The App Business Blog

2010 was a fantastic year!

The Blog

This blog has grown to almost four thousand regular readers. For this I am humbled and very grateful. It gives me great joy to provide iOS programming advice, and I hope that you have learned something new in this past year.

I typically write about challenges, bugs, tips and tricks that I encounter myself as an iOS developer. It’s also a great repository of solutions for myself. I smile each time I search for a problem in Google, and on the first page of search results is a blog post that I wrote (hopefully) quite some time ago…

That said, I do welcome your input on topics, tutorials, difficulty level, mix between technical posts, business items and general ramblings.

One of my few New Years resolutions is to post more regularly.

Pervasent

In my day job as CTO of Pervasent, I’ve had the privilege to deliver many cool iPhone and iPad apps, work on worthwhile and engaging projects, and consult for enterprise class clients.

The limiting factor for our growth is to find more great iOS developers. (That’s why you’ve seen several open job posts on the blog.) Fortunately we’re now in the situation where top notch developers are contacting us, wanting to join our team. Working with great colleagues on a project is a lot more fun than working by yourself.

Here’s a funny anecdote from a recent job interview: One of the opening questions I like to ask is how long have you been programming in Objective-C. Most iPhone developers will answer somewhere in the range 1-3 years. Imagine my surprise when this individual answered 21 years! (He worked at both Next and Apple.) That rendered several of my followup questions moot…

What’s in store for 2011? More enterprise consulting work. But we’re also working on our own product in the document management space. More about that when we’re ready to release it.

Predictions

I’m not going to do any predictions for this year. When it comes to Apple’s mobile products their release schedule is now well established and we all know that there will be incremental updates to most products on this schedule. As for brand new categories of products, they’re just impossible to predict.

The general mobile device market is definitely exciting, but the macro trends are pretty obvious:

• Apple will continue their curated, vertically integrated, high-margin business.
• Android will become the device volume leader.
• iOS will continue to command the most developer attention.
• The App Store will remain the only financially viable marketplace for selling apps.
• The other platforms (Windows Phone 7, RIM, Palm, Nokia) will continue to fall further behind.

I wish you a Happy and Prosperous 2011. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Update: Here are some predictions for 2011 that I found interesting, although I don’t necessarily agree with all of them.

• Cringely (especially #2, #9 and #10).
• Kevin C. Tofel and Om Malik @ GigaOm
• Gene Munster
• Computerworld
• Oliver Drobnik

written by Nick