Freelance iOS Developer?

Gooner10

Hi All,

I would just like some advice really, my wifes nephew currently designs Apps for iTunes Store and is currently doing very well for himself. He has designed Games and Reading Material and sold them on itunes and is now making a full time income out of it.

He has advised me its quite easy to do with a few programs and you dont have to have any special programming experience but if you are reasonably good with a PC then you could teach yourself like he did and start making Apps.

Now I work full time so would reaslitically only have evenings and weekends to work if I did get involved as this would be only like a second income for me however I just wondered what peoples opinions are? The only thing is you do need a Apple Mac Computer which I have not got however they are quite expensive so this would be a large outlay.

From what my wifes nephew said, these would be the things you would need to get started:

To begin being an iOS Developer you'll need the following:

Apple Account - free

Apple iOS Developer License - £59/year

Gamesalad Account - free

Gamesalad Developing software - free

Software to design graphics for your application -
for example i use Adobe Photoshop, would highly recommend it

I just wondered if anyone has done this here? Could it be something that could make you a regular income and would be worth all the effort for do you think?

Any thoughts would be appreciated

Thanks

Andrew

IrishGypsy

Hi,

I've done this myself (on top of a FT job like you) and it took about 2 months of reading multiple iOS development books and watching specific video tutorials (YouTube was a great source for help) and spending the time to learn as best I could. I orginally learned to code on a hackintosh laptop, but I earned enough money in the first two months to buy a Mac mini for official development.

There's a couple of significant pitfalls to worry about with selling Apps on the App Store and those are:

1). Apple: It's their house, so it's their rules. And these rules can - and will - change regularly. What was acceptable one day could very well be cause for rejection the next and there's very, very little you can do about it (I've been through their appeals process personally, so all of this comes from personal experience).

2). Every man and their dog are releasing Apps for sale now, so making yours stand out is a task and a half in itself. So marketing will be key (and trying to find the time to market your product whilst holding down a FT job and applying bug fixes, updates etc is a monumental task in itself).

3). You can most definitely make a tidy living (e.g. it's not massively difficult to make £30k a year with enough different 'products' out there for sale), but don't expect to earn millions, that's unlikely. If you're happy earning a comfortable living, then it's definitely do-able. I haven't released a new app in over a year (other commitements), but the apps I still have on sale still bring in a couple of hundred per month with absolutely zero effort on my behalf. My products have some of the highest customer ratings in their grouping, so the slightly higher price helps keep a bit of income flowing (always helpful).

4). Make sure your code is solid and sound. My code isn't perfect, but I tested the life out of it before release and I fixed EVERY issue as soon as they appeared. It's slower (took an extra month of development time to get right), but now I have a code template I can deploy with complete confidence that it won't cause memory leaks or crashes. And learn to code yourself, that way you don't have to depend on anyone else to fix any problems that occur. Because you'll need them again if someone else does the dirty work and they can then chartge you crazy figures depending on the severity of the problem found. You have full control over your own Quality output then, not someone else.

So study up and look at everything as an investment. Even though I haven't released a new app or update in a while, I still have my mac mini, my tutorial books and my base code - that still works - to work from should I ever want to start again.

Best of luck :beer:

nathand_2

Gooner10 wrote: »

any special programming experience

True, but you do need some experience. Certainly if you want to do it the right way.

You can teach yourself but don't be expecting miraculous results overnight. It takes practice to get to a level where you can create a useful app.

richard734

If you want to have a play and get a shiny toy out of it, try porting your apps to Blackberry for the Playbook.
The Register ran a story earlier this week about RIM giving playbooks to developers.

DS4215

Or you could speak to him and offer to port his stuff to Android and double his market...

IrishGypsy

DS4215 wrote: »

Or you could speak to him and offer to port his stuff to Android and double his market...

Last time I checked, the Android Marketplace offered refunds to customers for any products sold within the first 48 hours regardless of the reason. Ok for some products, but for informational ones this is just a no-no (and the main reason I stayed away from porting to the Android marketplace).

If you've learned to code Native Objective C 2.0, then it's even further learning to port that code across (may include learning Java/C/HTML, CSS and possible AJAX).

And apart from gaining experience (and a free tablet), is there any point developing for the Blackberry Playbook's own OS? I thought that it hadn't grabbed much of a market share and as such, is going for cheap already?

richard734

Free tablet and a foothold into a developing market? assuming RIM do not fold completly

InsideInsurance

Are you talking about being a freelance developer or are you talking about developing some apps for yourself and selling them as these are two different things with different considerations.

The former can be fine but you need to remember you are being hired as a professional and not a hobbiest. You will be up against people in India etc willing to work for $5 an hour and so will need to know how to win business when you cannot compete on price. The other aspect to remember is that whilst you may only want to do stuff evenings/weekends you can get some very angry customers if the system you developed for them turns out to have a major bug thats discovered on day 1 of your two week holiday.

The later in some ways is easier as you have no B2B relationships to deal with. On the flip side this time you must be able to come up with ideas for apps yourself and then know how to market them to get people to buy them otherwise it can be a lot of work for an app that only ever sits on your family's phone.

Gooner10

Thanks for taking the time to post Gypsy, a very helpful read

I am not sure what to do really, I was mainly considering this route of designing Apps as in my current workplace there is no real room for progression, so earning extra money while doing something else would be a great help to me and my wife financially.

Did you use Game Salad to design your Apps?

My only worry is if I made the investments in the Apple Mac and the software required would be what if my Apps do not get hardly any downloads? Or what if I cant get my head around the designing of Apps.

Thanks for your help again, its appreciated

Thanks

Andrew

IrishGypsy wrote: »

Hi,

I've done this myself (on top of a FT job like you) and it took about 2 months of reading multiple iOS development books and watching specific video tutorials (YouTube was a great source for help) and spending the time to learn as best I could. I orginally learned to code on a hackintosh laptop, but I earned enough money in the first two months to buy a Mac mini for official development.

There's a couple of significant pitfalls to worry about with selling Apps on the App Store and those are:

1). Apple: It's their house, so it's their rules. And these rules can - and will - change regularly. What was acceptable one day could very well be cause for rejection the next and there's very, very little you can do about it (I've been through their appeals process personally, so all of this comes from personal experience).

2). Every man and their dog are releasing Apps for sale now, so making yours stand out is a task and a half in itself. So marketing will be key (and trying to find the time to market your product whilst holding down a FT job and applying bug fixes, updates etc is a monumental task in itself).

3). You can most definitely make a tidy living (e.g. it's not massively difficult to make £30k a year with enough different 'products' out there for sale), but don't expect to earn millions, that's unlikely. If you're happy earning a comfortable living, then it's definitely do-able. I haven't released a new app in over a year (other commitements), but the apps I still have on sale still bring in a couple of hundred per month with absolutely zero effort on my behalf. My products have some of the highest customer ratings in their grouping, so the slightly higher price helps keep a bit of income flowing (always helpful).

4). Make sure your code is solid and sound. My code isn't perfect, but I tested the life out of it before release and I fixed EVERY issue as soon as they appeared. It's slower (took an extra month of development time to get right), but now I have a code template I can deploy with complete confidence that it won't cause memory leaks or crashes. And learn to code yourself, that way you don't have to depend on anyone else to fix any problems that occur. Because you'll need them again if someone else does the dirty work and they can then chartge you crazy figures depending on the severity of the problem found. You have full control over your own Quality output then, not someone else.

So study up and look at everything as an investment. Even though I haven't released a new app or update in a while, I still have my mac mini, my tutorial books and my base code - that still works - to work from should I ever want to start again.

Best of luck :beer:

InsideInsurance

You;ll be left with a very good computer.

You could use a hackingtosh instead - there are some net books that can run Mac OSX though graphics programs could be painful. A hackingtosh isnt anything "illegal" just the name of a none Apple PC that runs their operating system

Zelazny

IrishGypsy wrote: »

Last time I checked, the Android Marketplace offered refunds to customers for any products sold within the first 48 hours regardless of the reason. Ok for some products, but for informational ones this is just a no-no (and the main reason I stayed away from porting to the Android marketplace).

FYI, this was dropped to 15 minutes some time ago.