Published March, 2015
If you start having the following symptoms that
means you're coming down with a case of Appreneurship:
You can’t stop thinking about it as you fall asleep at night; your mind comes
back to it when you know you should be concentrating on your day-job; you get
distracted watching Blade Runner on TV.
As soon as the idea to create an app pops up in
your mind, there's no letting go until you build it. If you haven't got any idea
how to get started, this book is for you:
Research
Planning an App
Business Plan
Working out the costs
Outsourcing Development
Building the App (essential tools to go about
the business of creating Apps)
In-App Advertising and monetization
Supporting and Updating the App
Resources available on the Internet (e.g.,
AppTrace, etc)
It covers all the App markets available (Apple
AppStore, Google Play Store, Blackberry, Amazon AppStore, and Windows Store). As everything worth doing in life, it pays off
to be prepared...
The most important titbit of the book showed up
regarding the use Eclipse when developing for the Google Play Store: “Many people say that it’s easy to code for
iOS than it is for Android purely because Google’s IDE is [ ] embarrassingly
bad. Slow, clunky, counterintuitive when not outright baffling, poorly laid
out, needlessly complex, it’s just a mess”. My thoughts exactly. Maybe
Android Studio will be a turnaround. I’m not sure. I haven’t used it yet.
As someone who has done some research regarding
App Building, I’ve come across a lot of the so-called Sites where it’s
advertised that we can put an App out in the market in just a few minutes
without having to use any kind of coding skills… a few examples: iBuildApp, Appypie, AppsBuilder,
etc. Forget about them if one wants to produce nice-looking Apps. Quoting
Heinlein’s TANSTAAFL (There Ain't No
Such Thing as a Free Lunch), don’t expect free tools to do the work for
you. Anything that takes away my ability to create custom code is unlikely to be
a good thing. I already knew this, but the book’s authors emphasized this fact
in very strong terms. In the age of “everything-goes”, it’s always very
refreshing when someone advocates the fact that hard word always pays off in
the long run. If you’re in the business of wanting to make money as an App
Builder, taking shortcuts is not the answer. Moreover when using this free App
Builders available on the internet, don’t expect to be able to provide the App
with a robust Security layer. For me this fact alone is enough to put me off
using these free tools.
The only thing missing in this book is a
template for producing a working and salable Business Plan to allow you to
pitch the idea to potential investors. If you intend to develop the App on your
spare time, this template might be waived. Even then I’d advise you to use some
sort of Simple Business Plan, to allow you to jot down what you need and the
costs of your Development Process.
