Kent Nguyen has a great article about how building iOS apps takes a lot of work. And, here at Parse, we agree. Making a well-designed app is not a trivial task. Many non-developers hugely underestimate the amount of sweat and tears that goes into a single app.The big component that is overlooked and that Kent stresses is the server component. An app is not an island. Users expect their apps to richly interact with the internet.This means you need to worry about developing code on servers, communicating with servers, APIs, and a whole plethora of network issues.And this is the exact reason why ...

In a new research report from Distimo, the app store analytics provider examined two different ways that allow mobile developers to get a bump in both their download numbers and revenue. One way, which is within the developers’ control, is putting the app on sale. Within the first day, iPhone developers see an average increase of 41% in revenue using this method, and see revenue increases of 22% by the sale’s end. Android apps, however, rose just 7% on day one, but closed out the sale with higher percentage gains than either iPhone or iPad.The second method Distimo looked into is...

One of my New Years resolutions was to finally learn the iOS SDK and build a 'real' application.I am happy to report that progress is going really well and wanted to share something that I have noticed about iOS programming.It only looks scary... it's not. It's actually very easy.Now, I am not building Mail, Angry Birds or Photosynth or anything, but the core concepts of the SDK are not that bad once you spend some time learning delegation. If you don't understand delegation, iOS programming is VERY hard. Even if you have GUI experience and aren't coming from the web, it's going to be tough...

Why do I hate Android? It’s definitely one of the questions I get asked most often these days. And most of those that don’t ask probably assume it’s because I’m an iPhone guy. People see negative take after negative take about the operating system and label me as “unreasonable” or “biased” or worse.I should probably explain.Believe it or not, I actually don’t hate Android. That is to say, I don’t hate the concept of Android — in fact, at one point, I loved it. What I hate is what Android has become. And more specifically,...

As the horsepower packed into mobile devices gets ever greater, more full-featured forms of multitasking are possible. The market leaders have very different ways of going about things, and there are numerous misconceptions about what is going on behind the scenes. This isn’t all the fault of the user, though. In the interest of ease of use, sometimes the multitasking metaphor is overly simplified on both Android and iOS. iOS: It’s more complicated than it looksEver since iOS 4, Apple’s platform has had a limited form of multitasking accessed with a double tap of the home ...

My friend contacted me on twitter and asked for advice on different sources on how to learn iOS apps. Since this paragraph will already exceed 140 characters, I'm posting here, instead.(Obviously, reading this blog regularly is a great way to pick up some iOS development tricks)To get started, some people buy a book or find some good online tutorials. I tried both approaches, and the online tutorials were definitely better. I found Stanford's class on iPhone Development, available for free on iTunesU, to be a great place to start. However, watching lectures is time-consuming and, frankly, bori...

There is a huge bug when Group Messaging is disabled in iOS 5. I'm shocked Apple hasn't fixed this yet.Today a friend sent out a text message blast, announcing they got a new phone number. Shortly after, I got text messages from three random people I don't know. I was confused how these people got my number, but then I realized they were replies intended for my friend who sent out the text blast.If you've ever used the Group Messaging feature, it's supposed to thread messages sent to groups, showing the person's name above their reply. But in order to use this...

A few days ago I wrote a post trying to correct a lot of the inaccurate statements I have seen repeatedly mentioned about how graphics on Android works. This resulted in a lot of nice discussion, but unfortunately has also lead some people to come up with new, novel, and often technically inaccurate complaints about how Android works.These new topics have been more about some fundamental design decisions in Android, and why they are wrong. I’d like to help people better understand (and judge) these discussions by giving some real background on why Android’s UI was designed the wa...