Thoughts on the conclusion of Building Mobile Applications

Kwame Harlin

Thoughts on the conclusion of “Building Mobile Applications”

My expectations enrolling in the “Building Mobile Applications” course were to gain insights into the complete lifecycle of Iphone application development and the process of application approval in the “Itunes app store”.  Upon conclusion of the course, I feel like I have learned those things and more. It has become clear to me that the Itunes app store is not longer the “gold mine” it used to be back in 2008. It takes an enormous amount of strategy and promotion to ensure your application is even visible in the app store and even more effort to ensure your application is profitable. It is important to access the needs of your business before considering the developing an Iphone application. A few questions to ask would be:  Is my business mobile? How would users benefit from a way to access information on the go? Does my audience access information this way? All those are important questions to think about before investing in the development of an application.  Yes, an Iphone application is currently the trendy thing to do it doesn’t make sense for every business. They key is making this determination based upon your business goals. In addition, an extremely valuable aspect of the course was the contributions from the guest speakers. They were able to provide tremendous insight into the mobile marketplace and real word examples of successes and failures.  The 3 speakers whom stood out the most to me where:

• Brad Ellis from Rogue Sheep – He stressed the importance of design ascetic and the value of taking the time to make sure everything down to the icon is “pretty”. In addition, it was very interesting to hear about his experiences working for a small agency.
• Michael Schneider co author of “The Business of Iphone App Development” – He was probably the most informative speaker of the quarter regarding the application marketplace. His own personal story of transitioning from a lawyer to a successful application developer was inspiring. He gave the class valuable advice pertaining to the dos and don’ts in regards to being successful in the Iphone app marketplace.  The points of his that stuck with me the most were idea of the value of pricing your app accordingly and the testing the core functionality of the application in the marketplace before you invest a lot of time in developing additional features of the app. As this will save you a lot of time and money developing features customers may not even want and if the app is successfully customer will tell you what features they would like to see within the app.
• T.A. McCann – He was an excellent speaker. His tremendous amount knowledge of the mobile device marketplace really impressed me and it is remarkable that he has become such a well established entrepreneur having started over 5 companies. I am very much a fan of his latest company Gist. The technology was very impressive; I enjoyed his overview so much that I even downloaded the application.  In addition, I was very engaged with his thoughts regarding the potential of windows phone 7 and his option of which market to go after. It was a privilege for him to speak to the class.  

Ultimately, I feel like the course was a success overall. I would have liked the class to have been longer in order to introduce a programming aspect of Iphone application development as well. Maybe it could have even broken into two sections to accomplish this. This would have given the class a complete picture from the process of development to marketing the final product.

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