According to CNN, Apple’s “tiny” 9% marketshare accounts for 75% of all cell phone profits.
This chart covers all phone sales, not just smartphones, and the whole world, not just the U.S. This teaches a powerful lesson: more marketshare does not mean more money. Not all customers are created equally. Android’s marketshare looks impressive, but when you drill down into ...
Many clients mistakenly believe that supporting previous versions of iOS software is important. But almost universally, supporting iOS 4 and earlier is a bad investment.
Unlike other platforms where software updates are provided for very limited windows, Apple’s updates run on devices up to two years old.
Apple works hard to make new versions of iOS available ...
Android has been making some gains lately in overall marketshare. But AppleInsider has some fantastic charts today showing off the widening gap between Apple and Android in the enterprise:
It’s not even a fair fight. Even the least-owned iOS device, the iPhone 3GS, beats the pants off the most popular Android device. If you’re targeting enterprise users or business users ...
Some managers think that it’s important to have lots of programmers working on a project. After all, the more people you have, the faster it will get done! But nine pregnant women can’t make a baby in a month.
Adding more people to a late software project makes it later. - Fred Brooks
In fact, large software teams lead to project stagnation. Doug Putnam published research from 491 software projects. His ...
At DrewCrawfordApps, we practice an agile development methodology based on multiple small sprints and continuous delivery. This is because agile methods provide higher productivity, lower costs, result in higher quality software, and happier clients.
According to VersionOne’s 2010 study, 66% of agile practitioners report faster time-to-completion for software projects. More than half of all respondants report that agile has “Significantly Improved” or “Improved” their ability to respond to ...
MacWorld has published an article discussing how difficult it is to hire qualified iOS developers:
“We’re 100 people, but we have work for 130 people. We just don’t have those extra 30 bodies,” Michaels says. He adds that salaries for experienced iPhone developers “just keep going up. Our year-over-year salaries are up almost 20 percent.”
iOS development is a demand market right now. There simply aren’t enough qualified developers to ...
Apple announced today the release of the iPhone 4GS.
Some of the major improvements, from an app developer point of view:
Apple announced the public release of iOS5 on October 12th today.
We have been testing iOS5 for several months now, and we are very excited about many of the new features:
Apple’s Volume Purchase Program opens new opportunities for certain types of distribution scenarios. Originally designed for educational institutions, the Volume Purchase Program has recently been opened to all businesses.
The Program allows one developer with a Standard Developer Account to sell applications directly to eligible purchasers without making the application publicly available in the app store. The developer enters the e-mail address of the purchaser ...
Marco Arment, the author of Instapaper, put together this fabulous graph:
Android tablets and the tablets of other manufacturers (e.g. BlackBerry Playbook) are selling at rates comprable to failed video game systems from the 80s.
In other words, you are likely not to get a single new customer by developing a tablet app for a non-iPad platform. Even if the cost to add support for the ...
