Over the years, I’ve been very fortunate to be the recipient of much advice about iOS and Mac development from terrific blogs like those from Wil Shipley and Brent Simmons to great podcasts like those from the 5by5 network or (possibly my favorite) this old episode of Cocoa Radio featuring Panic. It only occurred to me in the last year or so that, thanks to the development of Headlines Reader, I might actually be in a position to share some of my experience with others.
With that in mind, I decided to embrace a little bit of stats nerdery (that I believe lives inside us all) and share some numbers about the process of creating my first app for iOS. Some may be boring, some funny, and some embarrassing, but I’ve tried to be as accurate as possible with all of them, keeping track of as much information as I could.
Hopefully, like me, others can gain a little bit of insight as to what exactly goes into this process.
Note: Your mileage will vary.
- 704.15 hours (and counting…)
- 659 completed to-do items
- 292 days (misc hours per day)
- 69 weeks (misc days per week — 2 weeks with none at all)
- 63 nights working past midnight
- > 150,000 articles (unfortunately, this is only an estimate as I have cleared out the data set a few times during development)
- 3 fits of psychotic rage
- 5 times wanting to give up entirely
- 9 moments of joy
- 21 missed deadlines (approximate)
- > 7 trips to get takeout at Bugaboo Creek Steakhouse (crappy website, great Snowbird Chicken). This is approximate because my bank’s transaction history only goes back a year.
- 3 web hosts
- 6 architectural overhauls
- 5 dramatic UI overhauls
- 82 mockup revisions (not including tweaks)
- 5 icon concepts (me trying out ideas)
- 7 estimates from icon designers
- 6 icon concepts whittled down to 2 proposed designs and 6 revisions (David Im at Heysd.com)
- 43 layers
- 6 icons from 512px to 29px
- 20 company names considered (approximate)
- 5-6 lawyers called, 2-3 quotes received, 1 selected
- 0 accountants or bookkeepers (so far)
- 2 domains purchased
- 2 business epiphanies (more on these in a future post)
- 2 family investors
- 2 pricing models
- 61 beta builds distributed (via TestFlightApp.com)
- 2,056 testing sessions
- 105 documented crashes
- 6 beta testers (I would have preferred to have more — if you’re interested, email me)
- 1 last minute feature
- 8 days waiting for review in the App Store
- 2 hours & 39 minutes in review
- 6 features cut — 3 small & 3 large
- 1 employee (me)
- 2 jobs (I work full-time at RainStorm Consulting)
- 1 application