May 2009: Survey of iPhone Developers

There’s 45 million iPhones out there, and tens of thousands of iPhone Apps – we know this, and we know that the top-10 apps make millions of dollars each. But what about the developers, the people *MAKING* these apps – do you have any idea who they are?

There is/was no widely available info on who these people were, how they worked, etc, despite the many companies making strategic decisions on this stuff right now. The small teams, especially, are largely on their own, and even if someone did a big, expensive, report they don’t have the money to pay for it (I include myself in that group).

At the start of May, I created an online survey to find out some more info about “who” the people are that are currently developing for iPhone – from one-man-bands through teams of part-time friends to large development studios.

Scroll down for the full results, and some basic analysis…

Coming Soon: A detailed report into iPhone Development

I made this survey for myself and for others in the development community who need the data. I’ve had a lot of great suggestions and requests for follow-up analysis that I’d like to pursue. If you’re a developer and would like to take part in the report (which will go into more detail), please email me at adam.m.s.martin at gmail.com

Or … if you’re not a developer, but would like a copy of the report anyway, email me and I’ll get in touch nearer the time.

(if you have any requests for particular information/analysis to be included in the report, feel free to mail me and let me know)

Highlights of survey

Here’s some interesting bits I’ve pulled out from the main survey … scroll down to the bottom for the complete results.

Almost 100 different teams were surveyed, and in the end there were 85 complete, accurate, genuine responses.

• The survey URL was posted directly to:
• 1 major iphone-developer forum
• a couple of iphone news sites
• 1 professional game-developer forum
• 1 hobbyist game-developer forum
• my personal blog
• 50 friends/ex-colleagues from the web and games industries

No attempt was made to pre-filter the respondents to artificially create a “controlled” sample (I wasn’t even sure how you’d achieve that, since no-one knows what the global makeup of iphone developers is?). I’m taking most figures as accurate to either 1 or 2 sig figs.

Who are the people making iPhone Apps?

Team Background
39 %	Game development
6 %	Mac development
11 %	Mobile development
32 %	Web development
11 %	(none of the above)

From personal experience – many mobile dev firms don’t seem to be doing iPhone yet – I wasn’t expecting a big chunk of mobile developers. However, I didn’t include any phone-specific dev commmunities (apart from the iPhone ones) in my promotion of the survey URL, so this part might be skewed.

Leaving aside the mobile percentage, its very interesting to see that the iPhone is attracting approximately equal numbers of game and web developers.

Team Size
59 %	2-5 people
30 %	1 person
7 %	6-10 people
2 %	11-20 people
1 %	21-50 people
1 %	> 50 people

A third of all the teams surveyed were 1-man teams, and two-thirds were 2-5 people. I expected a high ratio of 2-5 person teams, but I didn’t expect it to be quite that high.

Overall, around 10% of teams doing iPhone dev have more than 5 people in them. That’s quite astounding. There are two pressure that I suspect are keeping this down.

Firstly, this strongly suggests that iPhone development is a great deal “easier” than comparable platforms (such as console – even downloadable console such as XBLA and PSN, and handhelds such as DS and PSP), because even a fully-staffed 5 person team barely has room for one specialist in each of code, art, design, and project management.

Secondly, this suggests that developing iPhone Apps is very very hard to get large revenue for right now. 5 people is tiny compared to average dev team sizes from the games industry (even for last-generation PS2 games you’d expect most dev to be 10-20 people) – and compared to how much cash successful iPhone titles generate. With individual titles making multiple millions of dollars in profit, how come the teams aren’t larger? What about all the giant corporations who could easily put 15-person teams on iPhone immediately?

I believe the problem is that although it’s easy to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a single iPhone app, that high expenditure has little correlation with high revenues, and the large teams tend to lose a lot of money per-project.

Moving into new areas…
COND(0 yrs phone,will dev phone)
43 %	Yes
57 %	No
COND(0 yrs mac,will dev mac)
12 %	Yes
88 %	No
COND(0 yrs games,will dev games)
63 %	Yes
37 %	No

Here, I took all the people who said their team had, on average, “0 years experience” with either game dev, mac dev, or phone dev … and then checked what percent of them said they were intending to do development in that area.

Look at the result for phone dev. Approximately half the people with zero phone experience are now planning to do phone development – the iPhone has actively attracted a large number of developers to doing not just iPhone but general mobile-phone development

On the other hand, Apple’s failed to spur new Mac development. Bear in mind that in order to do *any* iPhone development, you *must* purchase a Mac, and you *must* use (and learn!) the IDE and tools that are used for all Mac development. The iPhone libraries are mostly identical to the Mac OS X libraries. So … once you’ve learnt to develop on the iPhone, you now (almost) know how to develop Mac applications too. This seems like a missed opportunity, and suggests Apple should perhaps do some more incentivization of Mac development for new iPhone developers.

What to expect when making iPhone Apps

I’ve spoken to a lot of people over the past 6 months about their experiences as clients, comissioning other teams to develop iPhone apps for them. Where this has gone badly, the most common recurring complaint is that the developer “seems very slow” – and there’s been no baseline for clients to use to check their gut feeling on this.

When asked, based on my own experiences developing iPhone apps, and from conversations with other developers, I’ve suggested that a typical iPhone app should take about a month for a first complete version. Sure, you can polish after that – and, as the client, you can/will probably change the spec a little, and ask for a new version before going live. But I’ve met people who’ve been paying teams for 4-6 months (or longer) for a simple app that I reckoned I could personally have written on my own in 4-6 weeks.

But have we just been lucky with the apps we’ve worked on? Are the “averages” we’ve experienced atypical? What *is* a “reasonable” length of time (and price/cost!) for an outsourcer to spend working on your iphone app?

Devtime average
3 %	1 day
9 %	< 1week
24 %	1-4 weeks
21 %	5-8 weeks
18 %	2-3 months
14 %	3-6 months
7 %	> 6 months

Around half of all developers spend less than 2 months, on average, making each app. There you go – the reasonable amount of time for someone to quote you is “1 month”, “2 months”, or “3 months” … and since that’s the range across *all* apps, you should expect that to be proprtional to the complexity of your app.

And don’t miss the fact that a mere 20% of apps take more than 3 months to complete, typically. If your outsourcer is taking 4+ months, you should probably start asking some very serious questions…

Use my iphone for development/testing?
79 %	Yes
21 %	No

This isn’t particularly important – although it could help when budgetting how much it’s going to cost you to start in-house iPhone development. Instead, it’s something I’d been wondering about for a long while, ever since Apple’s beta release of the iPhone OS 2.x / 2.2.x broke people’s iphones. At the time, Apple said something along the lines of: “if you were installing “developer betas” on your own phone, you’re stupid – we take no responsibility”.

Fair enough, but then … one of the big attractions to iPhone development is that the cost to start developing an iPhone app is very low: if you already have a personal iPhone, and you own a Mac, then it costs you a mere $99 / year for your developer license.

Looking at this survey, it would appear that the vast majority of iPhone developers *are* using their personal phones for development and testing. Having seen other people destroy their own (only!) $600 phone in the past, I point-blank refuse to install or test beta releases unless it’s on a corporate-bought “test” phone. From the results here, it looks like you’re far from alone if you decide to risk it – and that means that you should find lots of other people offering help/advice if your phone gets into trouble from a beta OS release.

Responses to all answers

After checking with the people who took part, I decided to publish all the basic response data, so that even the people who *didn’t* take part could get some (free) info from this. Thanks go to all the people who took part!

Please share links to this page widely – the more people that can make use of this data, the better. But … this data took a lot of my unpaid time and effort to collate, and a large number of people also contributed their own time to filling out the surveys – don’t abuse it.

So … feel free to reference the contents (so long as you include attribution: Adam Martin @ http://t-machine.org – and the URL to this page), but do not simply copy/paste substantial chunks (e.g. 200 words) without checking with me first. Re-blogging this is cool, awesome; copy/pasting all the content and putting a tiny misattributed link in the corner of the page is not. If in doubt … email me (adam.m.s.martin at gmail.com)

Team Background
39 %	Game development
6 %	Mac development
11 %	Mobile development
32 %	Web development
11 %	(none of the above)

Experience phones
56 %	0 years each
24 %	1-2 years each
13 %	2-5 years each
7 %	5+ years each

Experience Mac
66 %	0 years each
29 %	1-2 years each
5 %	5+ years each

Experience Games
29 %	0 years each
18 %	1-2 years each
23 %	2-5 years each
30 %	5+ years each

Team Size
29 %	1
60 %	1-5
2 %	11-20
1 %	21-50
1 %	51
7 %	6-10

Will dev for phones
57 %	Yes
43 %	No

WILL MAC?
28 %	Yes
72 %	No

WILL GAMES?
84 %	Yes
16 %	No

TEAM status
38 %	all full-time
38 %	all part-time
24 %	some of each

TEAM SALARIES
11 %	contract/paid by the hour
23 %	salaried/employees
49 %	self-employed/co-founders/profit-split
16 %	voluntary/unpaid

TEAM workingloc
40 %	ALL: co-located (work in same office)
11 %	SOME: disparate (work in different offic
48 %	SOME: remote-working (work from home)

TEAM profit sharing?
56 %	All of us
24 %	None of us
20 %	Some of us

Country
38 %	USA	2 %	India	1 %	Switzerland
16 %	UK	2 %	Australia	1 %	Hungary
11 %	Canada	2 %	Argentina	1 %	Israel
		2 %	Ukraine	1 %	Portugal
		2 %	Germany	1 %	Netherlands
		2 %	Ireland	1 %	China
		2 %	Russia	1 %	Norway
		2 %	Spain	1 %	Bulgaria
		2 %	New Zealand	1 %	Pakistan
		2 %	France	1 %	Sweden

iphone developer duration
8 %	2 months
8 %	3 months
30 %	4-6 months
24 %	7-12 months
21 %	< 1 month
9 %	> 13 months

own engine
51 %	Yes
49 %	No

unity
24 %	Yes
76 %	No

torque
5 %	Yes
95 %	No

Irrlicht
1%	Yes
99%	No

oolong
6 %	Yes
94 %	No

SIO2
2 %	Yes
98 %	No

other engines
52 %	None
28 %	cocos2d
8 %	dont know
4 %	BANG2D
4 %	OpenFrameworks
4 %	PhoneGap

Languages used during iPhone development
Obj C		C		C++		JavaScript		C#		Lua		Pike
78 %	Yes	13 %	Yes	34 %	Yes	21 %	Yes	9 %	Yes	8 %	Yes	1 %	Yes

Use interfacebuilder how much?
48 %	0% (we don’t use Interface Builder)
13 %	1-10%
6 %	11-25%
9 %	26-50%
10 %	51-75%
13 %	76-100%
1 %	[N/A]

Use my iphone for development/testing?
79 %	Yes
21 %	No

test: os 3.0beta
68 %	No
32 %	Yes

test: os 2.2.1
26 %	No
74 %	Yes

test: os < 2.2.1
72 %	No
28 %	Yes

test: iptouch 3.0b
83 %	No
17 %	Yes

test: iptouch 2.2.1
54 %	No
46 %	Yes

test: iptouch < 2.2.1
80 %	No
20 %	Yes

test: 3G
51 %	No
49 %	Yes

test: 2G
74 %	No
26 %	Yes

Apps: total
2 %	[N/A]
25 %	0
28 %	1
33 %	2-5
5 %	6-10
6 %	11-20
1 %	21-30

Apps: rejected
2 %	[N/A]
79 %	0
13 %	1
6 %	2-5

Apps: in top 10 free
2 %	[N/A]
89 %	0
8 %	1
1 %	3

Apps: in top 50 free
2 %	[N/A]
84 %	0
9 %	1
3 %	2
1 %	3

Apps: in top 100 free
2 %	[N/A]
77 %	0
13 %	1
5 %	2
3 %	3

Apps: in top 10 paid
2 %	[N/A]
91 %	0
5 %	1
2 %	2

Apps: in top 50 paid
2 %	[N/A]
84 %	0
9 %	1
3 %	2
1 %	3

Apps: in top 100 paid
2 %	[N/A]
82 %	0
9 %	1
3 %	2
2 %	3
1 %	6-10

Best revenue
3 %	[N/A]
33 %	< $250
5 %	$251-$500
2 %	$501-$1,000
7 %	$1,001-$3,000
5 %	$3,001-$5,000
2 %	$5,001-$15,000
1 %	$15,001-$50,000
2 %	$50,001-$100,000
1 %	$100,001-$250,000
1 %	$250,001-$500,000
37 %	(undisclosed)

Total revenue
3 %	[N/A]
33 %	< $250
6 %	$251-$1,000
10 %	$1,001-$5,000
3 %	$5,001-$15,000
2 %	$15,001-$50,000
1 %	$50,001-$100,000
1 %	$100,001-$250,000
1 %	$500,001-$2m
38 %	(undisclosed)

Devtime shortest
3 %	[N/A]
11 %	1 day
15 %	< 1week
26 %	1-4 weeks
17 %	5-8 weeks
13 %	2-3 months
8 %	3-6 months
6 %	> 6 months

Devtime average
3 %	[N/A]
3 %	1 day
9 %	< 1week
24 %	1-4 weeks
18 %	2-3 months
14 %	3-6 months
21 %	5-8 weeks
7 %	> 6 months

Have Publisher?
87 %	No
13 %	Yes

Have PR?
4 %	Yes
97 %	No

Have Marketing?
5 %	Yes
95 %	No

Have CS?
5 %	Yes
95 %	No

Have QA?
7 %	Yes
93 %	No

Predict shipped in 2010
6 %	[N/A]
16 %	40m-50m
28 %	51m-75m
16 %	76m-99m
24 %	100m-125m
6 %	126m-150m
1 %	151m-200m
3 %	201m+