I came ready to hate, but it's actually a good idea presented well and simply in the blog post. The one statement I (slightly) disagree with:
"Strike that. You will know that you passed the class when you recoup that investment tenfold. How many other classes you took offer such direct, undisputable grades?"
I doubt you'll make $1k, or even $100, but even if you don't you'll still learn a hell of a lot, so just by doing it you pass the class.
Maybe I was just lucky (though not that lucky), but it should be pretty easy to make back that $100 even without any marketing.
My opinion is that if your app does something slightly useful and basically works, you should be able to make back that $100 easily. Ideally, you'll make more than that especially over the course of a year.
Did you know that a lot of apps on the App Store are the sample projects from Apple themselves with just some images changed (almost all the level apps for instance)?
Some didn't even changed the images.
And, since the people approving the apps are a completely separated department, they couldn't know and they even featured some of them.
I don't know about the getting featured part but the apple sample code is provided for developers to use as they wish. I agree though that simply putting up the sample code is not very cool. There are not a huge amount of these as far as I can tell.
How do you know if you haven't tried? What does it take to make it to $100?
The App Store solves a very nice problem for learning sales: every product is put on an equal footing on the App Store, unlike the wild, wild Internet.
> every product is put on an equal footing on the App Store
This is not completely true since what Apple decides to promote in the "what's new", "what's hot", "staff favorites" etc spots makes a huge huge difference.
Out of curiosity, how would one go about bringing their app to Apple's attention to be potentially listed there? Or is that process, as well, completely opaque?
And that equal footing is pretty shaky. Simply put, without great luck or some intense marketing, your app is just one of thousands, only to be buried in the App Store after a day or two.
As a person who is entering a top ranked MBA program in about 3 weeks, I think any MBA would agree that doing something like this is a good idea for the learning. At very worst, you will learn what doesnt work.
As someone who did the MBA, I think it's an incredibly valuable asset but one that is mispriced and too long in duration. I've gotten more experience building apps on elance and trying to build business cases. The valuable insights can be gained from the books of the best lecturers (in my case Bruce Greenwald http://bit.ly/Vz5SL) and direct correspondence.
I think the MBA should be 3-6 months long and priced accordingly. And have a larger entrepreneurship component for those that are so inclined.
The Dell Mini 9 (which is Atom based) wouldn't be fast enough for the iPhone emulator (which you would use most of the time even if you own an iPhone). Moreover, Xcode on OSX86 kernels is unstable and buggy (first hand experience).
Afaik the iPhone is simulated not emulated, the binary is built for x86. So I doubt it would be too slow -- certainly not slower than the device itself.
Now that I think of it, I've tried it on a machine with an AMD processor which was 2Ghz (don't remember the exact model) but it hadn't SSE3 support. SSE3 instructions are emulated on OSX86 which makes it inherently slower. And on my 2Ghz machine with 2Gb of ram the emulator was in fact slower than the device itself.
The Intel Atom has support for SSE3 instructions so it should work better but I believe the stability problems are still there.
Intriguing you would find it slower, I guess it is possible that the binaries are built to the baseline Mac architecture requiring some instructions to be emulated via invalid instruction exception on lower instr sets, which may also explain some of your other stability issues.
But looking at your other comments I'm surmising your main contention is that one might just as well get a real Mac (eg Mini). I agree fully with this, imho the price difference is hardly worth the time to deal with all the various issues around install, upgrading etc.
I've also found the Mac mini to be completely adequate; and it still seems to me that even buying an iMac at $1k+ is still a pittance for a toolchain for this type of platform, considering one also gets a general-purpose computer to boot.
This might not affect the dell mini 9 since it uses an unpatched copy of mac os x. The changes are localized in the EFI (extensible firmware interface) I believe.
Still, I wouldn't risk losing time on possible issues.
Keep also in mind that you have to keep OSX updated to the latest version to work with the latest SDK releases. And some OSX updates update the EFI as well so there's the risk that you should have to wait for the patched EFI.
I wrote a very simple (but nice, in my obviously biased opinion) game which is on the App Store since november. It sold relatively well (at least in the first month) with zero marketing and without being featured.
Nonetheless, since then I've lost much of the initial motivation. So I know what you're talking about. Even though for me the reasons are more personal (and difficult to explain). I haven't had many problems with the whole publishing process though.
With Android, you can actually develop directly on the device (with android-scripting).
For big apps, you can download the SDK for free onto any computer that can run Java 1.5.
(At this point, Android is the only real competitor to the iPhone. Since the iPhone is the more expensive SDK of the two, I am confused as to how you can use the word "pittance".)
I was specifically referring to proprietary (closed) platforms and to SDKs with the relative level of scope/clarity/consistency we're seeing on iPhone.
Note that people mention iPhone/iPod, Nintendo DS, Sony PSP in the same breath, and on this list clearly the former has the lowest barrier to entry.
For me, somehow Android just doesn't quite fit in this categorization. (Neither does BlackBerry or the Palm SDKs of yore which also have low price tags).
But even if you want to just compare directly "phone to phone", it seems to me there is a cost that exceeds the "free" price tag on these other SDKs.
For example, I happen to be quite familiar with the openembedded toolset used to build eg the OpenMoko phones; and I have little doubt that the value of the additional time that must go into the learning curve to get going, and the effort required to produce something comparable, will easily exceed $1k for many people.
Basically, if I ask the question: to leverage $1k + time1 into $x; vs to leverage $0 + time2 into the same $x, it just always seems the $1k is a really minor barrier to entry here compared to the additional time in dealing with things like device variations.
I am inclined to think Android might change that equation somewhere down the line, but at the moment I'm just not quite seeing that picture.
Unfortunately, I think an apps popularity isn't based off of the things mentioned in this article. Apps like "Pull my finger" and "Mafia Wars" are not popular cause the creator priced them correctly or they were marketed well.
all he was saying is that it goes the other way too, especially as the app market populates. iFart was made by Joel Comm, believe me when I say he had a hand in marketing the app to drive the number of sales that it did.
Knowing a market is pretty intrinsic to marketing. It seems obvious now but iFart was genius in that lots of people found the concept funny enough to pay a dollar for. I know plenty of people who have bought it on a whim at parties.
I'd argue the contrary. For an iPhone app to take off, marketing is first and foremost. Buzz is a key ingredient. There are many ways to create buzz, and that's what makes the platform so relevant to teaching some concepts.
At least for me, hands-on experience is a required complement to theoretical learning.
But identifying a market correctly is a key business skill. I think apps like the ones you mention are pretty deplorable, but it's a sad fact that many people derive enormous amusement from fart jokes.
You can check out the world of micro-ISVs (indie software developers). It's been tough in the last 5 years or so, because everyone has their own web site and are trying to reach a wide consumer audience. Just browse the spectrum of questions on http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?biz.
You are correct about the cost of the Mac and iPhone. But a lot of students I meet already have a MacBook.
The article neglects the networking aspects of getting an MBA. The connections you develop while getting an MBA is often described as the most valuable element. Paying a large sums is what is both right and wrong about an MBA. Networking is important, I am just not sure if it is worth a 200k tuition.
Maybe if you are also expanding your network while building your iPhone application to investors and fellow hackers, you might be indeed getting most of an MBA for $99.
You are raising an important point. Let's say half of the value of an MBA is in the teaching of business, which the article covers. The other half is in getting the diploma, the network and the brand recognition.
I guess my view is that for the average MBA person, whose goal is to get a high-paying job in a mid-size to Fortune 500 company, the piece of paper and the network are very important - go get the formal MBA.
For the 1% of hackers who like to get ahead of everyone else and take the fast lane to life, the App Store is an intriguing approach. More efficient.
I just finished my MBA, and decided to start a company out of business school. I can honestly say that I've learned more about starting a company in the past 3 months than I did in the two years before that. The only way to learn entrepreneurship is by doing it.
"Strike that. You will know that you passed the class when you recoup that investment tenfold. How many other classes you took offer such direct, undisputable grades?"
I doubt you'll make $1k, or even $100, but even if you don't you'll still learn a hell of a lot, so just by doing it you pass the class.