[Off-topic][DISC] What do you think of the iPhone as a dev platform?

Was just thinking that the iPhone seems to have a pretty sweet dev platform... getting a license is cheap, the toolkit is free (although admittedly it's Mac-only, which could hinder some), and the way the distribution of apps is set up, there's no risk of anyone pirating your stuff.

Good apps reach the 'top apps' list and get loads of exposure, plus 'free' and 'paid' apps are separated, so people know what to expect. There are reviews of all the apps, so people can see how good or bad your product is, and you also get feedback for it.

On top of all that, the phone itself is pretty powerful (and everyone has the same specs, so if it runs fine for you, it runs fine for them), so 3D and physics stuff is possible. All that stuff you've wanted to play around with is possible.

If I knew Objective-C, I would definitely switch to writing iPhone games... it definitely seems like a more straightforward and surefire way of making money than wrestling with pirates in the Flash arena.

What do you think? Is it a mature enough platform for it to be worth the dev time? Are Apple's restrictions on app content a hindrance? Or maybe the lack of a Windows SDK is an issue for you? I'd like to hear your thoughts. :)

The XNA (Xbox Dev Kit) and iPhone SDK, are great ways to gain exposure while earning more profit.
I see them as just another way to tap into the game industry as an indie developer.
Only time will tell which one is the better way. But lets not ignore Flash completely.
EA actually uses Flash to quickly generate an interface for their Xbox games.
The next project I'm involved with a few friends, is actually developing an iPhone Game.
It is based of a card game I invented a few years back. The interface for it is already done in Flash.

Oh, you know someone who can write for this thing?

'Cause I've got a dev license but I have no idea how to start learning Objective-C. If you could find out for me what resources he learned from, I'd appreciate it. :)

I'm guessing its all here: http://developer.apple.com/iphone/
He got the dev license but needs to give me acess to it still :p.
Shouldn't be hard to learn. I wrote my first game for (XNA 1.0) 4 days after starting to learn it.
It was Tetris with sound and everything.
So learning to code for the iPhone shouldn't be much harder.

Ack. Was hoping there were some other, magical way. Admittedly I haven't looked further than the source code examples, though. I'll dive into the other content, I guess. Haven't looked at the videos yet.

My cousin and I couldn't find a proper way to create the infinite certificates or whatever it is you're meant to get from the license you buy... setting us up as 'Peter Birch' and 'Alex Birch' didn't work, the only thing we could find that worked in the end was having him as 'Peter Birch' and me as '*' (that is to say, I get the wildcard, so there's no other licenses available after that).

Actually, it's a bit of a pig setting up the whole provisional certificates thing for multiple people. If that's the reason you don't have access to it, I can give you my cousin's email address to sort you out... he's pretty good at this; he's quite possibly the only person who's managed to get the SDK running on a PowerPC Mac.

Well, now I'm interested. All I need is a Mac, an iPhone, the license, the SDK, and ... the knowledge!

Where to begin...

I dont like the closed platform ideas Apple has based their business on. They are taking pretty big cut for everything sold in their store, they can basically remove anything from there based on "we dont like it", you can only sell your app through their store, everything must be developed on Mac etc. Beats me why you think its a good idea to develop anything with such restrictive conditions.

If you have Unity you can make games for it with good old javascript

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Originally Posted by tonypa

I dont like the closed platform ideas Apple has based their business on. They are taking pretty big cut for everything sold in their store, they can basically remove anything from there based on "we dont like it", you can only sell your app through their store, everything must be developed on Mac etc. Beats me why you think its a good idea to develop anything with such restrictive conditions.

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Hm, depends on how you look at it. When compared to consoles then the cut apple takes is pretty small in comparison; when you compare it to the flash world then the cut apple takes is again pretty small compared to when you hand your game out to a few portals which probably make a good buck with a good game over time and you usually get no revenue share.
With flash you also have the choice to licence to many portals (though usually only lower paying ones are interesting in games which are alreadyy on many sites) or for example adding in mochiads into a game and then spreading it to many sites (which can be viable if you have highly popular games or just tons of em but usually for most games doesn´t bring much money; also there´s the problem that pirates just grab a game, remove your ads,creds and all and put their own stuff in).
With flash i have the feeling its a bit of a false freedom thing, there are lots more ways to monetize games than on many other platforms but at the end of the day most aren´t financially viable for most games and also the pirating of flash games is even way easier than when releasing to many other platforms which for many game types reduces the longtime revenue potential with flash games a lot.
And if one argues whether its a good thing or not that there is a unified app store and its regulated to at least a small degree what gets on there and what not, i personally like that and think its actually benefitial to developers more than it hurts em.
(See kongregate where the aim is to flood it with tons of games, most developers earn next to nothing with what they upload there and kongregate gets most because they earn with every uploaded game, hence they support the push for as many games as possible.
Sure, the app store for iphone/touch stuff gets flooded, too but at least its not as crazy as with the flash game market).
Also this is essentially about selling downloadable games and there you should also consider that if you handle that yourself you have to set up store and payment stuff for all countries you want to sell in, so apple actually takes a lot of work off one´s shoulders.

Overall i don´t want to say this is nothing but great and that is nothing but sucky; everything has its own upsides and downsides; for example it sure is nice to be able to release a game at any moment one wants which is still basically mostly only possible with flash games on the web (while still having an option to reach a big audience); i just felt like, yeah, when one considers some more sides of that freedom or no freedom thing then your post was a bit one sided and then not right.

iPhone is the new WiiWare, which was the new XBLA. It's the latest pot of gold ( It's even been featured in Edge magazine for the past 2 months ).

I know one person actively developing on it, plus a couple more guys waiting to make the move. There's silly money involved atm because it's just so hot, 70% profit to the developer, a week to a month waiting process before it goes into the app store, a lot ( Lot ) more freedom where compared to XNA.

In return, you're looking at 1500 games already in there after 100 days, with just 1 first party title. The app store is just Kongregate, and relies on user reviews to keep a game near the top of the charts. If your game is there ( Just like Kong ), then you're laughing. Super Monkey ball sold something like 300,000+ in it's first month. And it's crap.
If of course your game isn't there ( Like Kong ) then you're just in effect throwing it away.

iPhone, very buzzy, lots of potential, people happy buying crap for their new toy. Just like XBLA, and how many people at an indie level have made money with that ?

Squize.

more good points. And sure, at the end of the day any mass content distribution system could be compared to how kong does it, but again, i feel like kong and many flash sites have least restrictions regarding content so obviously that leads to the biggest flood.
Sure though, the more its flooded the more difficult it will become to sell things and sell em well for a longer timespan, that´s again the case with every distribtuion platform.
I think we´re already nearing that stage if we´re not already there, there´s enough shovelware that pure shovelware doesn´t usually have a big chance anymore and bigger publishers are already giving it more and more focus which will make it more and more difficult for indies in general.
Still i feel like its yet another good option, depending on which upsides/downsides are more important with your particular game of course.

Personally of the distribution options you listed i feel like wiiware is the worst one, least transparent to consumer and developer, content not well presented, not exactly making it easy for indies to come in ("nah, nah, you can´t get in if you work from a home office" type things) and as far as i heard pretty much all third party content sells bad.

I think that iPhone is a quick way to make some big cash, at least on Elance (elance.com). There are people that just write:
"Looking for iPhone Applications developer", and the project budget is over 100, 000$!
The big downside for me is that it's only for macs...but my sister's probably going to give me her old Mac, so, hopefully I'll be able to get on those.

As for those wanting to learn C...well, it's freaking easy if you know actionscript. It's the same thing, just with more details. You'll already know the syntax, you'll just need to learn more about things to include, and what functions exist, etc, etc.

In all, I'm loving the iPhone SDK, just it isn't available to windows :(
I don't think that the good money with the iPhone is submitting your own games, but doing contract work for companies. That's your big, huge, one time bonus. Then again, it doesn't hurt to have games floating around the iPhone :)

P.

btw: @ Wattz, you don't need an iPhone to start developing. A free iPhone emulator comes with the SDK!

i've only played around with it a little, but the performance is great. we're working on an android game at work and the performance, unfortunately, is laughable. (i mean that in a naive, i've only developed software for nice desktops previously way, so take it for what it's worth)

Dammit...my back up was going to Android developing if iPhone doesn't work out for me...
Well, I'll still check out both, but thanks for the warning!

By the way, Apple's really cut-off sort of system is really good if you're a developer making stuff for the iPhone. Or if you're completely paranoid about people stealing your game...since many still put up games on the internet. But yes, I like it as a developer to have a closed space for the games.
But I'm only applying this to the iPhone and iPods. I absolutely hate mac computers. That's where in my mind is Apple's biggest restriction, on their computers.
I see either nerds, or artsy people at school have them, and the only thing they say about a mac is that "It's better". How? "It just is. Mac rocks". I feel like punching them in the face...
(not that debating with nerds is my favourite pasttime or anything...just those times when I need to go to the library or pass them in the hallways...)

I was tempted by the i-phone as a dev platform, but they insist you buy a mac and use a very archaic language to develop with, so I decided against it.

I'm getting an Android phone tomorrow - it's an open platform, java based, just nice in every way the iphone will never be. The choice of hardware vendors in future will result in better performance at lower price too.

Btw, anyone moving from actionscript to i-phone development should check this out: http://www.bit-101.com/blog/?p=1761 very interesting post by keith peters.

lesli, you´re off there in several points.
First: one can also develop on a pc, though sure, with workarounds.
Next up: One can use various middleware like unity to then be able to develop for the iphone/ ipod touch in C#, JS and other languages.
Also i feel like all Andorid phones so far seem to suffer the typical java/mobile problems of the past: lousy performance and quite big differences from handset to handset so its difficult to optimize for something.
Also i wonder how most developers will make money with Android content.
Don´t want to talk Android all down, but yeah, so far its not that impressive to me, let´s see how it evolves.

Android.
Android.
Android.

I'm not even kidding, if it isn't the biggest thing since sliced bread in a years time i will be stunned. Every major handset manufacturer has an Android phone in development so think how much bigger the market will be than iphone. In terms of making money, android has its own store / or you can just sell them like java games on your website.

If the performance is currently an issue i think this will be high on the priorities of Google et al, and thats the other bonus i guess.. the platform is apparently improving in leaps and bounds

Those are good points!

It was what I was thinking too...since the Android is a lot more open, there will be more and more people with Androids than iPhone's. The only disadvantage, is that traditional mobile users rarely download content, whereas the iPhone's interface is REMARKABLY easy to use, very user friendly, and creates the impression of downloading something qualified, tested, and worth downloading.
Most mobile interfaces for downloads look very sketchy, and (from my experience at least) very few people ever download a single game. I've got a friend with an iPhone, and he downloads things very frequently from the store. If he sees a game or app that he thinks is good, he downloads it in an instant, and if it's not good, then he just delete's it!

I think that for the Android to succeed better than the iPhone (I haven't yet seen the android interface), the Android needs a clean, smooth, bug free, non-cramped, secure download environment. There should at least be a certified/official store for downloading apps, so people feel safer.

P.

Saying more and more people will have Android is like saying millions of people have "j2me" phones. The problem then becomes how to deliver the apps and collect payments. (Like Pazil mentions in his last paragraph above)

iphone has a user base projected to be 14 million by end of this year and they all go to the app store to get apps, unlike other cell phones where you are limited by what your carrier has opted to carry.

However, as much as I seem to be defending the platform as being worthy to develope for... the market for games is rapidly approaching a saturation point already. If you think slapping Mochi ads in a Flash game is poor compensation, imagine the effort put into developing a proper iphone game and then having it compete with other games priced at 0.99 cents each!!

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Originally Posted by lesli_felix

Btw, anyone moving from actionscript to i-phone development should check this out: http://www.bit-101.com/blog/?p=1761 very interesting post by keith peters.

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Blimey man. A combination of that link and this link turned out to be all I needed. I can read Objective-C quite comfortably now, and when I get some time I'm gonna see if I can get some sprites bouncing around. :)