Apple's AppStore a goldmine or ...

You find a lot of blogs on the Internet which speculates how good (or bad) sales are on the AppStore. Usually from people who didn't publish an application themselfs on the AppStore.

Now here I'm gone write my personal experience with the AppStore. About 1 month ago (3th of December) my application was finally approved by Apple.

Let's go over the timeline from concept of the app until today.

1. Concept

The idea came after a discussion with a friend , who's a financial analyst, to build a front end on top of his trading engine.

So the idea was that I should build an iPhone front end and that he would build the web infrastructure so that the iPhone could communicate with the trading engine.

I also did some investigation and I saw that their where only 1000 apps on the AppStore in the finance category , so at least we would be seen.

Of course this was not a game so we wouldn't reach the masses or getting great attention from review sites etc.

(Note: I still find it strange that people buy 600 USdollars phones to play games on it, but oke).

2. Development

And then it was April 2009, we started the development. I bought a development license from Apple for 99 USdollar ( 79 euro), got myself an iPod Touch for development. Got all the contracts signed (that was smooth by the way) and got myself an IRS number.

That was a strange experience for a non-US citizen ;-).

Apparently they don't believe in the Internet because the only to get that number was by phone, mail or fax - no online -.

Anyway we start coding , he was using PHP for the backend and I using Objective-C for the front-end.

And the communication between iPod and backend happened via HTTP using CSV files (nope no XML , that's overkill, the CSV's are generated on the fly during a request).

It took about 2,5 months to develop it, 1 month beta-testing and 1 month for corrections, change requests etc.

So in August 2009 I submitted the app for approval to ItunesConnect. And now the story begins...

3. Approval process

According to Apple it takes about 14 days to get approval (or rejection). So I was thinking , I submit it in August then we have an availability date of September 1th.

Now that was wrong.

After a week I got a mail from Apple to say that it would take longer to approve. But with no further explanation for what reason.

So august went by -> no approval

September went by -> no approval (and no message from Apple)

October went by -> no approval (no message from Apple).

At that time I sent an email to them but I got a standard response back.

And then suddenly in November they started the review of the application and I got an email that the app was rejected because of an usability problem.

I quickly fixed it and resubmitted it, and I was afraid that it would take again 3,5 months for approval.

But luckily for one reason or another they almost immediatly reviewed it and approved it.

So since December 3th the application is on the AppStore for sale !

4. Post Natal depression

So the new born is 1 month old, and how is the sales going ?

Well to be honest, not so good (sold twenty-some). We knew it was a niche market so we didn't expect 1000 downloads per day. But a bit more than 20... would be nice.

Now the AppStore (and ITunes Connect) doesn't give us much help. With more than 100.000 applications available you are just 1 item in a giant catalog (even finance has 1700 apps).

And a catalog with very limited search and browse facilities , after a few days your application is somewhere on page 10 and nobody cares anymore.

ITunes Connect as marketing aid is also nothing, you can enter keywords but you have no idea how many people are landing on your app, which keywords they used etc etc. You only see how many downloads their are.

Now we are spending our time in sending emails to review sites etc. But those guys are also overwhelmed with requests. And most likey they rather like to review games or entertainment apps than boring financial app's.

Conclusion : creating and developing an application for the iPhone is the easy part , its 10 % of the effort , marketing is the other 90%.

For those who think that the AppStore is a goldmine , forget it, a good idea is a prerequisite but some luck and a lot of marketing is needed. And even then you are not sure that you'll win the jackpot. 

 

drawing graphics for the iPhone (not opengl ES)

Don't we all want to make graphics like this : ?

Well , I'll try to explain how I did this (BTW this graphics comes from my iphone application iSignals).

First create a file in your project which is a subclass of UIView (via XCode>File>New File). Call it for example MyGraphView. 

Then you create a XIB with Interface Builder , in the XIB you add a view and you change the class identity to the custom view class MyGraphView.

And now comes the coding part, lets for the sake of clarity say that you have 2 arrays in MyGraphView (usually you'll pass them via a controller class). These arrays are called datapoints[] and ylabels[].

So let's see how the drawRect method is implemented.

- (void)drawRect:(CGRect)rect {

    // Drawing code

float width =  rect.size.width ;

float height = rect.size.height ;

CGContextRef currentContext ;

int i = 0 ;

 

 // Get the graphics context that we are currently executing under

currentContext = UIGraphicsGetCurrentContext() ;

   ;

 

In the first lines of the drawRect, I save the width and the height, I'll use this to calculate the scale factors.

To understand this you need to know a bit of coordinatesystems. The iPhone coordinates are simply the pixels that can be drawn. So for example a view can be 200 px wide and 300 px high.

But of course what more important is , is the world coordinatessystem. And these coordinates are the coordinates of your world.

For example if I want to plot 600 points and the range of those points are between 0.5 and 3.5 then my user coordinatessystem is: X-axis =(0,600) Y-axis  = (0.5,3.5).

So to convert user points into iphone points (or view points) I need to apply a scale factor. The scale factor is calculated as follows.

#define OFFSET_X 30.0f

#define OFFSET_Y 10.0f 

scale_factor_x = ( width -  OFFSET_X ) / ( [dataPoints count] - 0 );

scale_factor_y =   (height - OFFSET_Y ) / (max_y - min_y ) ; // max_y = max(dataPoints) ;min_y = min(dataPoints)

Note: OFFSET_X and OFFSET_Y are 2 constants to let some space in the view where I can are  plot the axes and labels of the axes.

So let's draw the axes , please note that in this first version I don't use CGPath's , later I'll refactor the code and use CGPath's.

And also be aware that I use the default orientation and default location of the origin of the view ( point (0,0) is in the upper left corner).

// draw the axes

CGContextSetRGBStrokeColor(currentContext, 0.83, 0.83, 0.83, 0.7); // this is sort of gray

CGContextMoveToPoint( currentContext,   OFFSET_X, height - OFFSET_Y  );

CGContextAddLineToPoint( currentContext,   OFFSET_X, OFFSET_Y );

CGContextMoveToPoint( currentContext,   OFFSET_X, height - OFFSET_Y   );

CGContextAddLineToPoint( currentContext,   width, height - OFFSET_Y  );

CGContextStrokePath(currentContext);

 

And draw some gridlines

        

CGContextSetRGBStrokeColor(currentContext, 0.83, 0.83, 0.83, 1);

CGFloat len[] = {4,2} ;

CGContextSetLineDash( currentContext, 0, len, 2 ) ;

    for ( i = OFFSET_X ; i <= height ; i = i + OFFSET_X )

{

CGContextMoveToPoint( currentContext,   OFFSET_X, height - OFFSET_Y - i );

CGContextAddLineToPoint( currentContext,   width, height - OFFSET_Y - i);

}

CGContextStrokePath(currentContext);

 

And then draw the graph of datapoints

  

CGContextSetRGBStrokeColor(currentContext, 1.0, 0.65, 0, 1);

    UIImage *red = [UIImage imageNamed: @"red.png"] ;

UIImage *green = [UIImage imageNamed: @"green.png"] ;

CGPoint aPoint ;

// draw the history graph

for( i = 0 ; i< [dataPoints count] ; i++ )

{

x =  OFFSET_X +    i * scale_factor_x ;

old_y = [[dataPoints objectAtIndex: i]  floatValue];

y =   (height -OFFSET_Y) - ([[dataPoints objectAtIndex: i]  floatValue] - min_y) * scale_factor_y ;

 

if ( old_x < 0 )

{

CGContextMoveToPoint( currentContext,   x, y  );

old_x = x ;

}

else

{

old_x = x ;

CGContextAddLineToPoint( currentContext,   x, y );

}

 

 

}

CGContextStrokePath(currentContext);

 

And now I show you how to add text in the graph (drawing the Y-labels, I will not give the code for the X-labels).

 

        // this is for the font

CGContextSetRGBStrokeColor(currentContext, 1, 1, 1, 1);

CGContextSetRGBFillColor(currentContext, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 0.8);

CGContextSelectFont(

currentContext,

"Helvetica-Bold",

FONT_SIZE,

kCGEncodingMacRoman

);

        // this transformation is to make sure that the text is written in the right direction

CGAffineTransform transform = CGAffineTransformMake(1.0,0, 0.0, -1.0, 0.0, 0.0);

 

        CGContextSetTextMatrix(currentContext, transform);

CGContextSetTextDrawingMode(currentContext, kCGTextFill);

// set Y-labels

float j1 = min_y ;

float step = (max_y - min_y)/ 7.0f ; // 7 labels

for ( i = 0.0f ; i <=height ; i = i + OFFSET_X )

{

  // set the precision of the label

if ( j1 > 999.0f )

{

    s1 = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%4.0f", j1] ;

}

else

{

    s1 = [NSString stringWithFormat:@"%4.2f", j1] ;

}

j1 += step ;

CGContextShowTextAtPoint( currentContext,0 , height - OFFSET_Y - i , [s1 UTF8String] , [s1 length] ) ;

}

   

CGContextStrokePath(currentContext);

 

Voila this was it, next time I'll refactor the code and use Paths instead of each time saving and restoring the context

 

Its finally there

After months of hard work and a long review process by Apple, my first iPhone application is finally accepted on the AppStore.

iSignals, for the active investor. This application integrates with an proprietary investment engine , this investment engine holds a computer-generated portfolio with more than 17000 equities on 28 different stockmarkets and with 9 years of historical data. 

On the daily basis the engine generates computer managed portfolios with buy&sells of those equities (portfolio's are organized per market).

The engine is based on a combination of technical analysis models, artificial intelligence (pattern detection) and a neural network.

Via iSignals the user can subscribe to one or more computer managed portfolio's and as such receiving the buy/sells from the engine.

The user can now use those computer generated signals as a guidance in his investment decisions.

The advantage of the application is that the user can consult the engine's portfolio's wherever he wants and whenever he wants. The user can also consult quote data for each instrument (data from finance.yahoo.com) on his iPhone/iPod Touch.

You can find it here