From idea to AppStore in 2 weeks | Hacker News Reader

From idea to AppStore in 2 weeks

alasdairmonk.com

101 pointstimparker52 comments

A year or two back three of us (one only very part-time, and two of us inexperienced) developed an iOS app that did two way translation (speech - text - text - speech) using two three different services from two different vendors, from scratch in less than a week. In Objective-C. (It didn't get submitted to the App Store, it was demoed to potential investors and then disappeared, presumably owing to the existence of similar apps.)

Not a terribly ambitious app, but no less ambitious than the app described.

Ruby Motion looks interesting, but I don't really see how it would make a big difference to shipping something like this in a very short time frame.

Hi, great looking app, well done! I'm wondering if you ended up caching the Tube status information on your own web server, or if you are directly accessing Transport for London's site?

Incidentally my first iOS app is also a London tube statuses app. But i never made any money out of it, (i deemed it unworthy of 1$).

Although i was learning Obj C for some time, i developed my tube map app in 2 weeks of starting with cocoa framework.

Its time to start looking at marketing 101 lessons :).

I'm curious if the author was able to earn the initial investment in the tools: 200$ RubyMotion + 100$ iOS Developer.

Yes – as of writing I've sold enough units to pay for the costs a few times over as well as server costs for the custom API I built. Some profits will be reserved for London based charities.

Well done.

What stack are you using for the API server? Any chance of a quick article on that?

Ruby would be my guess.

Is this a new trend to put $ after the amount (eg 5$ instead of the correct $5)? I've been seeing it a lot lately.

That's how it's written in French and maybe some other languages as well. I guess people writing this way are not native English speakers.

If you know and enjoy coding in Ruby, you intend to target only iOS, and you don't know Objective-C, C or C++ than RubyMotion is a good investment.

On the other hand, if you want to target iOS and Android you'd better learn Objective-C and Java. An interesting alternative is to use HTML5 and JavaScript if you already have a good background as a web developer.

Or, if we disregard costs, C# and use Xamarin's (http://xamarin.com/) products.

Same goes for C# and Xamarin, if you already know C# and enjoy coding in C# ...

If you don't know C# I see little reason to buy a Xamarin license (I know you can get started for free which is great).

Code sharing between platforms could make it a worthwhile investment of time and money. But it's quite costly if you are just starting out.

http://ruboto.org/ also exists, so you can stay in Ruby if you like.

This looks really cool, curious if anyone uses this in production.

This is great. I spent much, much longer on my first iOS app and it isn't half as successful. Very well thought up and executed.

Maybe it's just me, but I feel like because iOS is such a hot platform right now everyone is trying to hop on the bandwagon without learning anything new. Write iOS apps in ObjC. It's not hard, it's not that different, it's just something you don't know yet.

Might just be the fonts, but this looks like a Windows 8 app.

Congrats on the launch!

The font, called Johnston, is from the London Underground design style and the colours are those of the lines

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnston_(typeface)

I knew it looked familiar but couldn't place my finger on it - yes, london underground. thanks :)

I may have been misread - to clarify, I wasn't knocking the app or saying it was bad - it has a distinctive style (or really, is borrowing from the LU) and I wish the author success.

It's a great font!

I've recently been working on a game and I wanted to include this font in it. I've been a bit worried though because of the vague and scary sounding license that seems to come with all fonts, including Johnston. Did you consider the legal aspects? And did you do anything to make it "legit"? Like pre-rendering your text assets to images or anything? Or did you just include a .ttf in your app bundle?

Nice looking app btw!

> earning me enough pennies to buy some Dominos pizza.

To a large extent this has been the real problem in the iOS app domain for a while. Apps are far more likely to make you enough to buy a small pizza than even approach earning you a reasonable salary.

Part of it, I think, are the mechanics of the App Store itself. Search has been broken for years. When compared to searching on the 'net the difference is stark. This is unfortunate because developers who do a little financial math will, without a doubt, walk away. You are far more likely to make money with a good website than on the App Store. That's why people hesitate to spend $200 on Ruby Motion...you simply won't get your money back unless you use it to write apps for others and earn money for your work rather than from your apps.

I think there's a lot of factors at work, the search is terrible but there's plenty of app recommendation services now, one of the big issues seems to be that there's now a mindset of "£1.79? That's really pricy" and they'll move on pretty quickly. That's a big barrier and it's not going away anytime soon really, but alternatives like IAP are now getting push back and mobile advertising doesn't seem to be a solid cash stream yet.

That's just a fun term, safe to say it was a fair bit more than pennies for a pizza. $200 ruby motion was definitely paid off from this app.

Right, the author stated that he had a couple of thousand sales. The app is offered for £0.79. That means he earned at least £1100 ($1650). Not bad given that the app has been in the App Store for two weeks.

Not only on iOS. The "App Store" model as it is implemented today on most platforms is bloated and corrupted, it's just a mess. It _could_ be a tad better on Android since Google allows 3rd party app stores (could open up for specialization etc, like Steam for Android or similar) but in reality you still must be on Google Play (which is a hell hole) to succeed.

There's partly also a trust issue. If I go to buy an app on the App Store, there's a very good chance that the $5 is complete rubbish, is buggy or lied in it's description. There's no way of getting a trial, and getting your money back is harder than pulling teeth.

It's extraordinarily easy to get burned.

Three years ago my friend published his first app in the App Store. He taught himself Objetive-C and had never programmed a day in his life before. He first app made a few bucks a day so you know what he did? He build another app. And another. And another. You know what he is doing today? House hunting in San Francisco and taking frequent vacations to Hawaii. By the way he did this working four days a week. So the problem is not really the App store it's that peoples initial exception don't intersect with their willingness to put in the time needed to build a business.

Kudos to your friend but to me this seems to be an outlier rather than an indication of people not being willing to put the time in to build a business. The point about search being broken is surely that while success is always a big part luck, not having proper search makes discoverability of high quality products harder and so increases the luck factor?

It seems to me, after creating several apps of my own, that the App Store is meant to reward outliers, not make sure everyone gets in front of people.

We've released a few apps and found that the most successful were the ones which didn't fit any basic mold. At the same time, the more apps we make, the better we do.

andymoe's friend is the kind of story that Apple wants to have seen and they curate and control the medium to make it easier for people like that to succeed. I'm not saying they do the best job of it - crap copycat apps are in there too - but they have made a great medium for the persistent, innovative and determined developer to succeed.

Of course, when you make a medium that rewards persistence, unfortunately copycats can also succeed because they can be persisten too. Take the good with the bad.

I see what you mean and don't actually think it's a bad thing for it to be targeted at rewarding outliers - really good apps are probably by definition outliers.

But my concern about the poor search functionality is that it rewards the wrong outliers. E.g. people who are persistent and lucky/ early to the game rather than persistent and release great apps.

My very anecdotal example of this is the travel planner apps people use in London. Most people on ios I know use apps which are shockingly inaccurate with ux that leaves a lot to be desired.

They continue to use them because short of "download whatever has been downloaded a lot by other people" there's no reasonable way to find new higher quality ones.

I think a lot of us are curious if this is still possible (or whether it is only true if you built apps 3 years ago) and would like to hear from anyone with knowledge as to whether this is still possible simply by playing the numbers game with a 1-man shop.

For example, "met" a guy on Reddit who claimed to have built a bootload of Google Gadgets and made 1/2 mil in the process. I've been in the same market during that same time-frame, so I'm generally aware of what is feasible... and I believe I can vouch for the fact that this may still be possible, but probably 150x harder now.

Once he got to 100-250k installs things started to take off but that did not happen until two years in so this success is not that long ago. He also started to build more polished apps at that time and stopped consulting to pay the bills and worked on his own stuff "full time."

Great post - I love reading about this rapid fast releases, even better when the writer had to learn a new language.

I was curious about ruby motion beforehand but now I can't wait to get stuck in.

Oh, and congrats! :D

Congrats. I still can't get by the initial cost of RubyMotion. I know, it will pay for itself, but that's a lot of initial buy-in going on faith. I wish they had a demo version available to try before buying.

They offer a 30 day money back guarantee:

http://sites.fastspring.com/hipbyte/product/rubymotion

I'm in the same boat. I WANT to try it, I WANT to love it, but I can't justify paying for it just to find this out, especially given that I already know the Obj-C ways of iOS dev.

I'm really curious about that.

There are about half dozen similar applications on the Appstore, for free.

I tried a few, and most of them did the job they were suppose to do fairly well.

How did you convince people to choose yours as opposed to the other ones that already existed ?

Clearly the Metro article is what pushed people (that possibly didn't know that those apps existed) to actually get and download your app.

Congrats and kudos.

Thanks!

I knew that there were a lot of similar apps on the AppStore but I went with my conviction that less is more. Nearly all the apps are multifunctional and include journey planners, maps, alerts etc etc.

As a Londoner, I know my way around, the only thing I want to know is if the tube is even working – this is how Lines was born. I've tried to make the app's simplicity it's main selling point and hope I've achieved this to some degree.

Again, congratulations for your conviction.

I actually was doing something similar (well, the very same actually) a few months ago, got to a working version, but then saw that there were already plenty of options, got discouraged, and suddenly lost all interest in polishing/publishing it...

Actually, it is a very useful function. It has usefulness and simplicity. Would you mind to give ROI analysis for your project? This will be helpful to the audience here.

Thanks. As of writing Lines has sold a few thousand copies, so it's made a good ROI. After costs have been paid (servers, iOS dev license etc) I'll be giving some profits to chairty.

Congratulations. From an idea to an App Store app in 2 weeks is very impressive, but it's 10x more impressive given that you were learning along the way.

Simple question, though: what's the story behind the Metro article? Your story is interesting enough that it makes for good reading anyway, but I was wondering (and absolutely no offense intended -- there's nothing wrong with it imo) if you had a contact/friend/similar who helped you get the article? Again, congratulations, I hope your app continues to sell well.

Never underestimate the value of giving an idea a fresh coat of paint.

Implementations age. They stop getting updates. They are missing little things that new incumbents will add by default. They become boring if they're not constantly being reinvented. And they stop being supported by their makers.

Things that people build and give away for free, if its not a true point of pride, will eventually show their age as the makers lose interest...

That's when its time for the second, less-tired wave of makers to come in and stake a claim.

This is very true. Despite iOS coming with a pretty decent weather app, I've purchased three other weather apps looking for something even better. (FWIW, I'm happy with Check the Weather -- http://checktheweather.co/)

I'm also pushing out a rubymotion app in the next week. Its hard to estimate how much time it saved me but it definitely made building the app a much more enjoyable experience.

This looks like a sales pitch for Ruby Motion to me.

Its a good one. RubyMotion is a delight to work with, my absolute favorite coding environment.

"BUT, and it's a big butt" - deliberate misspelling?

4 days for approval? That's pretty fast.

From my experience it's a hit or miss. I just got an approval for an app I submitted on March 1st. That's the shortest time (6 days) I had to wait for an approval.

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