Posts tagged with "developers"

How to Know When Apple Finally Gets iCloud Right→

Gus Mueller:

But how are we going to know Apple has finally fixed iCloud syncing for developers and is really serious this time? And I’m not just talking about Core Data syncing, I’m also talking about the APIs developers are given to push document data back and forth. The broken stuff, the things developers laugh at Apple about and have given up on.

Here’s my short and inconclusive list of things that will let us know iCloud might be ready for real world developer use.

Gus has been trying to work with iCloud for VoodooPad since 2011. Some of the features he proposes have been requested by developers for over a year now.

I don’t think that “the Dropbox way” is a panacea for Apple’s syncing woes with third-party apps, but I do believe developers should get new tools, improvements, and fixes for iCloud.

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Goalie for HockeyApp→

Goalie is a $9.99 app that developers can use to manage their HockeyApp accounts on the iPhone.

I’m not a developer, but I use HockeyApp on a daily basis to install betas of apps I’m trying, and I know how the service works. So I asked for a test account, and played around with Goalie. The feature set is solid: you can view all your apps, get stats on versions (such as installs and crashes), view crash groups and full crash logs, manage team members, and even access the feedback area where you can delete or reply to threads. If you’ve been looking for a way to manage HockeyApp on the go, I think Goalie deserves a look. Make sure to check out the app’s website for screenshots and details.

Goalie is $9.99 on the App Store.

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End WWDC→

The whole point of the conference needs to be rethought, and the goals addressed from scratch using new approaches. As the greatest challenge for WWDC is in scaling to meet demand, I think it’s obvious that the rethought WWDC should be considered in terms of digital solutions. Call it WWDC if you like, but it needs to take place 365 days a year instead of 4. It needs to serve 300,000 developers, not 5,000. And it needs to take place online, not within the cramped confines of a small convention center in San Francisco.

Daniel Jalkut says that it’s time for something better than WWDC. The entire post is worth a read.

Personally, I think it’d be interesting to see an expansion of the Tech Talk World Tour that Apple did in late 2011. But even in that case, venues were limited, and I imagine traveling around the world put a lot of stress on Apple engineers. Having Apple staff at smaller, independent conferences could help, but those would need to be several conferences each year, otherwise the same issues would arise.

I agree with Daniel. Maybe, with hundreds of thousands of developers, the solution that makes the most sense is a digital one.

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Apple Restricting Special Characters In App Descriptions→

Mikey Campbell:

As seen in the image above, Apple is no longer allowing developers to submit app description edits with the unique character sets, which in this case includes a checkmark, explosion, “no symbol” and a speech bubble. It is thought that others are included in the new restrictions, but that has yet to be verified.

It appears that Apple has also started restricting usage of glyphs that aren’t necessarily emoji.

I would welcome a change to text-only release notes. While emoji and other characters can add a bit of fun and personality to otherwise boring release notes, some developers were overusing them.

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The Cost of Launching a Mobile Game→

Edge:

This is in no way atypical for some of the more successful game developers, and all of that is done in hopes that the new games get featured on a variety of app stores, causing that oh-so-important spike in early sales.

The post refers to Jessica Lessin’s article on The Wall Street Journal about the launch of ZeptoLab’s latest game:

Overall, ZeptoLab says it will spend around $1 million launching “Cut the Rope: Time Travel,” which traces the adventures of the green monster Om Nom as he meets versions of himself in time periods like the Renaissance and the Middle Ages. On top of that sum, which includes the costs of animation, the company is counting on some free help by promoting the game inside its other titles.

After nearly five years, the App Store is a huge market and game developers are throwing big money at it. In ZeptoLab’s case, add the fact that the game has also launched on Android – it doesn’t always happen, though – and you understand why large companies are capitalizing on the installed base of mobile devices.

There’s another side of the coin: indie developers with great ideas but limited budgets. Take this Polygon article about Ridiculous Fishing as an example:

We did everything…I literally didn’t sleep for three days before the launch, just working and making sure that every reviewer and every website and every person that I could send the game to had the game.

Different games, different needs. Vlambeer doesn’t have the same resources of ZeptoLab and they opted for a different pricing scheme.

Smaller indie developers aren’t “less important” than established, popular game companies: because of the freedom that generally comes with independent creation, indie games tend to explore concepts and game mechanics that larger studios are more skeptical about. With the rise and consolidation of app stores and digital delivery platforms, indie games have become a fundamental piece of any device’s catalogue. Ask Sony. Ask Nintendo. Take a look at Kickstarter, with well-funded game and hardware projects.

On our end of the spectrum, I’d say that Apple is doing a good job overall. The App Store’s front page is skewed towards free-to-play games from large studios and publishers, but, on the flip side, Apple has featured indie titles numerous times in the past, and it also differentiates between “big name publishers” and smaller titles in their curated sections.

And yet, for a successful Ridiculous Fishing, there are hundreds of indie games with solid, original ideas that don’t get the recognition they’d deserve, either for a lack on the developer’s side (poor marketing skills is a common culprit) or an obvious inability to get noticed on the App Store. Other times it’s because the market is simply saturated, but, again, indie games tend to innovate and explore new ideas.

There’s a variety of improvements Apple itself could consider to help indie game (and app) developers, many of which I elaborated upon last year. Let developers offer videos alongside screenshots for those game/experiences that are hard to grasp in a couple of images; give more prominence to human curation and weekly sections; protect game makers against scams and rip-offs that are still far too present on the App Store.

Launching mobile games is expensive, especially for large companies. I hope Apple will keep working on finding the right balance between “big name games” and indie gems on the App Store.

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The Market for Paid iOS Apps→

Marco Arment:

I haven’t always used these particular apps to solve these problems, but it takes a lot to change my mind on one. If you make another RSS reader or Twitter client, there are certainly a lot of people who could use it, but you’ll need to compete with very mature, established apps. Competing in these categories isn’t about price: it’s about relevance and attention. If you can’t find enough customers here, it’s probably not because you’re charging $2.99 instead of $1.99 or $0 — it’s because your app isn’t convincing enough people that it’s worth using over the alternatives.

This is also the same problem I run into every time I’m sent new apps to review: is this going to be better than Tweetbot, Fantastical, or Drafts for my workflow? Should my readers know about this app even if I won’t use it every day? How do I balance the expectations of my readers, who want to know about new apps, with my personal opinions and workflow preferences?

I’ve thought deeply about this, and I concluded that, ultimately, my readers prefer honesty over quantity of mediocre app discoveries. When a new app comes around and it improves substantially on my workflow, they deserve to know about it. From my perspective, I have chosen to remain curious while having high standards for the apps I’m interested in.

From a developer’s standpoint, I agree with Marco’s article. The 2013 app market is fine if you have the right idea, executed well at the right time. In four years of writing this site – it was launched 9 months after the App Store – I’ve learnt this: people like new apps, but they expect a certain degree of quality and functionality from modern iOS apps.

Again, like Marco says, the bar is higher today. But it doesn’t mean developers can’t still raise it.

Today, the App Store has other problems.

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Facebook SDK 3.5 for iOS→

Some nice updates for developers who integrate Facebook functionality in their iOS apps. A new native Share Dialog, with support for photos like the iOS 6 Share Sheet, will be available in beta today:

The native Share Dialog is simple to integrate and significantly improves people’s sharing experiences from your native mobile app. It has built-in support for publishing Open Graph actions. In addition, people now have the option to share activity from apps through this dialog without needing to login to Facebook first. This makes it faster and easier for people to share.

The data and publishing permission dialogs look good as well. Facebook says they’re 20% faster, too.

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A Better Testing Process for App Store Developers→

A Better Testing Process for App Store Developers

The Iconfactory’s Sean Heber, in a radar filed on Open Radar:

Allow developers to add “in development” apps to the App Store. Rather than having them go through review, they simply upload builds like normal but the builds are set as “in development” which then only go to registered testers associated with the app.

In his proposal, Sean goes through the steps a possible “beta portal” for App Store apps may require. While I’m not sure about the idea of putting available development builds in the Purchased section of the App Store (if only for the poor technical performances of that section), I do believe this is a good idea. The lack of any sort of deeper App Store integration is what helped the rise of services like Hockey and TestFlight, and it seems strange that Apple hasn’t done much in the area of testing development builds of apps. I would also add that it’s absolutely anachronistic how Apple is still forcing developers to associate builds with device IDs rather than Apple IDs of testers (device slots are limited, and many testers have multiple devices).

I’m also intrigued by Sean’s other idea – letting users pay for early access to betas:

Bonus points would be to actually allow the developer to put a price on an app - even for testers. Using a mechanism like this, the developer could gather a group of early adopters who are willing to pay for early development access - perhaps to help support the developer in their quest to build the next big game. The goal with this is to provide a way that the next Minecraft could actually happen on iOS. When Minecraft was first beginning, Notch allowed people to pay for beta “lifetime” access up front. Even when the game was barely a game or barely anything at all. That early access generated a lot of buzz and revenue for him allowing him to continue development.

Again, I’m not sure how it would work in practice, but I think the idea is fascinating and worth discussing. Imagine some sort of Kickstarter-like approach for App Store apps, managed and sanctioned by Apple, and directly controlled by the developer. The App Store needs many, more basic improvements, but this is still something Apple should consider.

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