Wednesday, February 1, 2012

The big question: How much does an iPhone app cost? This is a very common question that I’m asked by a lot of my business-oriented friends and non-tech savvy clients. Without fail, every single time I gave my initial estimation before even locking down the specs, I received that shocked expression because of the unexpected (high) quotation.

Sunday, January 29, 2012

On iOS and almost every other operating system, user interfaces tend to use gradients to give a sense of contour to interface elements. The trouble is, gradients alone can look artificial due to their unrealistically perfect visual smoothness. In the real world, almost nothing is completely flat and smooth - and that’s a good thing, because we rely on friction for grip.

Friday, January 27, 2012

The business of making games is very much alive and well. But increasingly, the energy is moving away from AAA titles and console games to mobile apps built by a growing army of developers. But don’t take my word for it, check out one of the premier game development events, the Games Developers Conference, held every year in San Francisco. Through its voluntary post-show surveys, the conference found that 43 percent of attendees in 2010 said they were involved in mobile development projects for a smartphone or tablets. Last year, 56 percent of attendees reported that smartphone or tablets development was their company’s major focus and 55 percent said this development was their company’s secondary focus.

Thursday, January 26, 2012

Mike Lee discusses the many facets of product engineering: planning, implementing, testing, team, funding, marketing, customers, platform, market, and shipping, all from a non-technical perspective.

Friday, November 4, 2011

I’ve been a corporate lawyer for 17+ years, and there are certain fundamental legal mistakes that I’ve seen startups repeatedly make.  Accordingly, I thought it would be helpful to provide a simple checklist for startups, which includes links to prior posts for a more detailed discussion.  (This post was originally published as part of the “Ask the Attorney” series I am writing for VentureBeat.)

Friday, October 28, 2011

The structured approach to marketing should appeal to most technical people. Marketing can seem like a magical black box, but the 4 P's: Product, Price, Promotion, and Place (aka distribution) are what's inside. The best marketing plan can be broken down and addressed in each area. Let's tackle Place—anywhere your app has a virtual space on a shelf, with a link to buy. Foremost is the AppStore, but it's not the only Place. Place is everywhere your product is listed from your website, aggregate app listing websites, and perhaps inside app-listing-apps. Free apps have additional areas where they can be listed, such as the free app a day sites. If you develop for other mobile platforms, place includes other paid storefronts. In my last blog post I covered Product; this post will move onto Place, which is essentially the distribution channels and your virtual “shelf space” within them. Because a lot of details can be covered concerning Place, I'm going to divide this topic into two posts, shelf space and channels. “Shelf space” will describe how to apply marketing to the design of your app's presentation in a single distribution channel. “Channels” will cover applying your shelf space across multiple distribution channels, discussing your varying options.

Monday, September 19, 2011

Hello everyone! It has been a while since my last post, and for that I apologize. But, as fall approaches, I wanted to kick things off with something that I’ve been thinking about doing for quite a while: an iOS game developer revenue survey. There are a lot of articles out there about this developer making a lot of money, or that developer not making any money on the App Store. Articles often throw around estimates of revenue averages on the App Store. The problem is, we really don’t have a lot of reliable data. As independent game developers, we don’t have the resources to hire large consulting firms to do very expensive market analysis for us.

Thursday, September 15, 2011

PLCrashReporter is a standalone open-source library for generating crash reports on iOS. When I first wrote the library in 2008, it was the only option for automatically generating and gathering crash reports from an iOS application. Apple's iOS crash reports were not available to developers, and existing crash reporters — such as Google's excellent Breakpad — were not supported on iOS (Breakpad still isn't). Since that time, quite a few crash reporters and crash reporting services have appeared: Apple now provides access to App Store crash reports, a number of 3rd-party products and services were built on PLCrashReporter (such as HockeyApp, JIRA Mobile Connect), and some services have chosen to write their own crash reporting library (TestFlight, Airbrake, and others).

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

With the abundance in variety of products available online, many online retailers provide sales rankings for available products to make it easier for the consumer to find popular products. Successful implementation of product rankings on online platform was done a decade ago by Amazon and more recently by Apple’s App store. However, none of these market providers provide actual downloads data, a very useful statistics for both practitioners and researchers. To address similar issues, researchers in the past developed strategies to estimate sales from product rank. Almost all of that work is based on either doing some experiments to shift sales or partnering with a vendor to get actual sales data. In this research, we present an innovative method to use purely public data to infer this relationship for Apple’s iTunes App store. We provide various validations to show our method provides highly accurate estimates on downloads if rank data in available for a given app.

Monday, September 5, 2011

The event brought together 50 of the most innovative mobile firms in the UK, who were told by Segerstrale that "Today is a truly awesome time to be a startup." Why? Because small, nimble mobile companies are well placed to disrupt whatever industry they are in. "It is horrible today to be a big company and want to do something new and innovative and different," said Segerstrale, referring to the current economic climate and the cutbacks that are being forced on many large companies as a result.

Sunday, September 4, 2011

Have you ever tried calling the phone number of any internet based company serving hundreds of millions, if not billions of users such as Facebook or Google? If you don’t know a specific employee’s extension, good luck getting in touch with a human. I used to find it frustrating that I couldn’t reach a live person at these companies, but now I finally understand. At some point in every successful startup’s evolution, a point is reached where it’s not easy to provide individualized responses to every user, especially when users outnumber employees by a factor of millions and many of them are using your product or service for free.

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Despite the impact that generations of video game developers have had on the medium of interactive entertainment, though, it's easy to forget those millions of tiny achievements when you're embedded deep within virtual worlds like Azeroth, the Black Mesa Research Facility, the Mushroom Kingdom, or a 10-block-wide screen of endlessly descending shapes. Logically, our brains know that none of these worlds can exist without the imagination, artistry, and programming skills of human beings. Yet for many gamers, those who work in the gaming industry are, essentially, faceless purveyors of joy. There are a handful of household names like Shigeru Miyamoto, John Romero, Hideo Kojima, and Will Wright; as for the rest of the names listed in the closing credits and the instruction manual…well, who?

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Hi, I’m Michael. I’ve been successfully launching apps with next to no marketing on my own for three years with my own company More Blu Sky, using only my design skills and a knack for iTunes SEO. So when I was invited to join tap tap tap to produce an in-house project I was excited to team up and apply my expertise to tap tap tap’s traditionally explosive launches. Fast forward one year later and we finally launched Faces. Everyone was excited and after a little hiccup…the app was out and we were off! I was pumped, and we were ready for the app to leap out of the gate. For some background: The Heist sold 89,689 units on its first full day of sales. Camera+ 2.0 sold 47,989 units on its first full day when it was relaunched. The partnership with Tapbots for Calcbot produced a first full day sale number of 11,979 units sold.

Game developers and app creators of all stripes and all sizes are cottoning to the idea that free can pay. You only have to browse the gaming news headlines to see how many industry titans, MMO behemoths, obscure Korean gamemakers and dozens upon dozens of mobile startups are releasing their games as “free-to-play” or ditching old price tags and subscriptions.

Monday, August 1, 2011

iPad by Apple is a truly amazing tablet. It lets you do practically everything you can expect out of a tablet and no wonder if it exceeds your expectations. The best part of an iPad is that you can even use it to earn good money by becoming a developer. Now you can always develop new and attractive applications for iTunes App store, but what many people don’t know is that you can even develop Games for an iPad. Now that sounds interesting, isn’t it?

An iOS Developer Takes on Android: Great reading!! #iOSdev #AndroidDev (@justinvincent)

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

HTML5 is growing up faster than anyone could have imagined. Powerful and professional solutions are already being developed…even in the gaming world! Today, you’ll make your first game using Box2D and HTML5′s canvas tag.

Monday, July 18, 2011

The folks at GAMEized were proud. They had produced a great iOS soccer (football) game called FingerKicks, built it with full HD support, and waited with bated breath as soccer fans in country after country began to pick up on the title. But things weren’t looking very good. According to Apple’s own sales data, first day sales hit $97 while day after day they saw lower and lower sales. Things leveled off and rather than depend on Apple’s numbers they decided to check out the Game Center leaderboard. To their astonishment, suddenly 5,000 people picked up the game over the weekend. They were over the moon.

Saturday, July 16, 2011

Like any other saleable object, apps need to be unique to sell. Some of the most successful apps on smartphones today haven’t introduced new ideas, they just do them better. With this in mind, we wanted to take a look at what makes a good app great, what differentiates one photo app from another photo app, to become a top seller on a mobile app store.

Friday, July 15, 2011

We love iOS for the fast and versatile experience it offers. But what we think is really cool is that it brings these attributes to the development process as well. The App Store makes short release cycles easy, allowing developers to address feedback quickly and add new features regularly. This improvement over the traditional box software model makes the agile development model a great choice, except for one thing: agile development requires good automated testing. We looked around and none of the existing iOS testing frameworks fit our needs, so we innovated. Today we’re happy to announce KIF, the “Keep It Functional” framework. KIF allows for realistic iOS integration testing through simulated user interaction. We developed KIF to meet a few goals: KIF requires minimal setup to run a test suite KIF lets you develop your tests in the same language as the rest of your code to minimize learning and adaptation layers KIF can be easily extended to fit your needs KIF works in continuous integration (CI) setups