This is the fourth installment of our on-going series of iPhone Developer interview. Last time, we had an interview with Valerio Dutto, the developers behind EasyTrail for iPhone. This time, we have a chance to catch up with Paul Chapman, the iPhone developer behind the Japanese Flash and one of the founding members of Long Weekend [...]
This is the fourth installment of our on-going series of iPhone Developer interview. Last time, we had an interview with Valerio Dutto, the developers behind EasyTrail for iPhone.
This time, we have a chance to catch up with Paul Chapman, the iPhone developer behind the Japanese Flash and one of the founding members of Long Weekend LLC. Japanese Flash is an educational iPhone app that helps you study Japanese vocabulary. In the interview, Paul will share with us his iPhone development experience and give advice for those who just start to develop the first iPhone app.
[SB]: Could you please tell us a little bit about Japanese Flash, your company and how you started as an iPhone developer?
[Paul]: We wrote our first app Japanese Flash with the goal of making the best Japanese vocabulary study app on the App Store. We wanted to make the chore of studying vocabulary more interesting, because it can be a very boring task! In addition to heaps of study data, we added a mood icon that changes facial expressions based on your performance, and 3 colorful themes to help break up the monotony.
Japanese Flash is visually beautiful, very fast and features lots of study data (180+ word sets, 149,000 words, 50,000 example sentences). The app has been quite successful so far, although the challenge of overcoming entrenched competitors is no small task!
We first started developing for iOS in May 2009. It was the “Golden Week” long weekend in Japan and three of us got together to create “something” for the iPhone. Whilst we had never used Objective C or Cocoa (Apple’s standard tools for developing iPhone apps), we had a lot of experience in web apps, strong OOP fundamentals and some exposure languages like Java, C#, C/C++.
[SB]: How did you come up with the idea of Japanese Flash and develop an educational iPhone app?
[Paul]: With only a four day weekend to develop our first app, we had to set an achievable goal! Being long time students of Japanese, we each had a number of study apps for iPhone. However, we found them all lacking. Some apps were ugly and had limited study data. Others had lots of data, but failed to deliver an acceptable user experience. We thought the iPhone deserved a much better app for studying Japanese vocabulary!
After four days our first prototype was very rough. But it could retrieve data from the database, display different sets and it liked to crash unexpectedly! Nonetheless, we had achieved our rather audacious first milestone.
[SB]: So, how long did it take to build the app?
[Paul]: We spent about 10 months perfecting Japanese Flash in our spare time. We tried to put in almost every feature we wanted because it was a labor of love; although it could have been released with fewer features if we had been decided to do so.
After extensive beta testing amongst friends in Tokyo, version 1.0 was released in April 2010. Around this time we quit our “corporate” jobs in Tokyo and established Long Weekend LLC, named in honor of the four day weekend we spent writing the original prototype!
[SB]: How do you determine the pricing?
[Paul]: We like to provide ridiculous value to our customers, so we took a look at the competing apps in the space and aimed to provide a much more compelling experience at the same price point. You also need to be realistic with people. Can a company afford to keep updating a product that sells for .99 cents? This is unlikely, unless it sells a 100,000 copies, and even then, only for the first year. We don’t want Japanese Flash to be “abandon-ware”, so we priced it accordingly. You may be interested to hear we are now working on version 1.2, which you can read about on our Facebook Page.
[SB]: Apple has rolled out iOS 4. What do you think about the new iOS SDK? Do you make use of any new feature?
[Paul]: Our first two products focused on Japanese; we also publish a FREE web browser for iPad with a built-in J-E dictionary, called Rikai Browser for iPad. However we are now developing a new product with more mass market appeal.
Our latest project makes use of background location monitoring to provide a wholly new messaging application. This is currently in alpha testing by people in Tokyo, Melbourne and New York City.
Through our R&D efforts we have collected lots of data, and have also made a number of interesting discoveries. We have shared these findings on our blog:
1. iPhone Background GPS Accurate to 500 meters, Not Enough For Foot Traffic
2. Background Location Monitoring in iOS4 Doesn’t Use GPS, Only Cell Towers
The iOS SDK just keeps getting better. In our old jobs we often complained about not being in a position to make our ideas into reality. We are thankful to be in a position to make apps using such powerful technology!
[SB]: Some of the readers have just kick started the iPhone development adventure. What’s the best way to learn iPhone programming? Any advice for our readers?
[Paul]: We actually have a recent blog post on this very topic. This post contains a number of resources we used to learn the ropes.
Other advice is to use a lot of apps first. It’s important to understand the medium because it is very different from desktop applications or web sites you’ve built before. After that the best way to learn is to build a prototype of the app idea you have.
In terms of specific skills, there are a number of concepts and tools you need to really get moving. It’s a good idea to learn about memory management, how the UIView hierarchy works and performance tools provided by Apple (Shark, Leaks, Clang Analyzer). There are lots of great resources on the web explaining how to use these tools so I won’t do that now. However, any new iOS programmer should know they exist and seek them out.
[SB]: With over 200,000 apps in App store, how do you market your app and make it stand out from the crowd?
[Paul]: Most people start iPhone development with only “a good idea”. We decided instead to find the right people to work with. Deciding “what to make” was an intentional second step. Why do this “backwards”? Because there is steep learning curve, and if our “one good idea” fails, what will we do then?
This comes from the “getting the right people on the bus” concept from Good to Great by Jim Collins.
It can be very difficult to make an impact on the App Store! From our analysis of top ranking apps, we found that in categories like Education, Productivity and the like, there is not much turn-over of top-selling apps. So whilst you might buy a new game every month, how often do you want to change your To Do List or Japanese Study app? Not very often!
This also means many “early winners” in these categories are still winning (i.e. successful apps launched in the first 12-18 months of the App Store). This is compounded by the poor search technology of the App Store. Search results are ranked mostly on total number sold. With most users buying apps from their iPhone, they also rarely look past the top 25~50 search results. So early winners are hard to beat, unless you are lucky enough to be featured by Apple!
You can definitely win in the above areas, but we reckon it might take 6-12 months to become a top seller. On the other hand, whilst there is a lot more turn over in categories like Games, Entertainment, Social Networking and Utilities, there is also a lot more competition!
Outside PR is the single most important factor in making your app a top seller! Surprisingly, this is even more important than good app store ratings. Many early entrants to a market segment have very poor ratings but continue to sell well.
We make it part of our daily work to communicate with relevant media outlets and influential individuals relevant to our target markets (like Simon Blog!)
[SB]: I’ve heard from some developers that they would like to quit the day jobs and build iPhone apps to make a living. Any advice for those would-be-full-time developers?
[Paul]: Put simply our advice can be summarised as follows:
1. Find the right people to work with, as partners or external contractors.
2. Try to get most of the way towards a releasable product before you quit
3. You must sell proactively, to journalists, blog authors, on Facebook, Twitter, etc. The world will not beat a path to your door.
4. It’s still early days for iPad and the new iPhone4 features, focus on a piece of app “real estate” not yet owned by someone else. Alternatively, try perfecting something that has mass market appeal but hasn’t yet been done “right”!
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