Imagine you have a design for an iPhone game and have decided to find a contract developer to create it for you. You want top quality and price is secondary. For this reason, you select a company which has developed dozens of applications and seems trustworthy; they’re expensive but you believe in your idea and decide to take the chance. You agree on the terms, sign the contract and development begins.

As you start receiving the builds, everything seems to be working out well; the quality is good and it’s moving in the direction you’ve envisioned. There’s only one small thing: the communication with the company and their responses seem to be oddly slow. You’ve asked them to change the color of a label from white to yellow and it took them 3 days to incorporate the change. Every question you ask seems to go through a committee before getting answered. Somewhere near the end of the project, you come up with a great idea you want implemented and even though it’s very simple, their price for the change is disproportionately high. Yet little by little, the project comes to a finish and you walk away happy with the game in your hands.

The above story is a true one and although it may not sound too strange, there’s quite a lot behind it. The original client had hired a US-based company (let’s call it Company A) with an extensive portfolio and years of experience to create the game. They have then hired an India-based outsourcing company (let’s call it Company B), also with years of experience and dozens of completed projects, to work on the game. Their price was considerably lower than what Company A had charged the client, so Company A was able to keep a decent profit off the project. The story doesn’t end here however, as Company B didn’t have enough developers and has hired us (Company C) to develop the project. Our price was lower than theirs, so they also managed to turn a bit of the profit off the project.

The original client is completely oblivious to all this and still believes that the game is being developed by Company A.

The reason for the slow communication with the client was the fact that all three companies were in different time zones and because e-mail forwarding from client to us and back wasn’t automatic and sometimes it would take a couple of days for someone at Company A or Company B to do it. That is also the reason some very simple changes took so long.

The prices for additional features by the client were unreasonably high because they would start with our request and then both Company B and Company A would add a certain sum to it to increase their profit.

You may wonder what is so dark about this; it’s simple trading where you buy something cheap and sell it at a higher price. Well, not quite. There are several problems here the way I see it:

• The original client believed the game was developed by Company A
• The quality of the service has been considerably lower than it would have been had the client been able to communicate with the developer directly
• The price has been unnecessarily high (I’m not talking 10-20% higher; it was about 5-6 times higher than what we charged for the actual development)

From the perspective of all three ‘development’ companies, there’s nothing to complain about; each turned a profit and moved on. Yet I’d bet you wouldn’t want to be the original client in this case.

Finding trustworthy and reliable developers is difficult and unfortunately, it sometimes takes a few failed projects, wasted money and time. There’s probably no magical formula and it’s always possible to make a mistake; I just wanted to make you aware of cases like this because in the long run, nobody truly benefits that way.

I was kidding. Really. Well, maybe you can, but I don’t have the recipe – and if I did, I’d probably be too busy applying it. I do, however, have some information to share, even if it’s not a recipe for getting rich; it may just help you make the next step towards riches.

The promise of gold

If you’re following the IT industry even a little bit, it’s likely you’ve read some of the success stories of iPhone developers striking it rich with simple games and applications, practically overnight. It’s true, these people really did make it (though not all as “overnight” as it may seem at the first glance). What followed were, unsurprisingly, hordes of others aiming to achieve the same thing. Wouldn’t it be great – you come up with an idea, invest some time (in case you’re a developer) or money (to hire someone else) and in a few weeks you have a golden goose in your hands? I know I’d like it. This way of thinking is what drove tens of thousands of games and applications to the App Store in the past year or so.

As a freelance developer, I’ve seen this happen many times. You can often read in iPhone development forums posts that go somewhere along the lines: “I have a great idea for an iPhone game! It’s definitely going to be a hit! I have the design completely worked out; all I need is a developer to make it happen and we can share the revenue!”. I honestly do appreciate the enthusiasm, though I can’t help but imagine that being written by a 12-year-old. More serious gold miners are looking for professional iPhone developers and are willing to pay. The basic idea is the same, however: invest a little and make a fortune, real quick.

Sand castles crumble

This all sounds great, but it doesn’t work and the results are usually very disappointing. The game is released and while everyone is eagerly waiting to see it surge to the number one spot on the charts, it gets buried under thousands of others and hardly ever returns the investment, even if it’s only the cost of the developer program. These people are then shaking their heads in disbelief and resignation, wondering how is it possible that their great idea didn’t make it. Eventually, most of them blame the AppStore, declare it broken and walk away. Louder ones stay a little while to complain, to no avail.

The problems

The main problem, I think, is not in the AppStore. Yet before I elaborate on that, I want to make a few things clear. I don’t think the AppStore is flawless by any means; it has its own share of problems, but they are well known and everyone is talking about them so there’s no point going into that here. I also don’t consider every developer or everyone who hires iPhone developers a wannabe millionaire. In fact, I’ve had some great experiences with people who really knew what they were doing and others who simply wanted to see their game or application idea live on the AppStore, which is perfectly fine.

An overwhelming number of entries on the Store, however, are just that. Poorly designed and often poorly executed attempts at creating a cheap hit.

So where are the real problems?

For one, not every application in the App Store can be a hit, even if they were all equally great. It’s very obvious, but many people seem to overlook that fact, not asking themselves whether their idea truly is so much better than the thousands of others.

Yet even if you have the greatest idea, in most cases it’s not enough in itself. An idea you can scribble in two sentences has a very long way to becoming a hit. There lies another problem. People often approach freelance developers with just such a short concept and then expect the developer to turn it into the next hit. This can work if you’re approaching a company with a formidable portfolio of hit applications and has all sorts of people in the team – from designers and producers to programmers and testers; which costs a lot of money, of course. On the other hand, if you’re approaching a relatively inexperienced developer with “one application already in review for the App Store” and working for $15/h, you can’t expect to get the same thing as from the aforementioned company (even though the size or even fame of the company is not always a guarantee of quality; more on that in another article). Similarly, many people seem to assume that game design just happens along the way. They start with a short idea and expect that it’s somehow going to be transformed into a gem.

In other words, the problem is that the quality of released products is very poor, which is a result of people trying to play the roles they know nothing about. If you have learned all you know about games just by playing them, don’t think you’re a game designer. Find people with adequate knowledge and experience for all the roles you need for your project or you’re risking you’ll get those components where you’re improvising horribly wrong.

Now let’s assume you’ve survived the development process and, one way or another, have created a really good game or application. It is widely assumed that it’s enough to simply send the application to Apple and wait for it to reach the top on its own. I’d love it if it worked that way, but it couldn’t be farther from the truth. The iPhone applications market is unique in many ways, but it’s still a market. While standard marketing methods may not always give the results you’d expect, it doesn’t mean that nothing works or that you can simply give up on that part. I’ve seen games in which considerable amounts of money have been invested, but after release there was simply no word about them. No reviews, no announcements on forums, no YouTube videos; absolutely nothing. It may happen that some people will accidentally pick up the application, spread the word and you’ll get a hit.  Though you may just as well play lottery instead.

In case you’re not willing to rely on pure luck for your success, roll up your sleeves and make sure the world knows about your application or game. You’ll still need plenty of luck along with that.

In conclusion

The AppStore is not the Aladdin’s lamp; don’t expect it to do everything for you. Yet in spite of all of its problems that can take you down really quickly, it can truly be a great start if you’re small or a valuable extension to an already running business. There still are ways to break in and ways to earn a decent income, as many publishers and developers  are proving each day. It’s not easy and you may fail just like in any other business, but it’s possible. Only you have to do something very special: “Think different”, as the famous Apple slogan goes.