Below is some advice from Taras Filatov, the lead of the team I am currently working with in the Ukraine. His advice is great if you are thinking about developing an application and are currently looking for developers (either locally or abroad):
1. “I need a simple iPhone app done…”
A lot of iPhone job posts at Odesk, Elance, RentACoder start like this. This is somewhat similar to the typical “I need a simple shopping cart solution” post we often see in the web development section. It might be interesting for you to know that when your ad starts like this there is a very high chance that it will be disregarded by developers or their sales teams that check the website. This is because developers in most cases find the requirements for something stated to be simple as oftentimes being actually very complex software: with bells and whistles, using GPS location, chat, camera, social networking functionality and a website to support the server functionality. All of this is just assumed to appear out of the blue built by the same developer.
Typically, there are no specification documents and the job poster has a general, unfinished idea of what he/ she thinks is a “killer app” and they want the developer to do the rest of thinking. It is also common in such cases that the author did little or no research into what is possible with iPhone SDK and after a discussion it may well turn out that implementing such functionality is impossible at all (except for jailbroken devices) so it turns out to have been a waste of time to even sign all the confidential agreements and begin discussion at the end of the day. Read more…
I have noticed on a few developer forums like this one that there are a decent amount of people who are looking for guidance as to how best execute their ideas. Most often these “idea people” are berated by the hardcore developers in the forums, written off as little more than a symptom of the iPhone app store hype. While no doubt there are a decent amount of Trism or iShoot wannabes who give the rest of us a bad name, I am writing this post for those of you who think you have something good and are actually serious about getting your product developed and following through. While I am still working on my 1st app, and have no idea how it will do in the App Store, I can tell you that I sat on my idea for a good 6 months so I have a pretty good idea of how hard it is to get started and where the pitfalls are.
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I started by posting a local (Philadelphia) advertisement to Craigslist and also by going to oDesk and posting an advertisement looking for an iPhone developer. My ad on Craigslist was straightforward and I offered both a salary while in development but also a portion of the returns. I got some good feedback and received inquiries from individuals, local iPhone development companies but also many international development firms. Initially I was interested in finding something more like a partner with technical skills to work with and share the return. This quickly proved to not be an option.
I still don’t think it is a bad deal to offer a developer: 1) an application idea, 2) a salary, 3) a flexible schedule, and 4) a portion of the returns. I wasn’t able to find anyone experienced, however, with enough interest and skill to really dive in to the project. While I am sure this is a symptom of the high demand for iPhone developers and my lack of being able to find / convince anyone locally (I only posted on Craigslist so wasn’t exactly scouring the city), it was still surprising how few serious inquiries I received. Let me just add, as someone who is learning the iPhone SDK, I was amazed at how little most developers who reached out to me knew about developing with the iPhone SDK.
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