Nguyen goes into a lot of detail, and it’s a must-read for anyone thinking about commissioning an iOS (or really any mobile OS) application. Here’s one passage in particular that I know will resonate with a lot of freelance devs:

Converting an iPhone app to iPhone/iPad universal app: This is the worst ‘additional feature’ found in iPhone development contracts. Because an iPad app is not a frikin’ additional feature. The iPad app is always more complex than iPhone app, and most of the time requires entirely different interface and interaction mechanism. It’s like making an electric bicycle and then convert[ing] it to a fuel-powered motorcycle! They are very similar at what they do, but under the hood, the difference is immense. [Emphasis in the original]

A lot of companies may be interested in what an app can do for their business, but without a good sense of what kind of resources need to be invested in order to create the app in the first place, there is bound to be ample frustration on all sides. Nguyen’s no-nonsense primer is a good way to help avoid some of that frustration.

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Welcome to the first App Store Roundtable. The iPhone and the App Store are always hot news, and for good reason. It’s a fantastic marketplace for developers, and there’s always something exciting happening somewhere for the press to report on. But sometimes the issues faced by everyday developers working on the platform get left in the dust.

The goal of this column is to give the development community a regular outlet — and to give the rest of the world a window into our lives. We’ve recruited an army of iPhone app developers willing to share their thoughts and opinions on the state of the App Store. The participants range from part-time hobbyists and one-man band independent developers, to big developers and publishers with dozens of titles under their belt. We hope you’ll enjoy hearing from them all.

To get things started, we talked about the App Store’s initial “gold rush.” Many developers brought up the fact that a few high-profile success stories have created the impression of easy money on the iPhone. This is driving more and more apps, making it increasingly hard to stand out, but relatively little is known about how to create a sustainable business in the App Store.

The word circling the media is that the iPhone is still a place where a developer of a flatulence app can earn an instant six- to seven-figure income. In development circles, though, we all know the glory days are over. You can’t just release crap and score mint anymore. In fact, it’s tough even to release something good and get noticed. The shear volume of apps available for iPhone in such a short time is unreal.

– Mike Kasprzak, developer of Smiles

We keep hearing the gold-rush stories, and the overnight success of fart or wobbling apps, or whatever the craze is that week. What I’d like to see discussed is the viability of having a sustainable business by writing games (or apps) independently and selling them through the App Store. Is that going to be possible, or are we doomed to the results of the shareware PC market? Do we need to cast our nets further (Android, web, desktop), or can developers carve a niche in the App Store and make a (good) living out of it?

– Noel Llopis of Snappy Touch, developer of Flower Garden

iTunes is to the music industry what the App Store is to iPhone software. If you’re not a Top 20 musician, you do not expect people to learn of you via iTunes, so why would we expect it to work for Apps? The issue at hand is what the proper venues are for advertising your App to your target market and the best bang for the buck for small developers and startups to enter the more traditional advertising space to get the mass market to know about their products.

– Trent Shumay of Finger Food Studios

Not to sound all “doom and gloom,” but inventory of the App Store is rapidly growing, and individual apps’ chances of exposure are diminishing. It’s getting harder and harder to climb into the “Top XX” lists. Apple doesn’t seem to be making any significant moves towards making developers’ lives any easier as far as the “marketing” aspect goes — they can only feature so many apps, after all.

– Peter Bakhyryev of Byteclub, developer of Scramboni

Join us next time?

If you are an iPhone developer with experience of the App Store and would like to participate by sharing some opinions in future App Store Roundtables, please get in touch via our contact form.

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Unfortunately, any application you create will not be headed for the App Store any time soon since it requires you to jailbreak your device by using any one of the more popular utilities (e.g. QuickPwn, XPwn, Pwnage, and WinPwn). While many iPhone users have used these tools to “free” their devices, I am still not a proponent of doing this since the practice is not supported by Apple in any way, and their use may void the device’s warranty if Apple has evidence of third-party software modification. You also open yourself up to device corruption and security problems due to the fact that jailbroken applications have free reign over every bit of data in your phone. If you do go this route, your application will reach the widest audience via Cydia.

IBM continues the tutorial by listing what you must have installed to begin development – cygwin for Windows and standard/core development libraries/packages you probably already have installed if you are a linux/BSD user. The author then covers how to download and access the data in the iPhone firmware image files in order to build the “toolchain” which will form the foundation of your development environment.

The article goes on to cover the installation of the Eclipse IDE and the configuration required to support C/C++ development for the iPhone using the toolchain. They start showing actual code with the most basic of all introductory applications, “Hello, World!”. Finally, you get an idea of how to work with the Cocoa Touch libraries with a full-fledged Objective-C code bundle that extends the “Hello, World!” example from the command-line to the iPhone graphical user interface.

The article/tutorial is a good read just for the “Resources” section (tons of good URLs for both iPhone development and coding in general), but I still strongly discourage folks from jailbreaking their devices. I realize Apple left Windows/Linux developers out in the cold, but there are other ways to protest such decisions besides doing something which could render your expensive device utterly useless.

If you are a Windows/Linux developer and have started down this path via these techniques, drop a note in the comments with your experiences.

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From a blog post that launched a thousand rumors, comes confirmation that Adobe is, in fact, creating a way to bring Flash content to the iPhone.

Here is an excerpt from their official statement during a recent “town hall”:

“Upon a direct question from the audience, Paul Betlem for the first time publicly confirmed that Adobe is actively developing a Flash Player for Apple’s popular phone. He said (not direct quote) ‘My team is working on Flash on the iPhone, but it’s a closed platform.’ He noted that Apple makes all the decisions, so in other words, the ball is in Apple’s yard at this time. If Apple says yes, Adobe will have the player available in a very short time.”

It will be interesting to see how this makes it way through the Cupertino application gates since this will be a direct competitior to the built-in audio and video players and will also provide an alternate way to develop applications for Apple’s devices. Given how Flash-centric their new creative suite appears to be, this move by Adobe may be seen as a real threat to Apple’s hold on the platform.

Apple may have little choice but to let Adobe into their camp since Microsoft has licensed Flash Lite for their mobile devices and it is expected that the Android phone platform will also eventually support it (but support is not expected out of the gate).

Do you want or need Flash support on your phone? If you are a developer of Flash content, are you eager to adapt your creations to run on Apple’s iPods & iPhones? Keep the converation going in the comments!

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