From idea to AppStore in 2 weeks

http://www.alasdairmonk.com/journal/from-idea-to-appstore-in-2-weeks/

by timparker • 13 years ago

101 52 13 years ago

alasdairmonk.com

mgkimsal2• 13 years ago

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

Congrats on the launch!

riklomas• 13 years ago

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)

mgkimsal2• 13 years ago

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.

adam-a• 13 years ago

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!

purephase• 13 years ago

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.

gearoidoc2• 13 years ago

They offer a 30 day money back guarantee:

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

ceeK2• 13 years ago

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.

gearoidoc2• 13 years ago

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

Kurtz792• 13 years ago

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.

sgottit3• 13 years ago

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.

Kurtz792• 13 years ago

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...

drd• 13 years ago

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.

jgranby• 13 years ago

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.

thetrumanshow2• 13 years ago

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.

atacrawl• 13 years ago

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/)

ceeK2• 13 years ago

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.

robomartin• 13 years ago

> 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.

nicholassmith• 13 years ago

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.

timparker• 13 years ago

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.

Samuel_Michon• 13 years ago

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.

gebe3• 13 years ago

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.

nwh• 13 years ago

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.

andymoe2• 13 years ago

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.

talkingquickly2• 13 years ago

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?

thetrumanshow2• 13 years ago

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.

AlexeyBrin4• 13 years ago

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

sgottit3• 13 years ago

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.

AlexeyBrin4• 13 years ago

Well done.

brador• 13 years ago

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

coin• 13 years ago

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.

eloisant• 13 years ago

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.

AlexeyBrin4• 13 years ago

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.

gebe3• 13 years ago

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

AlexeyBrin4• 13 years ago

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).

evilduck• 13 years ago

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

adamors• 13 years ago

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

bobthedino• 13 years ago

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?

vignesh_vs_in• 13 years ago

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 :).

podperson• 13 years ago

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.

RyanMcGreal• 13 years ago

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

mesozoic• 13 years ago

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

cnp• 13 years ago

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

LAMike• 13 years ago

4 days for approval? That's pretty fast.

leviathan• 13 years ago

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.

gfodor• 13 years ago

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.

andrewroycarter• 13 years ago

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.

From idea to AppStore in 2 weeks

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