13 replies to this topic

[JackiPhone]

There are a lot of resources out there. The main factor here message: I can make an app. You can make an app. It might not do much, and it might not look excellent. But yes, anyone can make an app, it’s simple. The apple company and Android operating system have all created app development simple. Fantastic designed Tino Cellular App Facilities, a device that allows everyone make a combination foundation app without composing just one range of value.

But as they say: Anyone can be a designer, not everyone can be Picasso.

When you are looking for a mobile app associate, here are some factors to keep in mind:

User user interface design:

With mobile, less can be so much more, and understanding the best pieces you need, and moreover the best pieces you do not need is not simple.

A small display creates it challenging to style the right buyer for an app. At some factor you may think you have the best style. It will look excellent, and then you will see the right design…

we style the best user interface we can, but the actual perform begins when the app is first seen by a individual. Enjoying the reviews of customers creates sure we keep enhancing in the route your customers want us to enhance. If anyone says they have the response right off the bat, we provide a guarantee: they do not even know the query.

Cross foundation support:

The above may audio challenging. It is. Don’t ignore how challenging it is to get a excellent first user interface style. But it gets even more complicated. Individuals believe you only have to do it once! But there are a number of systems out there. You need to style the app to get the best out of every foundation. Users anticipate their iPhone applications to fit in with the iPhone way, and their Android operating system applications to fit in with their Android operating system applications. Dissatisfied customers easily begin to carry down scores, and scores generate downloading.

Orientation:

It’s challenging to anticipate every possible way a individual may want to use your app. Many designers ignore and disappointed customers. When a individual moves the display, the material needs to upgrade in a way that maximises the new area. If your app looks the same but broader, you neglected. Take enough time, realize success and the customers will thank you.

Reliability:

The most typical adverse reviews on the appstores is that the app accidents. A lot of applications are actually so badly designed that they accident after a few moments use. Motorola’s CEO stated that many system profits were due to app accidents. There is definitely no reason for this. Users anticipate applications to be efficient, top excellent value and examining techniques help make sure this.

Phone to tablet:

Just the same, but bigger? No. Please, go choose up a product. It’s not a mobile cellphone. Nobody should cure it as a mobile cellphone. Beginning adopters of pills are already getting disappointed with app designers not helping the modifying requirements of the product globe.

These are just a few of the advanced stage factors that we consider essential for our customers to get the complete prospective of applications. There are many system and foundation particular concerns, configurations and insects to consider. It’s a subject that could complete a publication.

So, what do we look for in a excellent mobile app developer?

The same factors you need from any designer. Excellent troubleshooting capability, an attention of individual needs, information of audio style styles and attention of audio programming structure and methods. Quality style never gets old.

we concentrate on using the best developers we can discover, whatever their particular qualifications may be. The best developers comprehend how to generate solid, extension and re-usable value. If they have that, we can display them, through our user interface style group, exactly what we need to develop.

[Stainless]

I work with some big names, companies you all will know very well.

They often outsource versions of products, so the in house (high quality) team will do the PC version and some bucket shop in {insert random third world country} does the {insert random mobile platform}.

This is wrong in so many ways. A game that is not designed for the limitations of the mobile market has to be 'played with' to get it to work. If this is not done by real quality coders, you end up with an abortion.

On top of this, the bucket shops don't use good programming practices. Usually there is no source control, well there is . It's one guy with a PC who takes all the changes from other people and installs them on his machine.

This is a nightmare for me as I usually get the output of this crap and have to fix it.

This starts with getting the supplied code to compile. This is not a trivial task. Can take weeks depending on the quality of the code.

Once that is done I have to get it to run.

Then I can start fixing the problems.

Our QA is excellent, a little too good some times. I had a bug once "if you press these five keys with your left hand, these five keys with your right hand, and press the spacebar with your nose... the game crashes"

But it makes me wonder if the bucket shops have ANY QA

SO from my experience you need your BEST coders on the mobile market, you can get away with second rate coders on the devices with lots of grunt and loads of storage, not on mobile devices.

[TheNut]

I think the OP intended this post to be an advertisement for his business rather than a discussion on the nature of good vs bad developers. It is widely overlooked, but communication is absolutely essential for any successful business. Something I believe the OP neglected by not writing his intentions clearly in this post. I will give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he intended for this to be a discussion on a developer website, to which I shall grace you with my opinions

JackiPhone said:

The apple company and Android operating system have all created app development simple.

Actually, they have not simplified application development. Can you develop iOS applications on non-Apple operating systems? Can you develop an Android application that is guaranteed to work on all Android devices? It is an illusion to believe that these companies are trying to make things easier when they are in fact doing the opposite. Whether this is intentional or an unfortunate by-product of progress is quite a subjective discussion.

JackiPhone said:

At some factor you may think you have the best style. It will look excellent, and then you will see the right design…

Are we talking about professionals or hobbyists? A hobbyist might not care, or they may care but just don't have the resources to see it through. I don't think any professional thinks like what you say though. Everyone I've worked with, especially designers, are always changing things. One minute they like this, the next minute they like that. It's an on-going challenge that everyone recognizes and chooses to spend a lot of time on it upfront, or just go with the best they can do and wait for feedback. Neither of which I believe will have an affect on success, unless the product is extremely unoriginal (ie: another tip app).

JackiPhone said:

The most typical adverse reviews on the appstores is that the app accidents.

Nobody likes bugs, I can agree with that. But let's not forget that companies like to change APIs, fragment the market, and introduce bugs or illogical behaviour of their own. It makes it difficult to build quality applications without investing more in QA then in development. There are businesses out there that will test your product on 50+ phones. Imagine that, and imagine how that might still not be enough. You bring up a valid point, but simply putting the onus on the developer is a bad way to move forward. Developers and platform creators must work together to build a better platform. I think Microsoft is doing a good job with this, but there's still much room for improvement.

JackiPhone said:

So, what do we look for in a excellent mobile app developer?

I would say start with communication. A person who communicates is also a people person. Often they know what's best or are not afraid to ask questions. An experienced developer that communicates will give you an honest deadline and deliver the product as designed than a wizard who knows only how to speak to the machine, cannot communicate with QA, cannot communicate with management, and cannot connect with the very people he's developing the product for.

[ImperialPenguin]

TheNut, on 06 October 2012 - 12:28 PM, said:

Actually, they have not simplified application development. Can you develop iOS applications on non-Apple operating systems? Can you develop an Android application that is guaranteed to work on all Android devices? It is an illusion to believe that these companies are trying to make things easier when they are in fact doing the opposite. Whether this is intentional or an unfortunate by-product of progress is quite a subjective discussion.

I think it is time, and as you say, the progress that results that has simplified application development. Is anyone else here old enough to remember the days before hardware 3d acceleration was in devices that fit in our pockets and you had to code your 3d graphics by hand? Things like avoiding floating point numbers in your game loop and using lookup tables for sine and cosine operations really don't exist anymore. And let's not even mention the days before my time like when Atari 2600 games such as Combat were coded in raw assembly.

TheNut, on 06 October 2012 - 12:28 PM, said:

Are we talking about professionals or hobbyists? A hobbyist might not care, or they may care but just don't have the resources to see it through. I don't think any professional thinks like what you say though. Everyone I've worked with, especially designers, are always changing things. One minute they like this, the next minute they like that. It's an on-going challenge that everyone recognizes and chooses to spend a lot of time on it upfront, or just go with the best they can do and wait for feedback. Neither of which I believe will have an affect on success, unless the product is extremely unoriginal (ie: another tip app).

Yep, for the things I am not great at, such as most graphics work, I just do the best I can and forget about it. I'd love to be able to hire a graphics artist, but until that time comes I'm stuck putting forth my own best effort. That doesn't meant that I don't try, and I don't make revisions, but I don't make near as many revisions or spend as many days trying to get something just right as I do with skill sets that I am better at.

TheNut, on 06 October 2012 - 12:28 PM, said:

Nobody likes bugs, I can agree with that. But let's not forget that companies like to change APIs, fragment the market, and introduce bugs or illogical behaviour of their own. It makes it difficult to build quality applications without investing more in QA then in development. There are businesses out there that will test your product on 50+ phones. Imagine that, and imagine how that might still not be enough. You bring up a valid point, but simply putting the onus on the developer is a bad way to move forward. Developers and platform creators must work together to build a better platform. I think Microsoft is doing a good job with this, but there's still much room for improvement.

Android is horrible for this. iOS remains relatively consistent. The API does change, iOS 6 completely changed the way autorotation is handled, for example. But its a relatively safe bet that if something works on an iPhone 3, it will work on an iPhone 5 as well. Android, having so many phones and not specific enough standards, is quite a pain to work with. A good example is the Nook color and Nook tablet. The two devices have the same screen size and resolution, but one loads from the large resources and the other from xlarge. If the device doesn't fit the DPI exactly, device manufacturers just guess at the best fit.

TheNut, on 06 October 2012 - 12:28 PM, said:

I would say start with communication. A person who communicates is also a people person. Often they know what's best or are not afraid to ask questions. An experienced developer that communicates will give you an honest deadline and deliver the product as designed than a wizard who knows only how to speak to the machine, cannot communicate with QA, cannot communicate with management, and cannot connect with the very people he's developing the product for.

Communication goes both ways. Before I cut back on freelance work, I got most of my gigs from sites like Elance. Not only are people not willing to pay realistic prices, but they start adding a lot of things that they want done after a price and time frame has been agreed upon. If I knew where to get higher quality freelance work, this might be less of an issue. But even then, I suppose developers need to choose clients as carefully as clients choose developers.

[Stainless]

I wrote my first commercial game in hex, I didn't have an assembler, hadn't even seen an assembler.

When I went to work at Digital Integration and they gave me an assembler it was a revelation, I sat in the pub at the end of the day wondering how someone as intelligent as I hadn't thought of writing my own instead of messing around in hex. It really worried me, why hadn't I thought of it?

My next four games were all 3D hand coded in assembler, lot's of tricks to get speed. Generating arrays from the transformation matrix so you don't have to multiply a coordinate by the matrix, you can do it with array look ups and adds. All sorts of things. It's just what we did.

We also as a matter of course binned the target platforms operating system at boot up. All commercial Amiga coders had their own disk format and mini operating system.

We don't want to go back to that. The whole point of modern operating systems is they act as a hardware abstraction layer. For basic operations, you can just call the API and ignore the hardware. It's only when you want to push the machine to it's limits that this becomes a problem.

Android is a nightmare, no matter what you do, you are going to have problems on one platform or another. Some developers have dropped Android completely branding it as "unsustainable", others do an Android version and only release it on machines it works on. Other platforms they just don't release it for.

Xcode and IOS promised to be a good choice, after all appstore can generate huge sales figures. Xcode itself is lovely.... IF YOU CODE THE XCODE WAY. For an old hacker like me, it's a pain. I don't like the objective c method of working at all.

So where are we going? Well Khronos dropped the ball with OpenGLES, far too many of the features you need as a games coder are optional. Khronos didn't have the balls to say to the manufacturers "we need this, implement it or you are not compliant". As a result you have to take all optional features as none existant.

Maybe they will get it right with OpenGLES 3

Microsoft... well I really liked what they were doing with .NET and XNA, then windows 8 started to get floated and it became obvious that this whole code base was marked for destruction. They seem to be concentrating on HTML 5.

Flash, dead. Macromedia have moved to HTML 5

So the future seems to be heading for Opengles and HTML 5 as the mobile environments we will be working in.

If you want to get quality freelance jobs in the future, you should be getting product out in those platforms so you have a proven track record.

[alphadog]

Stainless, on 10 October 2012 - 09:01 AM, said:

Android is a nightmare, no matter what you do, you are going to have problems on one platform or another. Some developers have dropped Android completely branding it as "unsustainable", others do an Android version and only release it on machines it works on. Other platforms they just don't release it for.

Stainless, I'm really started to wonder who are the various "developers" you talk to, because they seem to have weird info (like this or the "death of .NET" one). Or, you are all doing exceedingly nasty things to those poor mobile devices!

Get a low-end, a mid-level, and a high-end Android device (Samsung/Moto or HTC), and you have already a pretty good pass at the low-hanging fruit of Android testing. Target 2.2 if you want to edge safer. Be careful about memory consumption and that makes you even safer, as lots of "complaints" come from bottom-of-the-barrel devices with limited mem.

Seriously, it's not *that* much harder than iOS, and comes with other freedoms that Apple won't give you.

iOS: retina + non-retina + tall device + iPad. 3 iOS versions to think about - 4.3, 5.1 and 6.0.
Android: 2.2/2.3 and 4.x, various devices screen sizes.

That being said, the current state of the market is that the iOS gamer market is anywhere from 2x to 5x larger than Android, but Android is non-negligible IMHO and I'm guessing will edge less and less.

[TheNut]

Stainless said:

Xcode and IOS promised to be a good choice, after all appstore can generate huge sales figures. Xcode itself is lovely.... IF YOU CODE THE XCODE WAY. For an old hacker like me, it's a pain. I don't like the objective c method of working at all.

I find it rather interesting that a lot of developers program using objective-c. I know it's the native tongue of the platform, but I've had a much more pleasant time working with C++ compared with projects I've done using only objective-c. Part of me wonders whether or not iOS devs know you can cross compile C++ code or if they really don't care. I mean, one could develop for Android, iPhone, Windows, and Linux rather easily, and yet would give all that up just to work in Obj-C. Bewildering.

Stainless said:

Microsoft... well I really liked what they were doing with .NET and XNA, then windows 8 started to get floated and it became obvious that this whole code base was marked for destruction.

Well, they are bringing C++ to Windows Phone 8 now, so I'm willing to turn a blind eye to their other faults

alphadog said:

Get a low-end, a mid-level, and a high-end Android device (Samsung/Moto or HTC), and you have already a pretty good pass at the low-hanging fruit of Android testing.

The problem is that the Android OS has too much freedom. You're at the mercy of the manufacturer to "opt-in" to the full feature set of the OS. At least Apple and Microsoft lay down the law when it comes to their software and hardware. Google is too lax, like Nokia was with Symbian. Anyone who developed for that platform knows what a disaster it was.

[alphadog]

TheNut, on 10 October 2012 - 07:45 PM, said:

The problem is that the Android OS has too much freedom

I watched The Avengers again last night, and this quote makes me picture you looking a little like Loki. Do you think we're not equipped for handling freedom? Are you sporting a gold reindeer hat?

TheNut, on 10 October 2012 - 07:45 PM, said:

Anyone who developed for that platform knows what a disaster it was.

I find it hard to reconcile words like "disaster", "nightmare" and "unsustainable" with the very good, very well-supported, and profitable Android apps out there now.

Just look at retina, and having to rebuild or adapt apps to a new dpi. I'm not sure why iOS gets everyone to put on rose-colored glasses, and Android brings out the curmudgeons.

Also, wasn't Windows of yore as open a platform as Android is now? A plethora of clones, a mass of OS versions, etc, etc, etc. Why is it good for Windows but bad for Android? Why do we cringe when Win8 looks like it's closing its garden walls in, but wish it would happen in the Android world?

[fireside]

Quote

Android is a nightmare, no matter what you do, you are going to have problems on one platform or another. Some developers have dropped Android completely branding it as "unsustainable", others do an Android version and only release it on machines it works on. Other platforms they just don't release it for.

Maybe it has problems, but as of last quarter 64% of the market for mobile phones went to Android, 18% to iOS.
http://www.gartner.c....jsp?id=2120015

Anyone dropping Android is a bit short sighted or has a very good iOS market.

[TheNut]

alphadog said:

I watched The Avengers again last night, and this quote makes me picture you looking a little like Loki. Do you think we're not equipped for handling freedom? Are you sporting a gold reindeer hat?

Haven't seen the movie, but I love a good hat

alphadog said:

I find it hard to reconcile words like "disaster", "nightmare" and "unsustainable" with the very good, very well-supported, and profitable Android apps out there now.

The success of both Android software and hardware out in the market is no secret, but no developer can say with a straight face that developing for the platform is as good as it gets. There's a lot of good you can say about Google's vision and it's great they support an open platform, but they really do need to draw the line somewhere. Without order there is only chaos.

alphadog said:

I'm not sure why iOS gets everyone to put on rose-colored glasses, and Android brings out the curmudgeons.

Tis the law of nature Quite frankly I dislike all of them equally, I'm just picking on Android right now cause that's how the conversation steered. I can equally trash talk iOS

I also don't know a whole lot about Windows Mobile, but Microsoft stepped up to the plate when they released Windows Phone 7. Strict hardware requirements (and the phones were still quite cheap!), solid development environment, beautiful documentation, idiot proof platform. Sadly, garbage marketing and lack of attention got them an expensive dud. Only time will tell if Windows 8 can pick up momentum where Windows Phone 7 didn't.

[Stainless]

One of the problems with Android is that hardware manufacturers can put any old junk in and and still get Android running.

It is common for people like mStar to develop their own opengl hardware and drivers to save manufacturing costs, with unpredictable results.

Quote

Stainless, I'm really started to wonder who are the various "developers" you talk to, because they seem to have weird info (like this or the "death of .NET" one). Or, you are all doing exceedingly nasty things to those poor mobile devices!

NDA's won't let me talk freely, but a quick google throws up this

http://www.neowin.ne...s-unsustainable
http://tech.slashdot...t-will-dump-net


I personally liked working on windows mobile, it was a very easy step from XNA. A few issues with unsupported capabilities, but nothing major.

Quote

I find it rather interesting that a lot of developers program using objective-c. I know it's the native tongue of the platform, but I've had a much more pleasant time working with C++ compared with projects I've done using only objective-c. Part of me wonders whether or not iOS devs know you can cross compile C++ code or if they really don't care. I mean, one could develop for Android, iPhone, Windows, and Linux rather easily, and yet would give all that up just to work in Obj-C. Bewildering.

Yes, I am aware that you can use c++


But porting the code I have to c++ is one job, then porting it to OSx would be another. It "was decided" that the best route was objective c.

[alphadog]

What I see is that developing on Android-as-a-platform is really not that hard. The "plethora of devices" is an old yarn, but most of the market can be QAed for somewhat easily, esp. if you aren't doing anything weird or cuting-edge.

However, the Android-as-a-store story is messy. Piracy, difficulties in discoverability, limitations like APK size, easiness of purchasing, international issues, etc. I would say that if Google wants to better their game, they need to focus first on that.

It'd be great to have a curated indie Android store... Hmm...

UPDATE:
As soon as I say that, someone points me to: http://www.hookedmediagroup.com/

Somehow I never learn that if you have an idea, ten people have already done it... Everything is a remix.

[alphadog]

BTW, while we're cherry-picking blog posts to support our confirmed biases and whatnots:
http://techcrunch.co...lity-assurance/
http://www.tomshardw...per,3169-2.html

I'll add that while QA is relatively harder on Android, and there are other issues, you do have some advantages too. Nothing comes out always in favor of iOS.

[fireside]

That tom's hardware article looks pretty interesting. I'll have to get back to it later.