Appsters: A Beginner's Guide to App Entrepreneurship by Jordan Gurrieri & Bobby Gill

Author:Jordan Gurrieri & Bobby Gill [Gurrieri, Jordan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blue Label Labs
Published: 2013-12-08T06:00:00+00:00

5.5. The Tech behind Dani’s List

With Dani’s List, we need to make some important decisions about the type of app we are planning on building and which platform to build it on. Given that Dani’s List is an app that uses both the GPS location and camera of the phone, it makes sense to build a native app (instead of a mobile web or hybrid app). With that decision, we now need to choose the platform to build Dani’s List on: Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android or Microsoft’s Windows Phone.

Choosing the Right Mobile Platform

As great of a platform Windows Phone is, its tiny 3 percent market share means that very few people would use Dani’s List by virtue of the fact that very few people have a Windows Phone. Building Dani’s List on Windows Phone would allow us to tap a possibly underserved market, but it would still preclude Dani’s List to achieve any mainstream success.

This leaves us with choosing between iOS or Android. As we mentioned earlier on in the chapter, one of the differentiators between the iOS and Android platforms is the increased propensity for iOS users to purchase apps and freemium content. Android users tend to focus on free apps, leaving Android developers to rely on advertising for a bigger slice of revenue. Furthermore, the location-based nature of Dani’s List requires a dense urban environment to grow, most likely New York City or San Francisco, both of which are heavily iOS dominated. The combination of these two factors leads us to build Dani’s List upon Apple’s iOS platform. Once Dani’s List has matured into a final form, that would be the time to make an Android version of the app. Otherwise, we take on the burden of having to maintain two entirely different versions of our app, each of which would need to be changed anytime we changed the app’s functionality. As our Appster commandments tell us that our idea and app will change, especially in the earlier releases, it doesn’t make much sense to attempt to build Dani’s List for Android at this time. This type of iOS first strategy aligns with that of other apps like Foursquare and Instagram.

Even though we’ve picked iOS we are still not done with platform choices. We now need to choose which versions of iOS to support on Dani’s List. Depending on the type of iPhone a person has, they may have a different version of iOS. For example, the iPhone 4 initially shipped with iOS 4.0, the iPhone 4S shipped with iOS 5.0, and the new iPhone 5 comes with iOS 6.0. Users of older iPhones can choose to upgrade their phone to a new version of iOS, or leave their iOS untouched. Each new version of iOS comes with new functionality, making some apps easier to build on iOS 6 than it would on iOS 5. Given that, as of November 2012, about93percentof iPhone users were running on iOS 5 or later, it makes sense to support Dani’s List on iOS 5.

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