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.