-programming thing for me is the App Store review process; you have to understand that when you think you're done, you're going to need to wait a couple of weeks, and it's possible that the idea you thought was great falls into some category that will never ever be approved, or that you'll have to change your app's name, etc.
It's easy to offer apps for sale on iTunes, once you pay your $99. If your goal is for people all over the world to download your free app, or to put your app on sale and make tens of dollars, the App Store is great. If you're hoping to make millions of dollars, or even thousands, you have to be some combination of competent, persistent, and lucky.
It's rather difficult to answer your question owing to the fact that often this is highly subjective in my previous experience.
1) Generally the effort is much lower than the one required when using a different platform. Those acquainted to software engineering principles including the use of design patterns etc will find that the SDK is built around all of the common abstraction we are used (except a very small part still using C style procedural APIs).
2) The learning curve is steep for people rolling this on their own, is really easy for people being taught on the matter. A fast course style exposure to the SDK and tools (say 40 hours total) it's usually enough for people to become proficient enough.
3) There are no hardware issue to be taken into account, at least in my experience. As already pointed out by Zoul, provisioning the devices takes some time to get used to. The submission/review process is in my opinion a little easier.
4) Selling is as difficult as it is on other platforms. But if you have got a really brilliant idea, then you usually sell many copies of your software. Or, the idea may not be so brilliant, but the software you develop is fundamental for a specific field targeting people always on the move etc. Just developing something without a clear target is the perfect recipe for disaster.
What is your definition of "medium sized app". It could easily be just yourself, or it could be a few people including a designer. Also, to some degree if you have more time you need fewer people.
That depends heavily on your experience to date. Many people have come over from .Net and Java development and not found it too hard... you probably need at least a month to be comfortable with a lot of the concepts.
You need a Mac, that is it. Any Intel mac with 2GB of memory will do.
It's very easy to sell, since all you do is upload a binary and (after a wait for Apple to approve it) Apple puts it up for sale. You need no servers. You do need to pay a yearly $99 fee to develop.
Very subjective. A one person app developer can develop a medium sized app. How long will it take? Depends on how much free time the developer has and how much experience with Obj-C.
I learned some parts of the SDK in less than a day. I still don't know the entire SDK, as I haven't needed to. I doubt that any one programmer would want to spend the time to learn the entire SDK. For example, if you aren't doing anything with the accelerometer, why study it?
You need to roll up your sleeves and delve into it yourself to see how long it takes you. If you are asking for your team, then you will have to judge how well their expertise will apply.
As for selling on the iPhone, there are some easy aspects, like not having to worry about packaging or salespeople, but you still have to sink money into marketing or no one will find your app in the almost 95,000 apps on the app store today.
If you're asking because you keep reading that it's an easy "get rich scheme", then I'd say you're in for a surprise. Despite the reduced overhead in some areas, and low start-up capital, it's as much work as any other software venture, since the ratio of team members to work to be done stays about the same (the economics of a $2.99 or $4.99 or $9.99 apps forces you to have a smaller team).
Perhaps an analogy... I want to know how difficult is is to build a house.
In terms of builder vs house
complexity. To be clear: how many
people do I need to build a medium
sized house?
Power tool learning
curve.
Permits, plans, and other
non-building stuff.
How easy is it
to sell my house?
Let me give you some guidance as I have worked on JQTouch. Its a library that build using JQuery and it also provides multi-touch related features too. Basically this is for UI related stuff.
Please have a look at JQTOUCH and look at the code samples. The business logic can be done in any server side technology of your choice.
Summing up the things with your relevant questions
Effort is not that tough. Easy for developers to develop. Less documentation.
Pretty easy
Emulator could be downloaded from Emulators
Not much knowledge on this.
Not so long ago iPhone development was quite simple, only a few OS versions and even less devices.
Now however, there are 2 major OS versions and 5 different devices to consider.
As a company about to release several applications testing has been become more and more of an issue.
What are the best ways to test all combinations, do I need to acquire every generation of iPhone and iPod Touch? Are there any gotchas with specific hardware/OS combinations I might need to code around?
I guess my question is, "What's the minimum amount of testing required to cover all the bases?"
In my experience, you won't have much compatibility trouble between iPod/iPhone. There are other gotchas to be aware of:
The devices run at different speeds. iPhone v1 and iPhone 3G run at 412MHz; iPod Touch runs at 532MHz, and the new 3GS runs at 600MHz. This can have a big impact on performance and even functionality if you're getting fancy.
There's a huge performance difference between EDGE/3G/WiFi networks; often the differences are counter-intuitive. EDGE can often have better latency (time to first byte) than 3G, while 3G has 10x better bandwidth. You'll want to test your app under all three conditions.
Are you using Core Location? iPhone v1 and iPod Touch do not have GPS.
Are you using the camera? The iPod Touch does not have a camera.
Is your app compatible with jailbroken phones? A lot of people have done it, and if your app crashes on them, they will blame you, not the Dev Team hackers, and this will be reflected in your App Store ratings. Note especially that background apps can use up memory that you might have thought would be available exclusively for your app. Leave yourself some overhead.
So, what do you need to buy? If you're a serious developer, yes, you should have all 5 devices available. But do you need to test every build on all 5 devices? Does every one of your developers need 5 devices each? No.
One developer can probably test everything that matters with one iPhone 3G and an iPod Touch. Toss in a 3GS and your coverage is probably nearly perfect. (Note that development on 3GS is much nicer just because the CPU is faster, so your apps deploy more quickly.)
At work we have one device per developer, but they're a mix of 3G and iPod devices (and, today, one 3GS).
I don't have much experience with the iPhone itself, but in general this might be a good application of pairwise testing. In practice, you can get 90% coverage with a small fraction of the testing of an exhaustive test pass. Then later if you find certain configurations have gotchas you can add them to your set of configurations and still not need to do an exhaustive pass.
I am not sure if its a best practice.
But I have heard many people using ibetatest for exactly what you are looking for. Lots of enthusiastic beta testers out there.
You shouldn't have any issues on 95% of your code running on different versions, and something like ibetatest should catch the remaining 5%.
Get all the combinations is the short answer.
I started out with just the iPod, but it's 100MHz
faster than the previous iPhone model. My app's
performance sensitive, so I'm gonna have to get
an old iPhone. I can hardly ask my beta testers
(volunteers?) to run the GL performance tool.
I'd suggest a couple things:
you probably will need a range of devices for your own internal testing. As has already been pointed out, there are various differences between each generation of iPod Touch/iPhone
you may want to look into using crowd-sourcing to supplement your internal testing. This potentially allows you to have a bigger audience to test your apps and any cost of using crowd-sourcing is potentially offset by the fact that you can spend less on devices and potentially less on internal testing staff and at the same time, potentially producing a better product. One crowd-sourced test group not mentioned above is uTest.com
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How much can a developer charge for an iPhone app like Twitterrific?
I want to know this because I need such an application with the same functionality for a new community website. I can do Ruby but have no experience with Objective-C. So it would be interesting for me if I should start reading books about iPhone programming or outsource the work to a iPhone programmer.
I'm one of the developers for Twitterrific and to be honest, I can't tell you how many hours have gone into the product. I can tell you everyone who upvoted the estimate of 160 hours for development and 40 hours for design is fricken' high. (I'd use another phrase, but this is my first post on Stack Overflow, so I'm being good.)
Twitterrific has had 4 major releases beginning with the iOS 1.0 (Jailbreak.) That's a lot of code, much of which is in the bit bucket (we refactor a lot with each major release.)
One thing that would be interesting to look at is the amount of time that we had to work on the iPad version. Apple set a product release date that gave us 60 days to do the development. (That was later extended by a week.)
We started the iPad development from scratch, but a lot of our underlying code (mostly models) was re-used. The development was done by two experienced iOS developers. One of them has even written a book: http://appdevmanual.com :-)
With such a short schedule, we worked some pretty long hours. Let's be conservative and say it's 10 hours per day for 6 days a week. That 60 hours for 9 weeks gives us 540 hours. With two developers, that's pretty close to 1,100 hours. Our rate for clients is $150 per hour giving $165,000 just for new code. Remember also that we were reusing a bunch existing code: I'm going to lowball the value of that code at $35,000 giving a total development cost of $200,000.
Anyone who's done serious iPhone development can tell you there's a lot of design work involved with any project. We had two designers working on that aspect of the product. They worked their asses off dealing with completely new interaction mechanics. Don't forget they didn't have any hardware to touch, either (LOTS of printouts!) Combined they spent at least 25 hours per week on the project. So 225 hours at $150/hr is about $34,000.
There are also other costs that many developer neglect to take into account: project management, testing, equipment. Again, if we lowball that figure at $16,000 we're at $250,000. This number falls in line with Jonathan Wight's (#schwa) $50-150K estimate with the 22 day Obama app.
Take another hit, dude.
Now if you want to build backend services for your app, that number's going to go up even more. Everyone seems surprised that Instagram chewed through $500K in venture funding to build a new frontend and backend. I'm not.
The Barack Obama app took 22 days to develop from first code to release. Three developers (although not all of them were full time). 10 people total. Figure 500-1000 man hours. Contracting rates are $100-150/hr. Figure $50000-$150000. Compare your app to Obama.app and scale accordingly.
There are ways of paying less to get an application, developed than paying the going rate, but very often you get what you pay for - inexperienced developers who leave you with a mess of spaghetti code that's impossible to maintain, or experienced developers with whom you have to communicate across a cultural and language gap.
Developing an app like Twitterific is not easy. It's an extraordinarily polished app with a lot of attention to detail that most people - indeed many developers - would fail to notice or realize the effort behind. You may be able to get a Twitter iPhone client written for $3500 or $5000 by going offshore or by being willing to "work with inexperienced developers", but you're not going to get Twitterific for that, and it's doubtful you'd get even a halfway decent application for that amount.
And you likely will end up spending a lot of time managing the process, going back and forth on requirements, and fighting to get what you really want instead of what they want to give you.
There's also a risk with "cut-rate" development, whether it's offshore or just using inexperienced developers - you may very well end up with something you can't use, or something that gets 1 star ratings because it crashes or behaves erratically. You might find the occasional underpriced gem of a developer, but they won't stay underpriced for long given the sheer demand in this market right now.
By virtue of my books and blog, people often reach out to me when they need help with their iPhone applications. I get, on average, 4 or 5 inquiries a month from people asking for help fixing applications they had developed either over-seas or by inexperienced developers here in the States. In most cases, I end up having to tell them they'd be better off throwing their code out and starting over with a developer who knows what they're doing rather than trying to fix the code they bought on the cheap. If they insist on trying to "fix" what they have, I decline the work.
I am a very good iPhone app developer, and I charge over $150 per hour for my services. I have a ton of experience building iPhone apps and their server side components. I have also been called in on several occasions to fix offshore developed apps. Here's my take.
Design costs money, good design costs lots of money. Expect several designer weeks of work per app screen. Offshore teams do not do design.
Server development and infrastructure is critical if the app is to succeed. A slow server response, or an overloaded server will hamper your app, and crimp sales and satisfaction. The server side of the equation will cost the most and take the most time to develop. Those who offshore their server development will find that quality and uptime are both terrible, in my experience.
App development if done right takes time too. A professional developer will ensure all HIG rules are followed, the app is properly structured and contains no known errors, it performs well, and it passes the app store validations. Offshore teams just cut code.
I'm just about to release a shopping app for a client. The design work was done by 2 client in-house designers over 2 weeks, quick because they had all the image assets already. Think 2 people x 10 days x 8 hours = ~$24,000. The server side had to be modified to provide data for the iPhone app. We used their in-house team and in-house platform and in-house API, 2 developers, 4 weeks, or about $50,000 and that's because they already have a web shop and API. Cost them about $400,000 to get there (excluding platform). And I wrote the app side in 3 weeks, given that a lot of my code is duplicated from previous projects, another ~$25,000, the cheapest app I ever did.
Total spent: ~$100,000, and that's insanely cheap!
And they will give this away for free so clients will buy from their store from their iPhones.
For your app, Peter, if you have the servers and the APIs and the design, I'd guess at $30,000 to $60,000 depending on complexity. If you do not have the design, double it. If you do not have the APIs, double again...
I am an account exec at a web and mobile development company and hear this question everyday. Unfortunately, iPhone apps are not cheap. You can expect around $100 per hour if you are staying on US soil. I have seen some offshore Indian developers out there for as low as $20 per hour. It all depends on the number and complexity of the functions you wish the app to perform. Simple one function apps are normally around 4-5k. They are so expensive because you are paying a team of people a healthy hourly wage and any type of raw prototyping, development, and coding takes time. Apps can exceed 60-100k pretty easily. Southwest Airlines making an app with a full ecommerce platform that allows you to buy tickets over your phone is an example. All of that porting into their IT is a big job.
And offshoring the project is definitely not always a better option. If you do so you better know who you are dealing with. Do not get me wrong there folks over there who do a bad ass job for a way better deal, but they are not that easy to find. Those guys could fuck around for 5 months on a simple project that would take 6 weeks here, or just not complete it at all and hand it over half finished. I have seen this scenario many times where we finish the work. The project management becomes a challenge. It can be difficult to communicate exactly what you want the app to do.
River of News for the iPad took about 400 hours of development to get to version 1.0 and I don't know how many hours my designer spent (20-50?). At US labor rates that's at least $40,000. But that sort of tight development was only possible because it was a one man operation. There is an enormous amount of overhead added when you separate the person writing the code from the person deciding what the product is going to do.
If you are going to send it offshore you'd better know exactly what you want. With the language and time difference it's very hard to do iterative design where you are exploring what is possible.
Appsamuck iPhone tutorials is aiming for 31 days of tutorials ending in 31 small apps developed for the iPhone all the source code for which is available to download. They also provide a commercial service to build apps!
If you want to know if you can do the coding, well at least you can download the code and see if anything there is helpful for your needs. On the flip side you can also get a quote from them for developing the app for you, so you can try both sides of the coin, outsource and in-house. Of course it all depends on how much time you have too! It's certainly worth a look!
(OK, after my last disastrous attempt to try and post a useful piece of help, I went off hunting around!)
I am the developer for Coupious mobile coupons iPhone app and with the amount of time that I spent on that application (v1.0 - v1.5), it was probably a $15,000 - $20,000 investment. However, to be fair, I do admit that I was the only developer working on it and when I started the project, I had never seen or used Objective-C before. Despite that, three months later, it was released so the numbers are probably a little skewed because there was a fair amount of learning going on as well as coding.
However, iPhone competent developers run in the range of $80-$150 depending on their skill and time with the platform. I would say that for a simple application, an app would probably run 2K-5K, a medium complexity app would run 5K-15K and a fairly complex app running 15K-30K. Game applications could be even more.
The reason it is so high is that the skill is fairly specialized and not everyone is able to do it
I hate to admit how little I've done an iPhone app for, but I can tell you I won't be doing that again. The guy who said that "simple, one function apps can be done .. [by solo developers]... for $5K" is correct; however, that is still lowball, and presumes almost no project design, graphic design or network backend work.
The rates that were quoted above are what you would expect to pay US developers; however, I do know some people who have been able to get their apps built for as little as $4,000 by using offshore developers.
Here is a blog post from a group that did this: http://www.lolerapps.com/why-outsourcing-iphone-apps-was-a-no-brainer-for-us
Also, Carla White wrote a fantastic eBook about the process she used to outsource her app called "Inside Secrets to an iPhone App". She talks about how she got a great deal because she was willing to work with a team that was still learning iPhone app development.
So, there are alternatives to the higher price developers discussed above.