My first App Store app story
A few weeks ago I published my very first iOS app to the App Store. It felt great after many years to have something I built on the App Store. It was like a mix of accomplishment and victory.
For the last 5 years I’ve been working as a web developer but mobile has always stayed in the back of my head. I started playing around with Android in 2011 while working close to a team that was building an Android app.
At that time I had an Android device, and got curious about how it worked. It didn’t take much for me to realize that I was hooked in the mobile side of tech.
Back then, I bought an Android book (Android 3.0) and started learning on my own. Over the following years I eventually made a few apps that I felt really proud of. For more than one reason I never submitted anything to the Play Store. Either I didn’t own the data I wanted the publish an app with, or I didn’t think the app was interesting enough, or as I’m sure happens to many developers, started something that I thought was promising, and forgot about it later on.
I actually contacted a company who owned the data of one of the apps to ask for permission to publish my app with their data, but with no luck (I mean, what was I expecting? ☺)
Fast forward to June 2014, Apple had just released Swift. Due to my interest in iOS I had tried Objective C before but didn’t like it at all. Its horrible syntax still haunts me now. Also when you want to start iOS development, you’re not only learning a new language, it’s a new language, a new IDE (and Xcode kinda sucks sometimes), a new framework... And boy did it feel overwhelming, specially because of Objective-C. So Swift looked like a breeze of fresh air in a hot summer afternoon and made me want to give iOS a new try. I grabbed the Swift book provided by Apple and started reading it on my commute to work everyday. This was the reading item for a few weeks. I started feeling a bit more comfortable with iOS and ended up doing a few minor things, some of them copies of the android versions.
Nonetheless, all this time I never stopped trying to get a nice idea for an app that I could take all the way and publish it. Not for the money (of course this would be nice), but just to have a chance to show my capabilities and have on my resume. It’s also something I want to work on full time and recruiters almost always want at least one app published. An idea finally came in November when a friend showed me GithubAwards made by vincent daubry. It ranks Github users based on their repositories’ number of stars. This kind of adds the gamification feeling to Github, and makes users want to create something beautiful and interesting so others will like, use and of course get some stars along the way.
I liked the app and searched for a mobile version and couldn’t find anything. It stroke me as a chance to do it myself. I investigated, looking for an API, and realised there wasn’t one. The good news is that I was fortunate enough that the web app was open source and built on Rails, which I have experience on. So I started working on an API and delivered it. Vincent liked it and after a few iterations shipped it. Now I had something to work on for the mobile app.
These were the first screens of the app working — by the way I always like to take screenshots of the apps since the beginning and love to go through the evolution. It’s amazing to see the first ideas take shape and gain color — As you can see, I’m very gifted when it comes to design. Not that I needed but I asked Cláudia, a designer colleague of mine who was also eager to put something on her portfolio, to see if she could do any better…
After some discussion, we had something we both liked and in the end of January I finally submitted the app to the App Store. — Do you really think she made a big difference design wise? ☺
It took 5 days for the App Store team to review the app. Those were some nerve-wracking days because I was so close to finally have an app published but was afraid that Apple wouldn’t approve it for whatever reasons.
It did!
So much joy! I was very happy about having passed the whole process (including the pain of being able to submit to the App Store) and finally having something of my own to show and that people could in fact download and see for themselves. I’m proud of the app, and I think it looks very nice this mostly thanks to Claudia. ☺
It’s not the most useful application one could ask for. But it’s a utility, specially for developers, and I guess for recruiters as well? I mean you can see the best developers around your location based on actual work… Isn’t that nice? ☺
About the code, I decided the let the app stay open source for a few reasons.
- It’s doesn’t contain the Coca Cola formula nor does it contain the cure for cancer (although open sourcing that would be good for everybody). It’s not like it’s hard to reproduce it so it might as well be open source.
- If a Guru comes upon the code he might let me know there are better ways of doing things, or who knows! like some idea and use it as well. Ok, who am I kidding?☺
- I believe it’s a simple enough app that a newbie (like myself) could start learning iOS with. Even though the code is not all as I want (sometimes I just want to see something working “will make it better later”), I’m really proud of most of it.
The app is available in the App Store here.
This post is not meant to have any moral of the story, but rather to share my fellings on my way to my first mobile app.
If you have anything to say, leave a comment here or on Twitter to @goncalvescmnuno.
