Most businesses outside major corporations didn't start commissioning custom software until the rise of the commercial use of the internet in the late '90s, when all kinds of small and medium sized businesses wanted their own website. Websites were relatively simple back then, and the people willing and able to make them cheap. Hell, even though I was already a professional programmer for years, back in 1994 the idea that someone would pay a few hundred bucks me to make a "homepage" was just cool enough in itself.

Websites became more complicated applications, no longer something hobbyists could do on the side, and became more diverse, including apps for specific platforms like iOS. The cost of having an online presence has multiplied many times in less than a decade because of the sheer amount of work involved, and the level of professionalism required these days.

But most businesses don't commission software ever few months, or even every few years. So every time they want a new app, or a refresh of their website, they are suddenly faced with a shockingly high price tag compared to the last time they wanted something similar (or at least similar from their perspective).

And we're only just getting started. The shortage of decent developers has only begun to translate itself into higher costs. Most employers are still rather conservative in the current economic climate, and developers are notoriously bad at selling themselves.

1) how much did it cost other people to build similar apps (comparative analysis) 2) that you are able to build the product successfully (reducing technical risk) 3) that the price is low enough that the estimated Rev will produce a return (ROI)

- If you can present those points clearly you will be in a much better position to make more money with less frustration

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I am seeking a telephony app. builder that can deliver a PhoneGap lie ( non-native) inexpensive app. for a telephony project.

pay is:

$350 + 1% equity stake in a newly formed Delaware Corp. and 2.5% on all residuals. possible board seat (future paid projects)

if you can deliver an additional investor, you can get 5% of the transaction on the capital raised through you contact.

First, too many stories along the lines of "I built this app for $1,000 in India and it is making me $50K per month".

Second, kids who don't know how to value their time who'll work like slaves for $2,000.

Third, bad programmers who deliver product cheaply enough, however, the underlying code is an absolute mess. They charge nothing, throw it together and move on.

Fourth, people tend to come up with an idea of what it is that they want to pay for something and try to fit that something to that number. When it comes to software that's like the square-peg -> round-hole problem. I've been to countless meetings where the other side says things like "We'd like to do this for no more than $10K" ... and then they describe an intense six-month, four-person job.

You can always try to educate. Sometimes that works. It can be painful. What you don't want to do is be the educator and have someone else walk away with the work for less (even if it is 1%) than what you would charge. So, don't invest any time unless you know that there's a really good probability of getting the deal.

If you have to outsource the entire cost of development, and you want a good looking, well functioning app, it's very expensive. And then there are the inevitable upgrades, improvements etc.

The problem is that so much of what we buy is mass-produced that we forget just how expensive person-time is, especially creative person-time, since for most modern products this gets amortised over hundreds or thousands or millions of units. Even user-facing software has this issue, since the programmers do their work once and then the marginal cost of each additional copy is pennies or less. But custom work? There the cost is borne entirely by the one commissioning the work, and if it's an individual, or a small business or startup that has never had to purchase enterprise or custom software, they simply have no analogous experience, with software or anything else, of bearing the entire cost of everything.

"With websites, you can simply add one more page, then create a link to that page when you needed. However, you can’t do that with iOS app, everything has to be set in the beginning, any changes might result in significant other changes that you might not be able to understand why."

Isn't this what the Navigation Controller is for? You just push a view controller onto the stack, and pop it when you're done.

Regarding the UITabBar: "if you want colors icons instead of the blueish tint, the change in code is substantial!"

I have been using this method, which is not really complicated: http://sugartin.info/2011/07/01/customizing-tab-bar/

You need to make images for the bar in both orientations (if you need it). The only time-consumer is the "more" button, for which you'll have to create a custom UITableView -- and still not have the handy "edit" command to rearrange the tab bar buttons.

...unless this is the wrong method to use, in which case I would love to see an example of the right way to do it.

Enterprises want to move fast, if they can, but they can't because of the mistakes they've done in the past were covered with more processes to make sure that 1) it didn't happen again and 2) if it happened, we can blame the process.

Sometime engineers don't understand 2 facts:

1) You will get fired if you made mistakes

2) You will make mistakes

So people tend to hide and blame "processes" to avoid firing.

CEOs are cold blooded firing squad. Just like "Businesses". What matters are profits.

Business people will wear a very thick layer of skin and try to pull unimaginably stupid statements to push the price down ranging from "I thought Facebook was done in a weekend" to "It shouldn't take a day or two to fix a 'simple' Database issue. You just go there and change the data"

The iOS and Cocoa Touch APIs are really robust, and with libraries like RESTKit, it's not that big of a deal to whip up an app that works well. Indeed, I've done it a few times myself.

The problem is that no one is ever satisfied with the UI kit that Apple provides. Browsing Navigation views of Tables, and doing simple CRUD to a simple backend (e.g., Rails on Heroku), is a weekend project, IMO.

I think OP is really talking about how unrealistic people's expectations/requirements are – not how difficult it is to make a working iOS app.

A quick example, I implemented a very good looking custom badge system for an app. The result looked just liked design, could be generated programmatically, and worked like a charm. It also took me a couple of days to implement the whole thing in quartz. If I were doing this as consulting, that's a $2-3000 feature. These things add up very quickly, particularly if someone wants to "try a few out."

Tightly integrated code: With websites, you can simply add one more page, then create a link to that page when you needed. However, you can’t do that with iOS app, everything has to be set in the beginning, any changes might result in significant other changes that you might not be able to understand why. The way iOS codes are structured is like a breadboard, everything is hard-wired, you still can change a few things here and there, but if you change the wrong wire, the whole board might stop working. Even extremely well structured code does not increase the flexibility by a lot. Adding an additional email button to ‘About’ screen might only be worth a few more lines of code, but adding a Facebook Like button on the same page is a different story, don’t expect that to be done in a few hours.

I disagree. Yes, it's nice to have everything in hand when you start, but I've built multiple apps concurrently with the backend development. The trick is to isolate your networking in the model layer (a good practice regardless of whether or not the API is already done). This allows you to stub or use dummy data until things come online.

WRONG. Mobile applications supplement existing solutions, which means they generally are a subset of features tailored to a handheld device. Enterprises generally don't adapt a lean methodology. For example they just assume that the current Facebook app you see today was birthed in a weekend...as Facebook itself was. Which, as we know all know here, is simply not true.

It's not their responsibility to know the market they're trying to consume; it's yours. Be prepared to quote market rates for varying levels of experience, and have examples to explain why your time is priced in whatever tier you consider yourself to be in.

Of course, the reality is usually exactly opposite.

I found out that it's not worth it to mingle with offline-small business. Their budget is usually $1,000-$2,000. That's barely enough to buy a stock template, a couple of plug-ins, setup WordPress and customize it a little.

The problem is not with small or medium businesses. You need businesses that works on the web. Their web presences is everything they are. They know how web dev. is hard and expensive and they also value it. Highly.

If you are a freelancer, find a few of them. Make a good relation. That's it. They'll make you a good salary.

Like creating quality TV/Film content, crafting mobile applications takes time, talent, and money and one day this will be better understood by the mainstream.

The idea that you can whip up a very complex iPhone app "in a weekend or two" is naive and, dare I say, bubblethink.

(1) Big infrastructure needed: Seriously, if the client is not picky, you should be able to build a working basic infrastructure for the back end in a week. And that's generous.

(2) You need a way to communicate: The claim that there is no standard way to do it is just plain wrong. There is absolutely a standard way, its how everyone with a brain does it these days, and its easily supported through every device SDK - you use HTTP

(3) Design the API: No, design the app. Then determine what question it needs to ask the server, and figure out how to make the server answer them. Designing the API first is a very engineer thing to do - if you're the only user for the API its just a flat-out wrong approach

(4) Pay for it: Sure, but I'll pay for the amount of time it should take to do this. Which is a week. Engineers that want me to pay for them to sit and write 200 page requirements specifications need not apply. I want to work with the people that want to build something on day 1, and then keep tweaking it.

I judge books by their covers. In fact, I don't know anyone who doesn't outside of trying very hard to convince others they do not.

The layout of the blog draws my attention to your picture and subsequently your "download my resume" link. I clicked since I was interested in learning a little about the author, his background, and what may have caused him to write such an article.

As soon as that link opened, I knew I would not read the blog post because the resume layout rendered the content difficult to read. Why does that bother me so much? The answer is simple: it ruined your brand for me before I even had a positive impression. Right off the bat, I'd give 2 suggestions to clean up your resume a little:

1) Do something about the half bar headers you are using as it currently divides the page when viewed, this wouldn't be an issue if you actually had a 2 column design which lined up, but it doesn't.

2) Never and I mean NEVER use justified alignment unless you're publishing a newspaper.

Sorry if I seem a bit harsh, but being that you're fairly young and these are very simple mistakes to correct, I thought I'd point them out.

Best of luck!

Same thing I think happens with programming. "I have this idea, and I know (somehow) that $500 is a fair price, in spite of the fact that they are neither technical people or... ever commissioned custom development before".

So, it's not just software development...

That's not always the case - if you manage to work $2000 /8h/day/month in my country , you're already being paid in the top .. 10% programmers.

Money has a different value based on location.

It still doesn't make sense as you can use tools such as Interface Builder. The only thing that applies, you could still be building the view programmatically or need custom animations. That needs coding. And of course a facebook button needs to handle things such as authentication than an emailing one does not.

About the UITabBar, you can always use the black one. Or use this little trick for greater effect which is less demanding on custom images: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/571028/changing-tint-back...

I also do apps for a living and it is true that business has unreasonable expectations on time and cost. Not to speak of the myriad of people that want a whatsapp clone for 500$

On the other hand, think of what you could accomplish with a weekend of work in 1992 and compare that to 2012. Our abilities as developers/designers/etc are vastly improved due to improved infrastructure, tools, communications, resources, etc.

You could build a distributed photo hosting and viewing application back in 1992. But you'd probably be writing it in C++ and it might take you a long time to get something that even works, much less looks reasonably okay and attracts an audience.

Now in 2012, you could hack that together in a weekend. To make it a real project may take a few weeks or months, of course, but the pace at which we can build things is indeed speeding up.

I think this is backwards. Programming is cheaper than ever. As outsourcing tools because better (vWorker is what I have experience with) this is only going to get better. Programmers have to realize that there are hungry, capable people around the world who can do much of what you can for far cheaper. I'm not taking anything away from anyone, but that's the reality of globalization. I've been able to get projects (mostly simple web development) done at less than half the price through outsourcing.

> The way iOS codes are structured is like a breadboard, everything is hard-wired, you still can change a few things here and there, but if you change the wrong wire, the whole board might stop working

Seems very wrong. It sounds like something that someone that doesn't really understand Objective-C would write. It's a very dynamic language, using features like first-class classes should help prevent that C++-esque nightmare.

A Facebook like button is not a fair comparison at all. In a web app, you can just paste it in. If you had to implement the button yourself it would take just as long as implementing it from scratch on iOS.

Instead, consider a data type. If we're writing a Facebook clone, let's say we only have status messages and now we want to add photos. On the web, you'll need to write the template to generate HTML for that in the news feed. On iOS, you need to write a cell class. It's true that the iOS one will probably take longer, but that doesn't make it less flexible. It's just the nature of declaring your interface in code instead of in markup.

Take a list of things for example -- let's say a list of contacts. On the web that's probably a styled <ul>. On iOS, it's a UITableView.

So, let's say late in the game you're asked to sort contacts by first name, and put a little section indicator in for each letter.

On the web that's easy, sort the array, then as you're iterating over it and rendering, insert your section header when the first letter changes. If the list changes, ajax the changes in and use an id on each item to update. Done.

On iOS, first you'll need to set up a collation on your table view. Decompose your array of contacts into section arrays. For efficiency, you'll probably want to keep a pointer to that list. Change your section and row count delegates so they match the new structure. Now when you're rendering the cells, you'll need to locate the contact by section and row, and if a cell is tapped you'll need to change that too. If you support editing (delete, etc), there are several other places where you'll need to make similar changes. Speaking of which, what if the user deletes the last contact in a section? You can't delete the last row in a section without deleting the section as well, so you'll need to detect that and react appropriately. Can updates arrive while the list is displayed? You could just reload the whole list, but that will probably result in an annoying UI pause. Better to just update the cells that need to change, so you'll want to find each changed row in your collated lists and update it, being sure to watch for any sections you need to insert/delete...

...And on and on. None of this is rocket science, but the point is that there can be a lot of complexity behind a minor changes that someone with a web perspective would think of as trivial.

You could create your own layout engine, but most developers choose not to, especially since the consistency of iOS hardware means they can predict screen sizes easily. Your other option is to make your app a thin wrapper around a Webkit view, but that tends to produce poor results (see the Netflix iOS app for an example).