Your own Personal App

Hi,

I am the new guy here, and I am not going to blog about a cool new gadget or a fancy new apps. Be assured the other bloggers do very well keeping you informed. No, I am going to address something different: "your own personal app!"

My observation is that the status symbol of the iPhone itself  becomes more and more replaced by having your own app on iTunes. I do freelance app development, and a year or two ago most apps were developed for companies - strictly business. But I encounter more and more people who just want to have their own app. Like a new stamp in a collection, people love seeing their own application-icon on the screen of their iPhones. Showing it to friends, enjoying the fun of actually selling a few copies, and secretly hoping that the hype will make their app the new twitter. While the content becomes merely an unimportant sidekick.

When I talk to these new kind of customers I encounter two different types of people that could not be more different from each other. The one type knows exactly what he/she wants, has ideas, and is willing to actually invest some money, still hoping for a nice return. Whereas the other, just had this "brilliant" idea, that supposedly will sell a trillion times, and the development budged is an estimated $37 (In average)... It has nothing to do with age or experience. It has something to do with their personal inhibition threshold. The ones with the great idea but no plan have very low one, and and the other ones don't. But why are there no shades of gray? This puzzled me for weeks, until I looked at my correspondence and saw a pattern: Both groups have no idea about code, graphic design, the iPhone SDK, user interfaces/guidelines, or developer licenses. And either you ignore this lag of knowledge and just do it, or you want to know how it works and start browsing until you understand the process from "app to idea". If you are not 100% motivated you simple stop researching and fall of the grid. Resulting in these two very different types of customers.

I think this is sad, and I would love to see apps and ideas coming from this gray area. I bet their ideas are much better than we all think. And it would also be quite an enrichment for the app store, which actually reflects this trend. We have brilliant high value apps, and tons of stuff that is unbelievably infantile. I am exaggerating here, put you get the point.

So the next couple of episodes of my blog will deal with the process of "from idea to app". Meanwhile let me know if you ever dreamed about having your own app but you immediately dropped the idea because you didn't know how to pull it off.

Cheers Arend