Is that an iPhone in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

Is that an iPhone in
your pocket, or are you
just happy to see me?
Pete Forde / @peteforde
Unspace Interactive

Are you ready for yet
another Gradient-themed
Keynote presentation?

Why develop for
iPhone?

• Roughly 18-20 million iPhones sold to date

Why develop for
iPhone?

• 30 million if you include iPod Touch

Why develop for
iPhone?

• iTunes Application Store (iTAS)

Why develop for
iPhone?
• iTunes Application Store (iTAS)
• Indirect marketing through association

Why develop for
iPhone?

Because it’s awesome.

So, you want to develop
an iPhone application...

SDK free to the curious, but a developer
membership is $99.

You only need it if you plan to publish.

Submitting an app costs nothing.

Apps can be free

or sold for $0.99 to $999.99

Apple takes 30% of the gross proﬁts, and
they pay out at irregular intervals.

Slowly.

[By comparison, people freak out when
credit card processors charge 1-4%.]

Apple recently announced in-app billing,
which will enable swarms of
micropayment business models.

Killer start-up idea #452:

“You want my digits? Pair with my iPhone
and pay $200. Show me your Bluetooth.”

There will be no in-app micro-payments
for free apps.

That means no Trialware business model.

Other business models

• Embedded ad networks (AdMob)


• Embedded ad networks (AdMob)
• Paid ads or exchange ads


• Cydia: an alternative app store for jail-
broken phones


broken phones
• Everyone’s a criminal


broken phones
• Australia


broken phones
• Australia
• 1.7 million iPhones with Cydia installed

2 Development Paths

• Standards HTML + CSS + Javascript web
apps running in Mobile Safari

2 Development Paths

• Standards HTML5 + CSS3 + Javascript web
apps running in Mobile Safari
• Native apps written in Objective-C

2 Development Paths

In the beginning, Apple told us that there
would be no SDK and all applications would
be Ajax applications.
There was much rejoicing from web geeks
and much angry shouting from 3D game
programmers.

Web Apps

• No need to learn a new toolkit

Web Apps

• Safari supports CSS3 and fast Javascript,
plus access to GPS and the accelerometer

Web Apps

• Developers can target a single device with a
speciﬁc screen size

Web Apps
• Developers can target a single device with a
speciﬁc screen size
• Updates occur instantly on the server

Web Apps

• No direct hardware access

Web Apps

• Can’t be sold in iTAS

Web Apps

• Users must type URLs

Web Apps

• Users must type URLs
• Subject to server availability

Native Apps

• Direct hardware access (3D, Camera, GPS)

Native Apps

• Faster, compiled code which can be sync’d

Native Apps

• Apps have icons and can be sold in iTAS

Native Apps

• Access to iPod, Calendar, Address Book...

Native Apps

• Access to iPod, Calendar, Address Book...
• XCode IDE and debugging tools

Native Apps


Native Apps

• Must learn Objective-C, Cocoa

Native Apps

• Must port to other platforms

Native Apps

• Apple can reject your application at whim

Native Apps

• Apple can reject your application at whim
• Relatively few Objective-C coders around

Hybrid Web/Native Apps

• Wrap Safari in a Site Speciﬁc Browser (SSB)


• quot;A site speciﬁc browser (SSB) is a software
application that is dedicated to accessing
pages from a single website. SSBs typically
simplify the web browser by excluding the
menus, toolbars and browser chrome that
are external to the workings of a the site.quot;

• quot;A site speciﬁc browser (SSB) is a software
application that is dedicated to accessing
pages from a single website. SSBs typically
simplify the web browser by excluding the
menus, toolbars and browser chrome that
are external to the workings of a the site.quot;
• The best of both worlds.

Case Study:
TheScore iPhone Edition


• First commercial iPhone app in Canada


• Rails app which processes and caches a
seriously evil XML feed and presents a
customized iPhone user experience


• http://iphone.thescore.com/


• http://iphone.thescore.com/
• #1 iPhone sports web application


• Announcement of App Store presented a
dilemma: stick with proven tech
investment, or follow the hype and re-write


• After experimentation, we realized that we
could create a SSB and potentially add
additional features

• After experimentation, we realized that we
could create a SSB and potentially add
additional features
• “Native” app a huge success, no waiting for
approvals on changes or bug ﬁxes


• Content easily re-purposed for other
mobile platforms such as Blackberry


• Rails’ lets us implement features faster,
which means cheaper


which means cheaper
• Facilitates iterative development and
experimenting with subsets of users


which means cheaper
• Facilitates iterative development and
experimenting with subsets of users
• Most users have no idea it’s hybrid

Business Models,
Revisited

Scenario #1

Business Models,
Revisited
You sell 25k copies of an app for $1.95.

That'd be $50k, except Apple takes 30% so
we'll sell 36,500 copies.

Let's assume a 3% conversion rate from
people reading about the app to sales.

Business Models,
Revisited
That means that you'd have to have 1.2
million people consider buying your app, or
about 5% of the total number of iPhone
owners.

That seems unrealistic without a marketing
budget.

Business Models,
Revisited

Scenario #2
aka “The 37signals”

Business Models,
Revisited

Customers subscribe to a web service for
$5/m ($60/year).

You need about 1000 customers, once you
factor in payment and infrastructure costs.

Business Models,
Revisited

Oh, and in year two... it’s all proﬁt.

With a one-time purchase, there is no year
two. There’s not necessarily a reason for
them to give you any more money.

Business Models,
Revisited

iPhones feature the most sophisticated
mobile web browser in history

Business Models,
Revisited

Full support for CSS3 transitions and a
lightning-fast compiled Javascript interpreter

Business Models,
Revisited

Are you still so convinced that people need
to click on an icon to consider a service to
be useful?

Why not take the power back?

Business Models,
Revisited

Publish your app as a web service for
iPhone. Potentially you could support
Android, and other platforms, too.

Provide an optional Site Speciﬁc Browser.

Business Models,
Revisited

Pay Apple $0 overhead.

Win at life.

Business Models,
Revisited

Perhaps it could even have push
notiﬁcations, if they ever launch it.

Meet Hampton
Catlin
• Employee #1 at Unspace

Meet Hampton
Catlin

• Creator of Haml, the most
popular Rails template engine

Meet Hampton
Catlin


• An outspoken queer developer

Meet Hampton
Catlin


• An outspoken queer developer
• Wrote iWik on a dare

Meet Hampton
Catlin
• iWik was created because
Wikipedia looked like shit on
iPhone, and was hard to use

Meet Hampton
Catlin
• iWik was created because
Wikipedia looked like shit on
iPhone, and was hard to use

• Hampton’s app took requests
and used public APIs to fetch the
data, which was then scrubbed
and reformatted for the iPhone

Meet Hampton
Catlin
• iWik sold well over 60,000
copies at $0.99 a copy

Meet Hampton
Catlin

• The ﬁrst version was built in
three days while visiting home

Meet Hampton
Catlin

• The ﬁrst version was built in
three days while visiting home

• A hybrid web app, all it does is
format something freely available

Meet Hampton
Catlin
• Wikipedia offered to buy iWik,
instead of harassing him

• In addition, they brought him in
on contract to run their mobile
division on a nice retainer

• Wikipedia is his dream job

What Apple doesn’t want you to do.

“Again I say to you, it is easier for a camel
to go through the eye of a needle, than
for a rich man to enter the kingdom of
God.”

Matthew 19:24

“Not gonna lie... it'd be easier to get
Steve Ballmer using an iPod, than for you
to get a straight answer on why Apple
rejected your app.”

@peteforde http://twitter.com/peteforde/status/1461939233

Secret Laws
• This is John Gilmore

• Sun employee #5, and
co-founder of the EFF

• Unsuccessfully sued the
US Supreme Court to
force them to
demonstrate which law
kept him from ﬂying
anonymously

• I assumed that Apple would be pretty
liberal in their curation of iTAS


• I was wrong


• I was wrong
• Any guesses on the ﬁrst app I heard about
being rejected?

“Pull my ﬁnger” was
rejected for being
indecent

Eventually, they decided to
allow ﬂatulent expression.

Today, there are over 83 fart
applications on iTAS.

One of them hit #7 on the
paid application list.

Apple has a long list of
banned application
concepts.

You can’t make anything
similar to an existing
Apple application.
Sadly, the reverse doesn’t seem to apply to Apple.

No nudity or adult
content.

No tethering (sharing
3G with your laptop)

One company had their
critical update delayed
because their features
list said “more dragons”

“What dragons are you
referring to? There is
no evidence of dragons
in your application.”

It turns out that there
are so many apps
rejected that there’s a
deadpool for them.
http://boredzo.org/killed-iphone-apps/

Apple was worried that
this app, which “broke” the iPhone
when touched, would confuse
their customers.

Golly.

The Lyrics app by
Moop.me has been
rejected 4 times.

Each time, an Apple auditor loads their
app, searches for the word “fuck,” ﬁnds it
in the 700k song database, and rejects
their application.

Of course, 99% of those songs are
available for sale on iTunes.

Apple will not directly respond to
requests for clariﬁcation.

The iPhone SDK allows
the registration of
custom protocol
handlers which start
helper applications.

To some degree, this
allows a developer to
introduce “impossible”
features into the mix.

The most dramatic
example is Alocola,
which enables passing
GPS coordinates to
Safari web apps

http://alocola.com/

There’s also several
Twitter apps, and even
an Authorize.net
payment gateway
processor.

Check out a list of
custom protocol apps
at:

http://applookup.com/

• Native apps will be able to expose an
interface to the new Spotlight functions


• Connect to Mail, Calendar, iPod


• Safari remembers web login credentials


• Peer-to-peer Bluetooth


• Peer-to-peer Bluetooth
• Push notiﬁcations

• External device control
• Embedded maps, turn-by-turn directions

• Voice communication, audio recording

• Rumbling

• Rumbling
• Access music library, Core Data API

None of this is what
gets me excited,
though.

Javascript
iPhone OS v2.2: 8-22x faster than v1.0.1

Javascript
iPhone OS v3.0: 3-10x faster than v2.2

Strong speculation that
v3.0 will feature the
native-code generating
Squirrelﬁsh interpreter

Rhodes: An open source framework that
lets you write a mobile app in Ruby, feed
it through a processor, and output code
to run on multiple platforms.

http://github.com/rhomobile/rhodes

Canvas: The HTML5 canvas tag supported
in every major browser except IE. It
supports powerful vector drawing and
shading... and with advances in Javascript
speed, could pose a serious threat to
Flash, which doesn’t work on the iPhone.

Tools

• Best iPhone developer blog: MobileOrchard.com

• Best free iPhone research and case study:
theamazingiphone.com

• Cool library to connect your apps to Rails:

ObjectiveResource: iphoneonrails.com/

Thanks!

I will be posting the
URLs from this
presentation on:

rethink.unspace.ca

pete@unspace.ca
@peteforde

Is that an iPhone in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

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