What’s involved in building an iPhone app?

People are often surprised when I explain the process of building an iPhone app and how much work is involved for something that seems so small and simple.  People seem to think it’s a few weeks worth of work.  Surely since most apps hover between free and $2 it can’t be much, right?

Well I thought I would give a little insight into what really goes into making an app.

The newest version of Camera Genius is a complete rebuild from our earlier version.  The latest version contains 39,924 lines of code.  To put that in perspective, the average novel is about 120,000 words.  Assuming about 10 words per line, that’s 12,000 lines.  So the instructions which tell Camera Genius how to operate are over three novels long.  This number only includes finalized code.  Generally we build out each major new feature in one or more separate projects before incorporating them into the main code base, which means that we create significantly more code than the 3 novel figure suggests. 

We aren’t done yet though.  We still have to make the interface for our application.  There are 624 images that make up the design of Camera Genius.  Each one of these images is designed from scratch.  Most of the images go through numerous revisions before we get the version that is included in the final program.

So who worked on it? We had 4 people within the company working on this project over the last 8 months. We also had work done by 6 artists for various parts of Camera Genius outside of our company.  Two of those artists had artwork making it into the final version.

So how much did it cost?  To date we have invested $36,560 in the update of Camera Genius.  This number does not include any payments to the two of us who own the company.  We get paid only if the app is successful.  This number also does not include any marketing dollars spent on promoting the application.  This is strictly development money.  Over 90% of the money went towards paying the two other developers working on Camera Genius and paying for the artwork created by the various artists involved. The final 10% goes towards misc costs of running the business, office costs, misc hardware, and other fees. I want to make one thing very clear, our costs are pretty low compared to what they could be.  You could very easily spend at least 3-10 times as much if you were to contract all of the work out that needs to be done.

If you like Camera Genius, please spread the word to your friends and family. It allows us to keep the updates coming.