Cat costa sa produci o aplicatie pentru iOS? Mult mai mult decat v-ati fi imaginat!

Craig Hockenberry, unul dintre developerii care a lucrat la dezvoltarea aplicatiei Twitterrific pentru iOS, a facut o mica estimare a sumei de bani investite in developerii care au lucrat la dezvoltarea acestei aplicatii pentru iOS. Conform celor scrise de acesta la acea aplicatie s-au lucrat aproximativ 540 de ore in 9 saptamani de catre 2 developeri a caror munca a fost estimata la aproxitmativ 150$ ora. Pentru dezvoltarea aplicatie s-a folosit in mare parte cod existent adica munca developerilor a fost mult usurata, insa in definitiv chiar si acesta costa foarte mult. Conform unui calcul facut de Craig munca celor 2 developeri ar fi costat aproximativ 200.000$ din cate 165.000$ pentr cele 1100 ore de munca(pentru 2 developeri) plus 35.000$ pentru codul folosit in aplicatie.

Inainte sa va uimiti de suma afisata acolo va propun sa luati in calcul si inca 25 de ore pentru design plus alte cateva ore pentru testare care in final se traduc in inca 50.000$ adunati la suma finala care acum a ajuns la 250.00$. Deci intreaga munca de dezvoltare pentru aplicatia Twitterrific(iPad + iPhone) ar costa aproximativ 250.000$ si daca am inteles eu bine Apple ar fi platit acesti bani celor 2 developeri.

Poate sunt eu putin cam “novice” dar 250.000$ mi se pare a fi o suma ENORM de mare pentru 2 luni de munca la o aplicatie precum Twitterrific.

I’m one of the developers for Twitterrific and to be honest, I can’t tell you how many hours have gone into the product. I can tell you everyone who upvoted the estimate of 160 hours for development and 40 hours for design is fricken’ high. (I’d use another phrase, but this is my first post on Stack Overflow, so I’m being good.)

Twitterrific has had 4 major releases beginning with the iOS 1.0 (Jailbreak.) That’s a lot of code, much of which is in the bit bucket (we refactor a lot with each major release.)

One thing that would be interesting to look at is the amount of time that we had to work on the iPad version. Apple set a product release date that gave us 60 days to do the development. (That was later extended by a week.)

We started the iPad development from scratch, but a lot of our underlying code (mostly models) was re-used. The development was done by two experienced iOS developers. One of them has even written a book: http://appdevmanual.com 🙂

With such a short schedule, we worked some pretty long hours. Let’s be conservative and say it’s 10 hours per day for 6 days a week. That 60 hours for 9 weeks gives us 540 hours. With two developers, that’s pretty close to 1,100 hours. Our rate for clients is $150 per hour giving $165,000 just for new code. Remember also that we were reusing a bunch existing code: I’m going to lowball the value of that code at $35,000 giving a total development cost of $200,000.

Anyone who’s done serious iPhone development can tell you there’s a lot of design work involved with any project. We had two designers working on that aspect of the product. They worked their asses off dealing with completely new interaction mechanics. Don’t forget they didn’t have any hardware to touch, either (LOTS of printouts!) Combined they spent at least 25 hours per week on the project. So 225 hours at $150/hr is about $34,000.