Tales of a serial app developer – From Udemy student to entrepreneur

Hi, my name is Nicola Quinn and I am a serial app developer. It has been 10 hours and 15 minutes since I last released an app on the App Store.

It all started one blustery dark day in October 2014 when my partner’s brother Dropboxed him some code for a slot machine after regaling him with tales of 6 figure wealth from his own reskinning business. Now I love code. I’d been handcoding my own sites since the 90s and missed the thrill of ftping files and refreshing the page for blast off since I too had shamefully succumbed to the WordPress way of life.

So after hearty discussions about themes my partner came up with the idea of Holy Rollers, Spin the Popes. I set up my developer account, downloaded XCode and started replacing the images. It was beautiful. Lush. Lots of gold. Spinning Popes. But it didn’t work. The back button from the inapp purchase page kept freezing the game. I was crushed. I knew nothing about Objective C or how to fix it. So I put it away.

Next my partner found online some free code a developer was giving away for a puzzle game. I’m a composer and wanted to give it a music oriented theme. Trey Smith’s game Phases was topping the App Store charts at the time so my partner suggested capitalising on this and calling it 4 Piano Phases. I was still smarting over the Holy Rollers debacle and was still determined to make a rich and sumptuous looking game so reused some of the images for the new one. I even paid someone on Fiverr to make a golden note for me as I wasn’t yet proficient enough in Photoshop to make it look good. There were hundreds of images, instructions pages, options pages, an interactive treasure map. This was going to take a while. I was itching to get something published soon and Christmas was fast approaching so I turned to Udemy to find something I could release relatively quickly.

And then I came across Yohann Taieb’s amazing courses. Complete with full instructions on how to reskin a game together with the source code. I instantly bought 6 (and a lot more later on) and set about getting a game ready for Christmas. I started with the side-scrolling jumpy skater game. It was a nightmare creating the screenshots as I am so rubbish at playing games (I’ve since learned it’s a lot easier to recreate them in Photoshop using the assets where you can position everything just the way you want it to make them look the most attractive). With the screenshots and icon uploaded and the first build accepted, I added some keywords and a description then held my breath as I clicked Submit for Review.

It was 10 agonising days before I got the email saying my binary had been rejected. I admit, I cried. Apple said they couldn’t see the ads. WHAT DO MEAN YOU CAN’T SEE THE ADS? I screamed. THE GAME IS SO F*****G HARD THEY POP UP AFTER EACH DIE!!!!! They weren’t having it and insisted on a video of gameplay showing this. I was again crushed. At the time I just didn’t know how to take a video of my phone to show them. So I moved on.

The next one I tried was a math quiz game. I kept to the Christmas theme, there was still time to submit if I was quick. The images were a challenge to position as I still wasn’t familiar enough with xib files and how to manipulate the individual images without disturbing ones on the other layers. However, within three days I was done. The screenshots were a lot easier this time and finally on 1st December I submitted Crimbo Calcs for review. Nine nail-biting days later it was accepted and on the 13th I released it for sale on the App Store. I was over the moon! I’d done it at last! I was a bona fide app developer 🙂 In all the rush I hadn’t noticed the rate link wasn’t working so hastily fixed that and resubmitted the second version the next day. I had over 500 downloads that weekend which wasn’t bad for a newbie with no promotion at all.

I’d managed to finish, and submit, 4 Piano Phases by the 7th December and nine days later that one was accepted too though being a paid for app (I had no idea at that point how to add adverts) the downloads were very disappointing.

Still, I wasn’t disheartened and pressed forward, releasing 4 more apps in January 2015. Rat Race, EmoCrush – Smash Your Negative Emotions, Jelly Up and a lite version of 4 Piano Phases. Using the code from Rat Race I was finally able to include adverts so I could release the app for free.

I was doing all the graphics myself as I hadn’t yet made enough to hire a professional. Although they weren’t that sophisticated I thought they suited the games. Yohann’s course for making cool graphics was a big help, though I still felt like it was just a hobby. Like I was stabbing in the dark. I had no stats or information to know what was happening once I put them out there. Apple app analytics was a way off yet and my free trial with AppFigures had long since runout.

Undeterred I released Sci-Fi Movie Word Search in early February. I liked the look of the app so made very few changes other than to add the word packs of the movies. Working out the json lists and how it all hung together was quite arduous and took me back to my php days where a single period out of place could disable a whole website. It was challenging, but fun. I started with 20th century movies, split into decades, and added 21st century, horror and fantasy movies as inapp purchases. The initial downloads were pleasantly surprising and I even sold an inapp purchase within the first few days!

Sci-Fi Movie downloads remained consistently good (I later added Sci-Fi Heroes and Directors to the word packs) though the other apps were quite dismal so I decided to play with the keywords, tweak the icons and screenshots and release updates regularly to test them. This kept me busy for the next few months and certainly paid off with better downloads thanks to Yohann’s brilliant ASO course. Here’s a screenshot of the results of my latest tweak.

I also decided to learn Swift at that time from another Udemy course with Jason Rybka and made two apps for my daughter featuring her black cat Obi. Kitty List, a simple to do list and Kitty Do You Love Me?, an answerball app to which I added sound and a video to test my new skills. I released those as paid apps. I had been trying to integrate them into a single app to release for free with one of them as an inapp purchase. That all went horribly wrong so decided to release them separately.

By August I was itching to do another reskin so released ElecTron Blocks, an unblock me game which both my daughter and I like playing anyway so it was great to be able to make my own Tron version. As much as I love it the rater is annoying and no matter what I tried I couldn’t stop it popping up after every level, and the lines in the graphics are slightly off. That one is still on the “to do” pile to fix.

Then along came something I was very proud of. At the time I started making apps I had signed up for a Coursera poetry course, affectionately known as ModPo (I was studying for my degree and it fit nicely with my Creative Writing module). The community was so amazing, and I got so much out of the experience, that I wanted to give something back in my own way. So I decided to make an app and donate all the proceeds to the Kelly Writers House that funds the free online poetry course. I settled on reskinning the 4Pics1Word app using the poets in the course so it would be relevant to the participants. It was a monumental task gathering together four images for each poet based entirely on only the poems contained within the course.

Nevertheless by September, the start of the next iteration of ModPo, Poetry Picture Puzzle was ready in time. I’m proud also to say that I had been invited to be a Community TA, a thoroughly demanding and exhausting, though enjoyable, task!

By the time ModPo ended in November I was determined to release another Christmas game so returned to the skater app and added a zombie with lurid gifts to collect. Jumpy Zombie Santa was ready by Christmas and well received on the App Store. And it made it through review with no mention of the ads this time 🙂

Fast forward to February 2016 and my partner and I acquired two degus (Chilean ground squirrels) the most delightful little creatures you could imagine. I joined several Facebook groups as they are quite difficult to feed and look after and found a lively community that lived and breathed their degus. Someone mentioned offhand about making a flappy degu game and I obviously jumped at the challenge. Within days Donny Degu, a flappy bird reskin, was ready and submitted.

The response from everyone was overwhelming. They loved it. Especially the attention to detail (degus poop everywhere, even fling their poop, and I had replaced the streaming hearts with poop, which most people found hilarious…). It was easy to ask for reviews. I finally understood what “find your niche” really meant. Spurred on I also released a skater version called Degu Dash a few weeks later using assets from Donny Degu to speed things up.

All this was well and good though while I was learning Swift I had decided to create a more serious app, one for people with anxiety, a way to help them leave their homes if they were suffering from panic attacks. I had written a book called Life Without Panic Attacks in 2004 about a technique that had helped me be free from them and now wanted to help others by way of an app. I needed to write the scripts for the inductions to record and embed in the app though was having trouble finding quiet time to do that. So I procrastinated, as I usually do, by reskinning another app.

This time it was Goth Stickers. I liked what I had done though I just wasn’t 100% happy with it. I wanted to be able to resize the stickers so scoured the web for code to do this and after a few teething problems (understatement) managed to make it work. I was so pleased with myself, the sense of achievement was enormous.

Which brings me pretty much up to date, as of June 2016, having just released a free version of Kitty Do You Love Me?

Things I have learned on this incredible journey ~

Never give up
Google is your friend
There are loads of license free images online if you dig
Use Stack Overflow to find answers
Update apps regularly
Keep learning
If you love doing it just do it anyway
When you feel your head is about to explode it means you are on the edge of a breakthrough not a breakdown…

P.S. Oh, and I finally made Holy Rollers work and submitted it, only to be told it was profane and offensive. So I screenshotted the notice for posterity