Developing an iPhone Application

It’s easier than you might think

A friend and I were in a book store talking about iPhone apps when we decided that we should try to make an app of our own.  After about a week of discussion and ideas, we decided that we would create an application that sniffs farts.  Yes I know, sounds ridiculous.  And it is.  We talked about how successful the iFart app was and that if we created something similar we would be aiming for a wide demographic.  Boys and men from the age of 10-80.  Pretty broad demographic eh?   Here is how we did it.

Outsourcing….genius.

I had downloaded and read an eBook on how to make an iPhone app without any experience.  You can find it here. The book was quite informative and helped paved the way for us to take an app from idea to app store in less than a month.  Yes…a month.  I purchased an iMac about a 2 week prior to the idea so I had half of the tools I needed.  The other half is something called liquid assets.  Heh…yeah…cash money.  So how exactly do you make an app without any programming experience?  Well you outsource it of course.  I created an account at elance.com where I was able to post an iPhone app job for programmers all over the world to bid on.   After receiving a bid for $500, I awarded the job.

If you have never outsourced anything on the internet, it is quite the experience.  In fact, I have been outsourcing a lot more since creating this application.  It is a pretty unique process in which you communicate the expectations to the provider and they get the word done for you.  Our particular programmer was based out of India, so they were actually working on our app while we were sleeping here in the US.  It was exciting to see the graphics uploaded to the workroom in elance.com.

After a few weeks the provider sent us a test build of the application.  There were some issues in which we wrote down and communicated back to them to fix.  For instance, I didn’t like the way the transitions were being made from page to page on our what is now called “Diaper Checker” app.  So they promptly changed it and sent back another build.  I downloaded it onto my iPod touch and tested it for a few more days.  After we were pleased with the product, they sent us the entire xCode file so that we could create the build from our computer.  This process was fairly simple too.  After one rejection from the app store (for description changes) it was finally approved and up for sale in the app store.

There is much more to be learned from this process than what I have outlined, but the eBook was quite helpful.  I will also be creating some videos that show you how to create certificates and actually sign up for the Apple Developers Program.  As far as our app goes, it hasn’t sold that well.  Actually, it hasn’t sold well at all.  I think if it were more of a user-oriented app it would have done better.  The reason that we decided to go with a paid app (.99) is because free apps make money from advertisements.  Advertisements that have to be displayed several thousands of times in order to be profitable.  We didn’t think our app would be opened and used several times per day by users so it would be better to go with a paid app.  We may have been wrong.  Despite our failure, the experience taught me a lot and I am contemplating other app ideas.