So last year, the plans for my apps really got accelerated. I got money from BlackBerry and I used that to buy a really nice Mac Mini. I also sold a few Rubik’s Cubes on Ebay to get money to buy an iPad and an iPod. On Saturday, it finally paid off when my app got approved to be in the Apple App Store.
Why did it take so long? Well, there was Micah, so I wasn’t waking up super early in the morning for a while. And then I did use a lot of my free time for a while to work on porting an iOS app to Android as a proof of concept. While that app hasn’t been released to the public, doing that was still worthwhile. I also had to learn iOS and Objective-C (the language used to code iOS apps). I did that by watching an iTunesU course on my bus ride. I also got delayed for a bit because I was doing some other project like the church website, redoing the website for Logan Apps, and setting up Logan Apps on Facebook, Twitter, and Google+. Because as much as I’d like to think that just having a good app is good enough, marketing is always going to be needed. I also have Logan Apps as an LLC for tax purposes and other reasons. All of this stuff takes time.
Originally, I was going to do PTO Tracker for iOS. But later I decided to do Simple Pricebook instead. It was less complex, and I thought that would be good for a first app. Plus, Simple Pricebook has been doing really well on Amazon AppStore lately. It’s been in the Top 20 for Paid Shopping apps for a while. Even peaking to #5!
So I worked on it, had a good learning process throughout, and last week finally decided that enough’s enough and I need to release it. That’s one of the weird things with app development. There’s always more to do. But if I you keep waiting until you do those, you’ll never release. So I submitted it to Apple last Sunday. It takes a few days for their approval process, but on the 15th, I got approved. I thought that they might reject something and send it back, but they didn’t.
So you can now get Simple Pricebook for your Apple device.
So what’s next? There’s a ton of things to do:
- Update Simple Pricebook on Android with some new features
- Go back to Simple Pricebook for iOS and add some things I just didn’t have time for and a few bug fixes
- Update loganapps.com to have the correct screenshots show for the various platforms
- Update that sidebar on the blog to make it better for marketing my apps
- Advertise advertise advertise
- Create new apps for both Android and iOS
- Add features to my older apps as I have time
- Keep learning new things and figuring out how to apply them
- Probably some stuff I’m forgetting….
Overall, it’s great fun. I enjoy working on apps. I know some people think it’s strange that I would want to come home and program, but my apps don’t have design committees, red tape, approval processes, etc.
If you want to give Simple Pricebook a try, just let me know and I’ll hook you up with a promo code.
What have you been up to?
