ATTN Developers: Guidelines to a quality photo app

After a year of buying, trying & beta testing iPhone apps (majority photography related). I have some helpful guidelines for current & future iPhone photo app developers. Following these will bring you one step closer to a great app.

1. A good, useful & unique concept for a photography app & or make an others concept 10x better.
2. quality, Quality, QUALITY remember a quick gimmicky app is just that a gimmick. Just because it is an iPhone app/photo doesn't mean your users want to save , share or post it on their phone. So to have it only look good within the iPhone screen is pointless!
3. A MUST have option is to be able to save your photo or creation to the best or largest possible iPhone resolution & sizing. ie: 1200x1600 for 3G. If you are going to spend the time to research, build & develop an iPhone photography app then NEVER limit your app or the users to save at 320x480 or 360x480 resolutions. By doing that you are absolutely wasting your time & only making a gimmick app that has no long term use.
4. Your app more often than not must have the option & ability to use your own photos from photo library/ camera roll & be taken from the camera all within your app.
5. A good UI building an app with a user friendly User Interface is essential to having a quality app. If your users can't figure out how to use it & or navigate around your app it will fail.
6. If you make an app of effects, borders, fames etc they must be high quality & again look great at the highest quality resolution off the iPhone once shared, for example on flickr.
7. Additionally if you can integrate any or all of these then that is a bonus Save to iPhone & Email option, Upload to Flickr option, Share to Twitter ability & Share to Facebook option.
8. Have a valid working website or blog is a MUST, and also include your email or contact info. Also highlight your apps functions on your website.
9. Make sure your app is well tested have qualified Beta Testers test your app on a variety of levels to work out the kinks, bugs & errors one might not find on their own. Contacting myself to Beta Test your application is a great idea.
10. Set your selling price at a reasonable price. If it is free perfect if it is a paid app $0.99-$1.99 is a good start & if your app is amazing possibly worthy of a higher price. As well make your app available for free at first for a limited time to ensure downloads & reviews.

Lastly if you can follow these simple guidelines you will be guaranteed to have a great iPhone app in the making.

Remember word of mouth sells iPhone apps better than the iTunes app store.

Post by: SCW

Comments

[greg]

Well done. now if we could only get them to listen.

[SUBBY]

Good thoughts.

[JS]

Good, but you really need an editor. That, or take a deep breath and a break, then proof before posting.

There is not equal to their (possessive pronoun).

[hendrik]

As a developer I would disagree with a bunch of these.
Making your app free first and then charging for it later is actually a really really bad strategy. Doing so is a sure way to get a poor average rating for your app. That is because many people will download the app even though they are not actually all that interested in it. After briefly trying it most of them will delete it and give it a low rating during the "rate on delete" popup.
Also the stats for the rankings are reset when you switch from free to paid. This didn't use to be the case in the early days. Back then switching from free to paid allowed many apps to jump into the paid top 100 list. But this hasn't been the case anymore for a long time.

As for high res image saving. I spent a lot of time on this in my app. The iPhone (except for the 3GS) has very limited memory. Working with full resolution images means that your app is likely to run out of memory, which causes it to crash. There are ways around this, but it is fairly difficult and a lot of work.
How important is saving in full resolution? My impression is that it is important to a very small but vocal minority. I suspect that a resolution of 800 or 1024 pixels is good enough for maybe 95% of users. As a developer you certainly will receive some complaints and negative reviews if your app does not save at full camera resolution. However if your app instead is prone to crashing due to low memory you will receive a TON of negative reviews. A crashing app affects 100% of users while the limited resolution likely only annoys 5% of your users. So my recommendation would be to stick with lower resolution unless you are willing to go all the way and spend a lot of time on advanced memory management techniques.

[scw]

JS ~ I will never claim to be a well written editor... I am the guy who will type & send.
But I can agree with you =)

Henrdik ~ I will agree to disagree with you & suggest as I always have that a great quality app will do all the above & what you have said invest the time to get higher resolution perfected through advanced memory management.

With the ever growing popularity of the iPhone & iPhone photography being at an all time high... These aren't just toys for fun one time use photo & gimmicks. People are taking serious photos with their iPhones. Using them for things nobody ever thought they would have. So if you want to take a fun tiny photo to share with your friends enjoy a Sony or Nokia. But if you are using an iPhone & are investing in numerous photography apps you either have interest in photography & or will soon be addicted & ever so slowly attempting to capture & edit the perfect photo. Once obtained you will be excited to save, share & post to your favorite site, blog or social network. Possibly even print your new master piece out to share or give to that special someone... But if you did all this to find your time spent making this wonderful creation was downgraded in size to fraction of the original... You will be more than annoyed at the developers whom you paid your hard earned money on buying these apps.

So there is never an acceptable reason to ever justify poor quality.
If it is lack of memory... easy simply reboot your iPhone prior to editing. Many don't think of this but truly it is easy... very easily done.

Cheers

[Glyn Evans]

JS, sat back took a deep breath and hopefully corrected the errors. Thanks for pointing out the mistake, and apologies from the editor.