High cost of developing for Apple

You could say that I am biased because I do all my daily development work on a Windows machine and use a lot of Google tools.  But I've been very frustrated by how much money it costs to develop a phone app for Apple platforms.

First of all, you HAVE to have an Apple computer to develop for the Apple platform.  The converse is not true for Android, you can develop for Android using a Mac.  But Apple forces you to have an Apple computer in order to produce a testing profile through their development environment, XCode.  So when I wanted to develop Monster Cache for iOS, I had to go buy an Apple computer that ran a certain version of  XCode, which translated to needing OS X 10.7 (Lion).  So I got a used iMac for about $400.

Next cost is the fee for a developer account.  For a Google Play developer account, there is a one-time fee of $25.  For Apple, its a YEARLY fee of $100.  I just had to pay for my second year.

After paying for both of those, I was able to develop Monster Cache for iOS and make updates for a little over a year.  Then iOS 7 came out.  Developing for iOS 7 requires the latest version of XCode, XCode 5.  XCode 5 requires that your Mac's operating system be at least OS X 10.8 (Mountain Lion).  Apple no longer distributes version 10.8, so if you want to upgrade through the App Store, then you have to upgrade to OS X 10.9 (Mavericks).  Of course, my older iMac does not support 10.9.  So I will have to buy another Mac, which means another few hundred dollars.

The last Apple-specific cost I've been seeing is far less significant, and may not even be Apple's fault exactly, but its just a little salt in the wound.  When people make In App Purchases, Google and Apple transfer the money to my bank account at the end of the month.  Apparently, Google's transfer is a domestic one, but Apple's is an international transfer.  My bank charges me $3.50 for each monthly transfer that Apple makes to my account.

iOS progress

Let's start with the good news.  Last week I built the MonsterCache app on the Mac with PhoneGap and it went quite well!  The only thing that didn't go smoothly was installing the Google Analytics plugin for iOS.  Eventually I remembered that I'd already downloaded it in a .zip file with plugins for different phone OS's.  And eventually, I found the instructions for installing the iOS version of the Analytics plugin.  It was exciting to see the first page in the simulator:

This weekend was the first test to load it on someone's actual iPhone.  That didn't go well.  

The first problem was my Apple Developer account.  I thought that I could load the app onto a phone connected to my computer without doing anything with the Developer account. For that reason, I hadn't even signed up for the Developer account yet.  Once I found out we needed to, I went to sign up and found that the approval process can take 24 hours.  So that killed our hopes for trying it that day.  Incidentally, I signed up yesterday afternoon, a Saturday, and haven't heard anything back as of Sunday night.  So I guess maybe they mean 1 business day for approval???

The second problem was that my friend's iPhone was an older one, a 3GS.  That would have been fine if the OS had been kept up to date, but it was still on 4.0.x.  Turns out the version of the iOS SDK that I'm building with in XCode only supports 4.3 or higher.  We hoped we could upgrade, but its not easy to upgrade to any iOS version that isn't the latest.  The latest is 6.0.x and apparently 3GS iPhone's don't run that very well.  So besides the Developer account issue, the particular phone we had wouldn't have worked anyway.

My parents are coming in to town for Christmas and they have iPhones, so looks like they will be my first iOS beta testers.  In the meantime, I changed the "Forgot Password?" handler to send a password reset link instead of the password itself in clear text. I've been needing to do that for a while, so glad to have that off the list!