I love open source software. I love that there are people out there with such a love of programming that they’re willing to spend countless hours of their own time to build cool things that people find extremely useful on a day to day basis. For iPhone development one of the best open source things around is Cocos2D. Here was a package originally made for Python that riq went and converted to Objective-C and now is used in all kinds of iPhone games, and by me for my current project. When you read the forums you see all kinds of cool stuff happening. The community works together to support each other’s efforts, to further develop the library and quickly fix bugs that come up.
Every now and then you even get to see financial success based around the open source project, whether it’s by supporting users of the software, or building addons to the software. In the case of Cocos2D for iPhone check out Particle Designer by 71 Squared. This thing is amazing. I’ve developed games for 10 years and every game I’ve worked on used particles in one way or another and none of them ever had a programmer with the time to build as nice of a particle design tool as this, and here’s one you can buy for $8 that works with an open source engine. That’s so awesome it blows my mind. I’ll be buying it straight away and putting it to good use.
After checking it out, and messing around some more with an updated ASIHTTPRequest library I’ve decided to use Amazon’s S3 storage service to host the media my new app will stream. This means I need to figure out how to incorporate the costs of bandwidth into the price of the app, as well as ensure that ongoing use of the app doesn’t bankrupt me.
Right now the plan is to charge an upfront fee to the user (the price of the app) which entitles the user to X hours of use. Once the hours run out the user won’t be able to stream anymore media from the S3 service. Then I’ll incorporate in-app purchase which will allow the user to purchase more listening time. I’m worried about the nature of this, I’m scared about the extra barrier this puts on the purchase decision.
Other options would be just to increase the overall price of the app, and then assume that some users will use the app a lot, and some will use it very little. This is a dangerous move I think, users could decide they love the app so much and use it constantly which would kill my profits of course. I also thought about adding ads to the app, but I don’t think that would generate much revenue due to the nature of the app. People will turn it on, tune into a stream and then lock the screen and put their iPhone in their pocket. They’re not going to stare at it and tap ads.
Even if I go with the purchased time approach, I’ve still got the pirates to worry about. Lots to think about with this issue that’s for sure.
Well after lots of trouble with a nasty bunch of issues on one device (the HTC Incredible, which should be called the HTC Incredibly Crappy) Prescriber’s Letter is now up on Android Marketplace.
The HTC Incredible had all kinds of weird issues. When we enabled zoom on all the WebViews that caused the WebView to crash on that device only. We had to check the device model and disable zoom for the Incredible. Then we had all sorts of strange issues with respect to leaving the app (either by the back button or the home button) and then coming back into the app. On every device but the incredible we would get one pattern of resume calls for activities, but on the HTC Incredible it seemed to want to recreate the default activity every time, which sort of left the existing stack of activities orphaned. I had to do a bunch of custom work for the Incredible to work around this.
So, if you’re doing any Android work try to get yourself an HTC Incredible to test with.
My next project will require streaming media which I need to host somewhere. I have a website (stormtapstudios.com) which I’ve paid for unlimited storage/bandwidth, but I’m positive for the amount I pay that bandwidth pipe can’t be all that wide. So I’m currently checking into things like Amazon’s S3 storage service to determine whether I can make it work economics-wise. Essentially what I need to do is estimate the amount of user my app will get by the average user, and then incorporate the bandwidth/storage costs of that use into the price of my app. This will be pretty tricky to do, if I guess wrong then I’ve got an app on the store that costs me money rather than makes me money! Not exactly my goal as a successful entrepreneur. 
