What If Someone Steals My Great App Idea?
Startup founders are protective of their ideas, and for good reason. While it’s true that “execution is everything” in the mobile app development industry, execution can’t happen without a good idea to base it on. With that in mind, pitching and team building can become an exercise in paranoia for founders with particularly innovative ideas. […]
Apple Watch Apps Blaze the Trail for Wearable Developers
The Apple Watch has been on the market long enough now that it’s begun to lose the new gadget glow. This is good for iOS and Apple Watch developers. Soon it will have completed the transition from “toy” to “tool,” offering developers much more long-term value in building relationships with users. Early apps for the […]
Material Design Levels the Field for Android App Developers
When most mobile app developers think of cutting-edge design, we think of one brand: Apple. For years, the company’s iconic flat UI has been the touchstone for great interface design. Thanks to Google’s heavy involvement with the Android operating system, however, that association may see a challenge over the next few years. Android Lollipop has […]
How the Psychology of First Impressions Defines Startups
Making an app is, in many ways, like preparing a good meal — long hours of preparation for something consumed in the blink of an eye. Mobile app developers and UI designers labor endlessly on the home screens and initial on-boarding experience because the data shows that users judge whether or not to abandon an […]
3 Design Challenges Faced by UI-free Chat App Developers
For many mobile app developers, designing simple chat bots is just a step on the path to mastering your programming language of choice. Base-level “artificial intelligence” in the form of task-oriented bots has been a feature of computer science since the beginning. (Just take a look at Twitter, where over 23 million user accounts are […]
How to Leverage Customer Service to Bootstrap a Beta Product
Bootstrapping is hard. Ridiculously hard. (Trust us, we all worked on startup teams for years before going into iPhone app development full-time at Dogtown Media.) Even if your app idea is completely new and innovative, it’s bound to spawn competing iPad app developers the second you go public — and those competitors will have the […]
Why Simplicity Matters for Mobile App Developers
“Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” —Steve Jobs Clean code. Minimal interfaces. Simple services. The mantra of “keep it simple, stupid” is heavily ingrained into […]
Value & Monetization: A Tricky Balance for App Developers
It goes without saying that when it comes to providing a service, more value equals more money. It’s an equation that has held true since the very first financial transaction — that is, until the mobile economy began turning everything on its head. These days, iPhone and Android app developers find themselves in a much […]
What App Developers Can Learn From Apple’s Design Process
Look at a 2004 BlackBerry. Now look at an iPhone 6. Smartphone design sure has come a long way, hasn’t it? For iPhone app developers, there’s never been a better time to design mobile products — yet many iPhone apps aren’t nearly as polished and refined as the platform itself. Startup founders know the competition […]
How WeChat Leverages Chat UI to Offer Diverse Features
WeChat doesn’t look like much from a western mobile app developer’s perspective. Is it WhatsApp for Asia? Is it Google for China? Then you see the staggering statistics behind the chat app’s wild growth since its 2011 launch: above 90 percent of the population in all first-tier Chinese cities use the app regularly. Beijing alone […]