I started looking into iOS app development in March of 2009. I didn't know much about programming, but it seemed like a pretty lucrative industry to get into and I decided I wanted to be a part of it. I talked with my wife Lisa about the prospect of getting an iMac. A few days and $1,500 later, a beautiful 24" iMac showed up at our door. The unboxing of that iMac was an event that changed my life! I was instantly converted from my PC loving ways, and was the newest addition to the Apple fan-boy club.
With as much time as I could spare, I tried getting into app development by looking at different tutorials online. I honestly had no idea what I was doing. I would follow along different posts online, and do things without knowing why in the world I was doing them. I was going through the motions and getting nothing out of it.
The main reason I wanted to get in on the app market was because I had an idea for an app that I really wanted (like I actually wanted it for myself, so I thought maybe some other people would want it too). Having served as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I fell in love with the concept of playing scripture based games. I wanted to make a game that would test your knowledge of where different scriptures were located by having you read a scripture, and then guess the reference and get points for how well you do.
It seemed like a simple enough concept, but try as I might, I just could not figure out what I needed to do. I finally got to the point where I realized that I might as well pay someone to build me the app I wanted, and then I could have an app on the app store, that would hopefully be making me some money, and then I could actually go back and learn what was going on after that. I can say right now, that was one of the best decisions I ever made. Had I continued on the path I was on, I would have succumbed to the awesomeness of iOS and been destroyed.
I checked online to see if there were any people at BYU that knew anything about writing iOS apps. It turns out there was! A group called CocoaHeads met every week to code together and talk about different principles and concepts. I headed over there one night to see if I could find someone that could throw my simple app together.
Lucky for me, there was a guy (Dave DeLong: @davedelong) there who knew more about iOS stuff than anybody on the planet. I asked him if he'd build me an app, and he said he would for $100/hr! Wow. I definitely wasn't expecting that. He told me it would probably take him four hours to complete. Four hours! It would have taken me four years, and here this guy is saying he could get it done in four hours. I wanted to be like that. I agreed to pay him his rate (which was more than fair for the quality of work he did), and finally had an actual live working app in my possession. It was such a cool feeling to have a product that works that you are ready to take to market.
I somehow managed to get the app up on the App Store (which is quite a complex process), and started to reap the rewards of my investment. By the end of the second month, I had enough sales of my app to recoup the cost of paying Dave to develop it. That's not too bad, right?
While I was making money each month from sales of my app (that bought me more time with my wife :), I was able to go through all of the source code and start seeing how things were working. I had a working app, and because it was working, I was able to understand why things were working, and what was making them work. I took the source of the first app, and made another version of it, with different content, and that took off and started making me even more money. I didn't realize this then, but the benefits that I would reap from learning from and studying the source of that app would far outweigh the monetary gain the app has made me over the past few years.
Because of the work that I was doing on improving and reverse-engineering these apps, a whirlwind of events started that have changed my life forever. Doors opened up to me that would have otherwise been impossible to get into, and I was able to establish a modest recurring income that has been a life saver while I have been in school.
I think that developing mobile software is the most enjoyable and rewarding job in the world! Following along closely the posts in this blog will help you build a strong foundation of experience that will help you see how rewarding it can be, and it just might be as life changing for you as it was for me.
I think that developing mobile software is the most enjoyable and rewarding job in the world! Following along closely the posts in this blog will help you build a strong foundation of experience that will help you see how rewarding it can be, and it just might be as life changing for you as it was for me.
