How Non-Developers Can Get Apps Made And Into The App Store – with Ken Yarmosh

Flurry is still allowed by Apple in iOS apps. We used Flurry to see how many beta users actually used the app. They were not personally identifiable, of course but we got a rough sense of how many betas were installed (via the 0.1 version tag) and a really good sense how they were using (or not using) the app. For example, only about 15% of the users ever clicked on More in the tab bar. As a bonus, Flurry will log your uncaught exceptions for you if you implement an uncaught exception handler. This is invaluable for finding those bugs you can't find easily. Always email beta testers personally when you get any feedback - you might get some improvement suggestions that aren't that hard to implement.

This interview is even great for developers who want to make successful apps. Good stuff.

He glosses over beta, but that's a crucial stage for non-developers to understand. Testing your application with real, live users is hugely important. If you don't beat the hell out of it, the public will, and you don't want to end up waiting around for Apple to approve a fix for a glaring bug that pisses people off.

(Sidenote: This is the pain of experience. I once pulled one of my apps just as it got popular because of a data destroying bug that my sloppy QA process didn't catch. Just one line of code, part of final performance optimization. Harmless, right?)

I wrote up a lengthy post on doing iPhone betas last year. Maybe it'll be useful to others here, dev or not:

http://blog.danilocampos.com/2009/12/03/how-to-run-a-great-i...

And for the love of god, do one last round of exhaustive QA even after making "minor" performance improvements. :)