danielamitay

Me: Final year college student, iPhone/iOS developer, NYC.

My blog: Personal app milestones, interesting app statistics.

Traffic: 5k unique/month, >100k back in June 2011 (when I was active).

Every so often I receive unsolicited (but much appreciated) offers from SV, NYC, and Israel to work at a startup doing iOS development or management. A number of these have been well funded by top-tier VCs. What drives my traffic? A blog post detailing the most common iPhone passcodes, a blog post detailing how piracy doubled my legitimate sales (despite it being a poor post), and another blog post describing how to programmatically detect the apps installed on the iPhone.

In my opinion, a personal blog is an opportunity to demonstrate your expertise to those who are interested, and a way to increase your luck surface area.

Side note: I like Bump (YC S09), and I duplicated a minor feature of theirs (app detection in v2.X). Because I blogged about their feature and how I did it myself, a few people at Bump read my post. Later on, I found out that the CEO of another major company was referred to me for advice by them. I'm probably nothing special to Bump, but when I graduate, if I want to go work at Bump, I'm not just another name.

I agree whole-heartedly with the dynamic icons.

- Weather apps that display weather directly on the icon (I don't understand why Apple never did it for themselves).

It would be trivial for iOS6 to implement a protocol where the OS could "poll" the app for a new icon only when the icon is visible, and only occasionally for performance.

Actually, that account looks pretty legit (in the sense that it's not 100% bot generated).

Look at Swagstro's follower list [1], and Cmd/Ctrl-F for "holic", "fanatic", "introvert", "bacon", "wannabe". Almost all of the accounts are simply randomly generating the Lorem Ipsum of Twitter descriptions.

[1] https://twitter.com/#!/Swagstro/followers

Every single account I checked has constantly retweeted the account @Swagstro[1]. They have 314k followers, but no "Verified Account" tag (which extremely popular users tend to have). I don't mean to point the finger, but it seems like these accounts were used to boost the popularity of said account.

EDIT: They gained 70k followers in the past two days alone[2].

EDIT 2: Their tweets have all disappeared since posting this comment.

CONCLUSION: Automatically generated accounts, profiles, and tweets. These accounts are used for services that provide paid followers and retweets. It's actually pretty interesting stuff if you look at the automatically generated "Twitter Ipsum" that is their profile descriptions and how they randomly pick quotes from famous people to tweet.

[1] https://twitter.com/#!/Swagstro

[2] http://twittercounter.com/Swagstro

Move #2 is really big at the moment. Apple is still able to create market segmentation with it's 3-year old device.

As of last quarter, the top selling smart phones [1]:

1. iPhone 4S

2. iPhone 4

3. iPhone 3GS

4. Samsung GALAXY S II

5. Samsung GALAXY S 4G

[1]: https://www.npd.com/wps/portal/npd/us/news/pressreleases/pr_...

Does this use method swizzling? There doesn't seem to be any hook-ins to any views.

If anything, this is healthier for people's personal information.

Companies seeking such a service typically resort to purchasing homeowner information in bulk from other services. With such a USPS service, it decreases the demand for such databases, and with it the incentive to create such databases.

It is unlikely that the USPS will overwhelm homeowners. Presumably the USPS will limit received promotions to one per day. That can potentially give the USPS an additional $60/year in revenue per household, at marginal cost.

General comment about TD games: Whenever there are no clear tower/mob advantages, I simply maximize damage-time per dollar. (You can go a step further and do damage-time per dollar-space.)

Simply doing that, I'm on round 200 with 100 lives, on my first try. Eventually it makes sense to only buy orange towers, no upgrades.

Stats on popularity from TIOBE:

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.... (Obj-C now the 5th most popular and quickly rising)

Feedback: don't allow usernames "root", "admin", "administrator", et cetera.

They specifically mean hard-coded references. For IAPs and the like, you should be querying the server for the localized price.

A good example is a "Share via Email" function that presents a pre-filled Email Composer with "Download this $1 app." This causes problems if you happen to change the price down the road (or if users are in a different economic zone).

This conclusion of nepotism assumes that the propensity for a son to follow in their father’s footsteps is independent of industry.

Aside from being an assumption that shouldn’t be made, it can’t possibly be true.

The industry of the top 1% and the skill sets required are completely different from those of the other 99%.

Although I agree with the sentiment, this is a logical fallacy. Does an art critic need to be an artist themselves to be taken seriously?

Robert isn't telling us what makes a great company, he's telling us what has become a minimum standard.

(iOS Dev) What is your revenue model? Ads? Price? DLC? It makes a difference. As well as the market.

In general though, I have found that the best use of your time and money is making a good demonstration video on YouTube (which improves all of your future posts/messages you distribute anywhere), and a PRMac release ($20).

I'm not endorsing PRMac, but I have had great success with it, and in the long run it helps your search rankings.

The founders featured in the Bloomberg series agreed to the coverage. There were other TechStars NYC companies that did not agree.

A "Hello World" example might take a while to pan out.

I went through and found the expected values of the Jackpot and $50k instant win tickets, and found the expected value (excluding the inclusive value of additional credit rewards) to be ~$0.016

By that metric, 1 credit is worth $0.0016, and 10,000 is worth $16.

Although I agree that most comic faces are left unblurred--when I look at some (perhaps 15%) of the faces visible, they are without a doubt blurred. They tend to be the ones that are forward-facing, without facial hair, and natural skin colors.

Example: Take a look at the GI Joe comic on your right all the way at the end.

Although I agree that the price difference is staggering, the important metric to measure these phones by is depreciation. If the iPhone user can sell that iPhone for a few hundred dollars at the end of those two years (I certainly have), then the cost of using the phone isn't that high. On the Android side I'm pretty sure depreciation is quite fast.

Additionally, the figures pointed out in this article are totals of the Voice&Data plans tied to the iPhones by AT&T. These are costs of a minimum iPhone service as deemed by AT&T, and not a cost of the iPhone itself.

In a few previous threads, PG has dropped these tidbits:

-All else equal, students are favored. (regarding YCNYC: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2889006)

-All else equal, technical people are favored. (Last FAQ: http://startupschool.org/faq.html)

I'll find them and post links when I can. (Done)

Certainly is.

EDIT: Imagine if there was a sharing option where each new person could only edit one new row. They can't edit the headers or alter the arrangement, but they have a saved, protected slot.

Just ask him. If your skills compliment his and vice versa, then it's merely a matter of being able to compromise and understand each other.

After all, that is one of the reasons why pg likes friend founders: comfortable enough that they trust each other, honest enough that they'll point out flaws, and understanding enough that they'll accept the criticism.

Being the only species in the universe to be able to survive an extinction level event is a pretty impressive goal.

Even if we couldn't communicate at all, it would be mind-blowing to know that we have spread our species to other solar systems.

True immortality for the human race. That's an enticing destiny.

Would you be interested in stats regarding the age of those 2000 apps?

"And by cowbell, I mean clickable-ness. Examining the results of our first round, and our research of what makes a photo clickable, we experimented with a new version. This one took our best performing ad (Ad B) from round 1, and zoomed in further to put more focus on the baby and the, ahem, clickable-ness."

Best part. Great article, much appreciated. Reminded me of the infamous "gray shirted girl": http://www.whattofix.com/blog/archives/2011/04/why-does-face...

On the iPhone side of things, you need to provide permission for an app to use GPS data. Mic, camera, compass, gps, and gyro are all fair game. No implementable restrictions either.

A shame that there aren't any responses (yet) from people with relevant projects.

Is it possible that those programmers merely take the easy (although not completely fool proof) route and exclude all data from April 1, and all data that refers to April Fools Day?

Answering the question "how does Google make money off of..." (regarding any of it's projects) can usually be answered by saying that Google has a vested interest in getting users to spend more time on the internet. For every hour that you are on the internet, you're probably using Google a few times.

This is how you can also answer "how does Google make money off of self-driving cars?" If people aren't driving their cars, they'll most likely be on the internet during their commute. If they are on the internet, they are probably using Google.

That said, Android provides a number of benefits to Google. Namely brand recognition, user interface research, and user GPS data. Ultimately though, the introduction of Android as a cheaper alternative to iOS and a more flexible alternative to BlackBerry probably contributed to smartphone sales much larger than the actual sales of Android devices (meaning: having an additional smartphone stimulated the demand for smartphones themselves).

TL;DR: The open-source nature of Android encourages increased smartphone production and consumption, thereby increasing consumer usage of the internet, and by default, Google.

Absolutely beautiful. Slick, and informative. I was not expecting the good visualization of data directly on the home page, not to mention the other tabs.

I previously used the Google Spreadsheet posted a while ago, but this has just replaced it. Very, very nice.

EDIT: Funding is still missing for all companies, but you should be able to get that info from CrunchBase, etc. "Greater than" information is sufficient. Also, I noticed that there is a duplicate BackType entry, but with 0 founders.

The most honest robots.txt file