How much can a developer charge for an iPhone app like Twitterrific?
I want to know this because I need such an application with the same functionality for a new community website. I can do Ruby but have no experience with Objective-C. So it would be interesting for me if I should start reading books about iPhone programming or outsource the work to a iPhone programmer.
Cost 99$ to apple to be able to publish your app, or 399$ if you want to control on which device you put your application. But you can pay it near the end when you feel ready to publish.
Dev tools are free.
This is the best book I found soo far, the screencast are good to.
Objective-C is a pain IMO.
Plus an iPod/iPhone to test on!
A really good blog post on developing an iPhone app for about $5000.
This is a bad answer. See what schwa and chockenberry say below for much better data.
Original, terrible, misguided (though not high, just stupid) answer follows:
Twitterrific probably took an experienced Objective-C developer at least a month or so of development time (say 160 hours), plus a week or so of a graphic designer's time (say 40h). And that is a pretty optimistic estimate of time, I would think testing and tweaking to produce a high quality application would probably add another month.
The API it uses to communicate with Twitter already existed, as well as did much of the actual application logic as there's already an OS X application.
For a developer who is entirely new to Objective-C but has a couple years of development experience in a few other languages anyway, it would be reasonable to add a month of development time for ramping up.
iPhone developers are a bit of a rarity right now, but I think newbies (like me) have had a few months to get close to speed on it so you might be able to find a freelancer. Guru.com shows Obj-C developers with hourly prices of a pretty large range, but ones that are talking specifically about Mac development seem to be at least $50/h.
200 hours (development + graphic design) at $50/h is $10,000.
You might also be able to negotiate a percentage of sales in exchange for a lower rate, but that would require convincing the developer that you're going to achieve a certain level of sales.
The Barack Obama app took 22 days to develop from first code to release. 3 developers (although not all of them were full time). 10 people total. Figure 500-1000 man hours. Contracting rates are $100-150/hr. Figure $50000-$150000. Compare your app to Obama.app and scale accordingly.
OK After my last disastrous attempt to try and post a useful piece of help, I went off hunting around!!
I found this site which is aiming for 31 days of tutorials ending in 31 small apps developed for the Iphone all the source code for which is available to download. They also provide a commercial service to build apps!
If you want to know if you can do the coding, well at least you can download the code and see if anything there is helpfull to your needs, on the flip side you can also get a quote from them for developing the app for you, so you can try both sides of the coin, outsource and in-house. Of course it all depends on how much time you have too! Its certainly worth a look!
It costs $99 to get an application in the App Store. Aside from that, everything is technically free.
If the developer of Twitterific created the application in his free time (which is more than possible), it wouldn't cost anything more than the App Store registration.
The biggest cost would be how much you charge for your time, which is kind of dependant on the client.
As for learning ObjC or iPhone development, "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X" by Aaron Hillegass is one of the best books for learning ObjC/Cocoa, and almost everything learned from it will apply to iPhone development (for example, none of the code depends on the ObjC v2 garbage collection, which the phone does not have)
There is much easier way to develop iPhone apps then learning Cocoa.
For example there are libraries shareware and open source as well to build your application using html and javascript only. These are QuickConnect(opensource), PhoneGap(opensource) and NimbleKit (shareware), maybe there are more of them I know just these.
QuickConnect - develop user interface in Dashcode then convert it to Xcode and do scripting. It has access to native iPhone functions like vibration, playing audio, etc, but last time I saw it was totally undocumented and I could not figure out how to build at least something normal.
PhoneGap - similar thing but very few features.
NimbleKit - same concept except it uses real native iPhone controls, has more features, really simple to use (just install and Xcode has new template), well documented, most preferred choice of course. Trial version has no time limit and full featured, so you can play with it and see if you can do what you want. The limitation here is that if you want to run it not only in simulator you have to buy it. I started to play with it about week ago and I like it, however I need some more features to buy, I left all my feature requests on product's web-site and got promised all features will be there within 1 month, well... we'll see :)
The rates that were quoted above are what you would expect to pay US developers; however, I do know some people who have been able to get their apps built for as little as $4,000 by using offshore developers.
Here is a blog post from a group that did this: http://www.lolerapps.com/why-outsourcing-iphone-apps-was-a-no-brainer-for-us
Also, Carla White wrote a fantastic eBook about the process she used to outsource her app called "Inside Secrets to an iPhone App". She talks about how she got a great deal because she was willing to work with a team that was still learning iPhone app development.
So, there are alternatives to the higher price developers discussed above.
There is no doubt offshoring the project is a better option. Why offshoring gets the job done for less is probably because of the healthy team size, experienced developers who are aware of the know-hows of the iPhone development, thus the turn around time is less. So it basically works with everyone.
Offshoring the work to build an app similar to twitterrific can be done for $3500. Below is a very helpful link to a presentation on iPhone development costs.
http://infobeans.wordpress.com/2009/07/23/what-does-an-iphone-app-cost/
How much can one expect to make from an application if they spend $50k to $150k on developing an application?
I think the best way to make money by making iPhone apps is to work by yourself. That means you make more money.
I am an account exec at a web and mobile development company and hear this question everyday. Unfortunately, iPhone apps are not cheap. You can expect around $100 per hour if you are staying on US soil. I have seen some offshore Indian developers out there for as low as $20 per hour. It all depends on the number and complexity of the functions you wish the app to perform. Simple one function apps are normally around 4-5k. They are so expensive because you are paying a team of people a healthy hourly wage and any type of raw prototyping, development, and coding takes time. Apps can exceed 60-100k pretty easily. Southwest Airlines making an app with a full ecommerce platform that allows you to buy tickets over your phone is an example. All of that porting into their IT is a big job.
And offshoring the project is definitely not always a better option. If you do so you better know who you are dealing with. Do not get me wrong there folks over there who do a bad ass job for a way better deal, but they are not that easy to find. Those guys could fuck around for 5 months on a simple project that would take 6 weeks here, or just not complete it at all and hand it over half finished. I have seen this scenario many times where we finish the work. The project management becomes a challenge. It can be difficult to communicate exactly what you want the app to do.
At our app development company we always get the "how much" question. The thing is, it always varies but particularly if the app needs fast turnaround, if we have to code extra to break Apple idioms or if it needs a server. We made a video with our CEO to help answer this and the other questions we get like "how do you get accepted to the iTunes store": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3KAAdzx5VU
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.)
Twitterrific has had 4 major releases beginning with the iOS 1.0 (Jailbreak.) That's a lot of code, much of which is in the bit bucket (we refactor a lot with each major release.)
One thing that would be interesting to look at is the amount of time that we had to work on the iPad version. Apple set a product release date that gave us 60 days to do the development. (That was later extended by a week.)
We started the iPad development from scratch, but a lot of our underlying code (mostly models) was re-used. The development was done by two experienced iOS developers. One of them has even written a book: http://appdevmanual.com :-)
With such a short schedule, we worked some pretty long hours. Let's be conservative and say it's 10 hours per day for 6 days a week. That 60 hours for 9 weeks gives us 540 hours. With two developers, that's pretty close to 1,100 hours. Our rate for clients is $150 per hour giving $165,000 just for new code. Remember also that we were reusing a bunch existing code: I'm going to lowball the value of that code at $35,000 giving a total development cost of $200,000.
Anyone who's done serious iPhone development can tell you there's a lot of design work involved with any project. We had two designers working on that aspect of the product. They worked their asses off dealing with completely new interaction mechanics. Don't forget they didn't have any hardware to touch, either (LOTS of printouts!) Combined they spent at least 25 hours per week on the project. So 225 hours at $150/hr is about $34,000.
There are also other costs that many developer neglect to take into account: project management, testing, equipment. Again, if we lowball that figure at $16,000 we're at $250,000. This number falls in line with Jonathan Wight's (@schwa) $50-150K estimate with the 22 day Obama app.
Take another hit, dude.
Now if you want to build backend services for your app, that number's going to go up even more. Everyone seems surprised that Instagram chewed through $500K in venture funding to build a new frontend and backend. I'm not.
I hate to admit how little I've done an iPhone app for, but I can tell you I won't be doing that again. The guy who said that "simple, one function apps can be done .. [by solo developers]... for $5K" is correct; however, that is still lowball, and presumes almost no project design, graphic design or network backend work.
I am the developer for Coupious mobile coupons iPhone app and with the amount of time that I spent on that application (v1.0 - v1.5), it was probably a $15,000 - $20,000 investment. However, to be fair, I do admit that I was the only developer working on it and when I started the project, I had never seen or used Objective-C before. Despite that, three months later, it was released so the numbers are probably a little skewed because there was a fair amount of learning going on as well as coding.
However, iPhone competent developers run in the range of $80-$150 depending on their skill and time with the platform. I would say that for a simple application, an app would probably run 2K-5K, a medium complexity app would run 5K-15K and a fairly complex app running 15K-30K. Game applications could be even more.
The reason it is so high is that the skill is fairly specialized and not everyone is able to do it
I am a very good iPhone app developer, and I charge over $150 per hour for my services. I have a ton of experience building iPhone apps and their server side components. I have also been called in on several occasions to fix offshore developed apps. Here's my take.
I'm just about to release a shopping app for a client. The design work was done by 2 client in-house designers over 2 weeks, quick because they had all the image assets already. Think 2 people x 10 days x 8 hours = ~$24,000. The server side had to be modified to provide data for the iphone app, we used their in-house team and in-house platform and in-house API, 2 developers, 4 weeks, or about $50,000 and thats because they already have a web shop and API. Cost them about $400,000 to get there (excluding platform). And I wrote the app side in 3 weeks, given that a lot of my code is duplicated from previous projects, another ~$25,000, the cheapest app I ever did.
Total spent: ~$100,000, and thats insanely cheap!
And they will give this away for free so clients will buy from their store from their iphones.
For your app, Peter, if you have the servers and the APIS and the design, I'd guess at $30,000 to $60,000 depending on complexity. If you do not have the design, double it. If you do not have the APIs, double again...
There are ways of paying less to get an application, developed than paying the going rate, but very often you get what you pay for - inexperienced developers who leave you with a mess of spaghetti code that's impossible to maintain, or experienced developers with whom you have to communicate across a cultural and language gap.
Developing an app like Twitterific is not easy. It's an extraordinarily polished app with a lot of attention to detail that most people - indeed many developers - would fail to notice or realize the effort behind. You may be able to get a Twitter iPhone client written for $3500 or $5000 by going offshore or by being willing to "work with inexperienced developers", but you're not going to get Twitterific for that, and it's doubtful you'd get even a halfway decent application for that amount.
And you likely will end up spending a lot of time managing the process, going back and forth on requirements, and fighting to get what you really want instead of what they want to give you.
There's also a risk with "cut-rate" development, whether it's offshore or just using inexperienced developers - you may very well end up with something you can't use, or something that gets 1 star ratings because it crashes or behaves erratically. You might find the occasional underpriced gem of a developer, but they won't stay underpriced for long given the sheer demand in this market right now.
By virtue of my books and blog, people often reach out to me when they need help with their iPhone applications. I get, on average, 4 or 5 inquiries a month from people asking for help fixing applications they had developed either over-seas or by inexperienced developers here in the States. In most cases, I end up having to tell them they'd be better off throwing their code out and starting over with a developer who knows what they're doing rather than trying to fix the code they bought on the cheap. If they insist on trying to "fix" what they have, I decline the work.
River of News for the iPad took about 400 hours of development to get to version 1.0 and I don't know how many hours my designer spent (20-50?). At US labor rates that's at least $40,000. But that sort of tight development was only possible because it was a one man operation. There is an enormous amount of overhead added when you separate the person writing the code from the person deciding what the product is going to do.
If you are going to send it offshore you'd better know exactly what you want. With the language and time difference it's very hard to do iterative design where you are exploring what is possible.
We just develop app for mobile and cost for develop about 9000$ (7 developer + 1PM + 1 Tester)
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