Stack Overflow: “I’m one of the developers for Twitterrific and to be honest, I can’t tell you how many hours have gone into the product. I can tell you everyone who upvoted the estimate of 160 hours for development and 40 hours for design is fricken’ high. (I’d use another phrase, but this is my first post on Stack Overflow, so I’m being good.)”
Craig would know, he’s a very experienced Mac and iOS developer. In other words he’s been doing this for years and is one of the good guys. Listen to what he has to say. These aren’t toys, they’re serious applications, and those serious applications take time, and money, to create.
My brother and I spent many hours on a fairly small application, that doesn’t have a complex UI. Can you imagine the amount of time it takes to go outside the default UI, not to mention whatever logic is needed behind the scenes? Yeah, it can be quite daunting, I can assure you.
Go read the piece. Craig should post it to his weblog. It’s very valuable information, from a very valuable developer in the iOS ecosystem.
4 replies on “Craig Hockenberry on iOS Development Costs”
And then there’s the fact that Objective C is just a bear of a language to deal with and the paucity of libraries and controls available on the platform, combined with a weak set of development tools. No wonder it’s so damned hard to write apps for iOS.
It just shows how horribly all the other platform companies missed the boat on the business side that developers would suffer through what it takes to build applications in such an unfriendly environment.
Tommy,
Wow! I think that’s the most fired up I’ve ever seen you! I don’t mind Objective, not at all. The thing that drives me crazy is Interface Builder, I’m just too stupid to figure it out.
C# is a fun, and easy, language to use, thanks to the .NET Framework. I’m sure there will be an explosion of Windows Phone apps on the market because it’s easy to code for.
Mr. Hockenberry was talking lime they wanted to do WinPhone version of Twitterrific the other night on Twitter. It would be interesting to see.
Thanks for the feedback, it’s always good to hear from you.
I just hope that the tie-in with games can carry the momentum with Windows Phone until the features improve some because the iPhone has been around longer and has a long head start–one that Windows Phone won’t catch with its first version (nor its second).
My rant was more an expression of frustration at Microsoft for squandering the smartphone lead. And it might also be frustration that something I value highly–and the team I work on values highly–isn’t that important in the grand scheme of things. Maybe it doesn’t pay to make it easy for developers. Maybe you should invest your effort in building compelling marketplaces and industrial designs. When you look at Apple’s experience the past several years, not just with the iPods and iPhones, but with Macs as well, they’ve focused on the consumers and mostly let the developers fend for themselves.
And there are a lot of people who are perfectly happy with that arrangement.
Tommy,
I can understand where you’re coming from.
I use Visual Studio every day and there’s no doubt it is the best IDE in the industry. There’s also a part of me that believes all the stuff added to help .NET developers has made it less than perfect for the C/C++ developer. A complaint I had while at Pelco. Now I’m doing C# daily and I appreciate it a bit more.
On the flip side Xcode is pretty sweet and has made huge strides in recent years, mainly due to the huge adoption of iOS by developers outside the norm for Apple. It is quite useful, and I’d put it on par with Visual Studio 6.0, which just so happens to be the best C/C++ IDE I’d ever used.
So they’re not so far behind the curve and they’re very focused on a specific set of API’s and one language, which helps them.
Microsoft delivers choice, Apple delivers simplicity. You can live in both worlds as a developer, and I honestly believe they can be complimentary worlds. Xcode + Cocoa on the desktop and mobile and .NET on the backend.