Developing iPhone apps not so easy after all

Rating: Serious problems with App Store uploading

The lead developer for Stuck4Words (see our story here), Steven Dow, described his experience of trying to upload software to the Apple App Store as “like having a television not working and the way to fix it is to change a fuse in your toaster.” Perhaps things aren’t so simple as Apple would have us believe, after all?

But then look at the statistics. The App Store launched on July 10th 2008 with some 800 apps available for download. Just three days later (July 14th), over 10 million apps had been downloaded.

In less than a year (April 23rd 2009), the numbers had increased to 35,000 apps available and an impressive one billion downloads. The latest figures (from October 27th 2009) are 100,000 apps and over 2 billion downloads.

So, obviously, enough developers are prepared to put up with the idiosyncrasies of Apple’s system to make it worthwhile creating and uploading iPhone apps.

In Steven Dow’s blog he says he searched the relevant Apple documentation and found the relevant certificates which overcame the “Not signed or certificated” error message.

The system then accepted the app but for three days the software wouldn’t work. “It stayed like this (showing me a message which was obviously not correct) for three bl**dy days as I tried everything,” Dow said.

Eventually, after trawling through Google for information about the error message he was receiving, he found the toaster fix which seemed highly unlikely but actually did work. So the moral for iPhone app developers is persistence pays off.

One final set of stats. A recent survey by AdMob of 1,000 mobile phone users found that the average iPhone users downloads ten apps per month. But iTouch users are even hungrier for apps – downloading nearly twice as many – 18 apps per month.