Issue #1

Editor’s Note

I’m new to the space, so not all the articles I run across and share will necessarily be brand new. I’m hoping that in my journey to become a successful iOSpreneur I’ll be able to share bits of information you might not have otherwise seen.

In other news, my first app just got approved for sale in the app store. Math Minute Addition.

Headlines

Path Wants To Kiss And Make Up

Path is still dealing with the fall out of sending people’s Address Books to the cloud. Overall, I think Path has been a pretty good example of “what to do”, after being a decent example of “what not to do”. Here’s some more to the story.

Detect What A Mobile App Is Sending To Its Servers

Maybe Path was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Who knows, but it’s caused the folks at Think Vitamin to put out a tutorial to show folks how to see what data your app might be passing over the wires.

Preparing for an app launch – interview with Leap founder

James Dickerson talks about how they’re promoting Leap app.

MONEY AND THE APP STORE: A FEW FIGURES THAT MIGHT HELP AN INDIE DEVELOPER

A detail heavy article from Emeric Thoa, creative director and co-founder of the independent game studio The Game Bakers, discusses post-mortems and figures from their most recent turned base action RPG SQUIDS. The also share some number, and some speculations, to “Blockbuster” and “Jackpot” apps in the app store.

Dear business people, an iOS app actually takes a lot of work!

If you’re bootstrapping your iOS empire then this will be an interesting read for you, and maybe even something worth having potential clients read. It mentions a post on stack overflow that discusses some numbers from Twitterific. It also has numbers for the Barack Obama app. Very interesting.

How To Market Your Mobile Application

This is one of those older articles I spoke of. I’m still trying to weed out things that are no longer applicable, but if you ignore the app store numbers the rest of the advice still seems sound.

Selling open source apps

Zach talks about his experience selling open source apps on the App Store, using his app LiveReload as the primary source of information.

iPad 3 may be announced March 7

Where would we be without rumors of the iPad 3. Oh, that’s right, here.

iBooks update brings Promo Codes and Screenshots

iBooks content publishers now get promocodes to help share their works.

There’s A New King Of The Jungle: Apple Announces Mountain Lion

So, 10.8 was announced. More iOSification of OS X, notification center and some other apps.

Resources

Want Me to Download Your App? Please Do This

Adam points out this great idea from FullContact on providing your customers options to download your app.

App Cartel – Social funding for mobile apps and games

It doesn’t look like this has launched yet, but it’s one in a number of ideas to help get higher quality apps without being slaves to publishers or VC.

Double Fine Adventure

Is probably the most well known and successful–in terms of money raised–social app funding in recent history.

AppBackr

AppBackr is another version, and even the folks over at Moms with Apps are getting into the action.

App Store SEO tutorial

Interesting presentation on App Store SEO.

6 Tips for Designing a Promotion Worthy Business Card

Have something to promote your app if you’re networking.

Continuous Deployment for iOS Apps

Shortly I’m going to need to do something like this. Maybe not continuous, but a one step build would be awesome. Even more awesome if I could bring down new devices and add them to my certificate before building.

INFOGRAPHIC: The Rise of the Planet of the Apps

Interesting infographic from the folks over at AppAnnie. Fun fact: iPad generates 2.4x more revenue than iPhone per download. At least according ot App Annie collected data.

Discussions

Is it possible to make iPhone/iPad games and make a living off of it?

bobbery asks this question over at iPhone Dev SDK forums.

How much can you upsell in a free app?

dfvdan posts this question in iPhone Dev SDK forums. Obviously, “it depends” is the classic answer. There’s also a brief discussion on how Apple might be starting to frown upon Lite/HD versions of the same app due to app store congestion. I haven’t heard this, but I’m not an expert. I have seen in other places people talk about release 4 versions of your app! Lite/HD versions for iPhone and iPad.

TidBits

The Indie Game Developer

Funny little image mash-up on the perceptions about an Indie Game Developer.

Podcasts

What Now? Episode 11 – “Entitlement”

I’ve really enjoyed the What Now? podcast. Gavin says that if you’re a freelancer or indie game dev, or indie game dev shop you should do anything you can to get to GDC. Hurry if you want to get there, it’s March 5 – 9.
I really wish I could get there, but at this point I don’t think I can move enough stuff around to make it work.

What Now? Episode 12 – “Was that a rant?”

This is a bit of carry over from Episode 11 but it’s interesting to hear between the dialogue about what to happen if you just sort of grind away at life/biz and aren’t making any progress. Or worse, if you can’t feed your family.

Events

GDC

This gets mentioned as an aside in a podcast summary above, but it’s probably important enough to call out on it’s own.