iphone App Development

[scross]

Hi there everyone,

I recently had a client enquire about the cost of developing a simple iphone game application. As a Flash designer, I haven't really looked into developing anything for the iphone and have little experience in quoting for such a project.

My gut reaction is to suggest approximately 5k, as this is what I would start at for a small game in flash but I'm interested to know if that is an applicable ball park figure for iphone apps.

Any suggestions out there?

[dominicwa]

My instincts say to push it higher for any native iOS app. If you compare to Flash I think you'll be under-quoting.

I've not done a lot of Flash development (just tinkered really). I'm normally a PHP/.NET/SQL guy (building Intranets and Windows apps). But I did build a simple game for the iPhone - http://www.frostybadger.com/osxs/ - to start me off with the iOS SDK. It took three of us (me coding, one art guy, one sound guy) more than 50 hours overall to build that. I'd say about twice that in fact. For a simple naughts and crosses game! A little frustrating... I could have built it in Win.NET in about 1/3 of the time.

The bulk of that time was spent coding and the learning curve would have absorbed *a lot* of it (maybe 50% - it's a steep'n!). There's also a lot of time faffing about getting setup, submitting apps to the store, going through all the certificate signing etc. It all chews up a lot of time. (Much more than other platforms I've developed for.)

There are technical factors involved in IOS apps development that you don't need to consider in Flash or other IDEs/frameworks...

- Memory management shuffles to the top of my mind... you need to keep on top of that because there's no automatic garbage collection or anything like that. The devices don't have the same juice as a desktop either (so you have to be much more aware of what you're using and free it up afterwards = *lots* more testing and debugging).

- Then there are all the UI guidelines and rules Apple slaps you with. Hopefully you'll not hit any of them and it'll all go smooth but you need to consider otherwise (rejection from the store submission leads to weeks longer waiting and more time developing to fix whatever issue was caught).

- Obj-c isn't as fun or easy to work with than many other languages I've used. You'll really need a firm grasp of OO programming and MVC.

So I suppose it depends on a couple of factors...

- How complicated is the game? If it's as simple as the naughts and crosses app then you can gauge a little based on that. That one just uses the main graphics APIs built into Cocoa. If you're going to be needing fast-moving animations/sprites, vectors like in Flash... you'll need to look at one of the game frameworks like cocos2d. That'll probably add extra complexity to the project unless you've worked with them before (or say, OpenGL).

- Are you going to do it yourself? And pick things up as you go? If so, you'll need to allocate a lot of time for learning. How much you need to learn will obviously depend on your skills/experiences but unless you're walking into this as a Mac developer - I wouldn't expect an easy time. (It's heaps of fun though once the barriers start breaking down!)

I hope some of that helps. Perhaps 5k isn't too far out if your game is as simple as ours was and you can do it all using the main graphics APIs. Just as long as you expect to need to put in twice that amount of time if you're doing it yourself and learning as you go.

Last point (I've earned my brownie points today I think)... Developer Program fees and cost of equipment. It's $120ish/year to be an iOS developer and the min. spec for entry into Apple's club is the Mac Mini which costs $1000 now. So bare both of them in mind when quoting too... I don't think it's unfair to expect a percentage of that to be covered by the client (at least the program fee).

I'm subbed to this thread if you have any further questions.

[scross]

Cheers! That's an aweful lot to take into account and I think while it's probably something I'll look at in the future, I am more than likely going to pass her onto a iphone developer. She eneds someone who already knows what they are doing and my own research stumbled upon the fact that I either need to buy a Mac or try to get the OS running on a virtual machine (neither of which I'm ready to do just yet).


Thanks for all your advice! You certainly did earn a brownie point!

[nebbian]

I'd recommend checking this out:

http://gizmodo.com/5552545/smokescre...ipt-on-the-fly

Also when developing for the iPhone you can make a webview which is essentially just a webpage (without the URL bar), and package it up quite easily.

As others have mentioned, memory management is a right royal pain in the bum. I find myself spending 75% of my time trying to get the memory working properly, 20% of the time getting frustrated trying to figure out how to do something simple, and 5% actually doing the normal coding stuff of design and banging out code.

[scross]

Smokescreen seems to be a viable option until Apple stops it's silly fight with Adobe.

It's pretty heft though (175kb).