I recently posted a thread on how I can start programming geared towards the mobile platforms.
I would like to develop apps for more than one mobile platform. However I just have access to an Android device (SE Xperia X10), iPhone 4, and an iPad 2.
Smartphones are not like candies, that you can go pickup at a cheap store.
I mean how and where can I and other people who want to develop apps for specific platforms get free phones for testing and using the apps we develop?
The emulator that is included with the SDKs are not always the best way to test.
Any suggestions? All help is appreciated
EDIT: Forgot to mention that recently Windows Phone called over WebOS developers to develop applications on the WP platform, and Windows gave the developers free devices. But there are not many WebOS devs out there..
The best and fastest way to require a "demo" phone is doing the following.
Just get in touch with the companies that are creating the phones.
Explain your development and give them a nice overview on what your app is, what it does and how things go.
Make sure you don't demand a phone but wish to test run it on certain specific devices with key features that are a "+" in your app.
I think you'll have a chance to receive a demo phone.
Btw don't expect you'll be able to keep that phone forever.
I recently contacted HP to request an Elite-book from them for business usage.
Explained the plans and deals and after a few days i received one.
I need to return it by end of this year.(aawww )
Did same thing for some phones for my company
I think it depends on what you wanna test and how high your requirements are.
Also i think it's best to mail on behalf of someone working in the industry or on behalf of a company.
They had my company info in case of argument.
Sites like XDA got enough rep to request them and be trusted.
Individual guy asking for a phone is "50/50" chance. (depends on the person processing your mail and your info & app your working on)
One thread is enough: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1237030
OK I know there are two obvious and immediate answers to this question. First design it yourself, second try your luck on the app development forums.
Unfortunately my design and programming skills are non existent and as I am doing a full time biophysics PHD, my time is severely limited. Second I had a look through the app development forum and that place is so deserted you can practically hear the tumbleweed blowing through it.
I know every man and his dog probably thinks they have a great app idea, but my idea truly is great and I believe it may have vast commercial potential. It should be relatively easy to persuade a commercial company - or several large commercial companies to adopt it, because it fulfils a genuine need that currently isn't being met and it offers the potential to save businesses extremely large sums of money. Moreover there are a large number of areas within commerce to which the technology could be adapted.
At the very least there's no harm in an experienced app developer hearing me out. I know I might get some silly responses here, like tell us your idea and we'll tell you if its good or not. But clearly that isn't going to happen. Everything would be above board and strictly legal and would require anyone taking part to sign a full IPP confidentiality contract and/or an NDA.
So, by chance that there might be someone out there with significant proven experience in both programming for mobile devices and app design and if maybe someone might be interested in making a few million please feel free to contact George on [email protected]
PS
For logistical and practical reasons I would be most interested in speaking to anyone from the UK, although dependant on experience I may be willing to consider someone from further afield.
Hello? More tumbleweed it seems ...
[Q] Research Survey: App Developers and App Company Managers needed to share opinion
Hi,
Currently, i am conducting my Master thesis research at the University of Technology Eindhoven about quality analysis services of mobile apps. According to literature it appears that the quality of apps is often based on user experience and functionality of apps. Only very basic and few research has been done about technical quality of apps and it is mainly unclear how app developers and app owners (i.e. managers of app companies or individual developer of their own app) think about the technical quality.
Therefore, i am looking for app developers and app owners to help me by taking a 5 - 10 minute survey. For every completed survey I will donate a euro to a charity of your own choice.
The survey is anonymous and only used for academic purposes. All data will be removed after finalizing the project.
The survey is available at survey.sogosurvey. com/k/RQsUYPUSsQsPsPsP (please remove space)
I appreciate your help in this and hope that you take the survey as all app developers and owners opinions count.
Thank you.
Mike Loeffen
Graduating student at University of Technology Eindhoven
P.S. unfortunately, I noticed too late that the survey tool does not provide an optimal format for smartphones, so I recommend to use a computer or tablet.
I hope this will not be a reason to decide not taking the survey.
Hmmm,...
I would have selected "Keep the Euro" but there was no such option, so MSF...
Then I saw this:
6) Price: How much you are willing to pay per month in dollars. The price can be:
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and the next few pages had money questions.
So I felt I was filling out a marketing survey, and I aborted and posted this.
Please feel free to explain.
mikereidis said:
Hmmm,...
I would have selected "Keep the Euro" but there was no such option, so MSF...
Then I saw this:
and the next few pages had money questions.
So I felt I was filling out a marketing survey, and I aborted and posted this.
Please feel free to explain.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for you comment.
To answer your first comment, I chose to make that particular question about charities not mandatory. So, if you did not want to let me donate, you could keep that question open. But I wanted to do something in return for every participation, and as a student I don't have many resources. Therefore, the decision to donate something.
You have a good point with your second comment. As I explained on the first page is that I study Innovation Management at a Technical University. This study combines the technical aspect, like IT business, with economy aspects, like marketing, sales, and management. The goal of my research for my Master thesis is to analyze if technical quality (i.e. the quality of the source code) of apps is just as important as the technical quality of large software systems and to analyze what opinions app developers and app owners have regarding the technical quality.
In my research I use the so-called conjoint analysis, which is indeed an analysis method often used in marketing scenarios, but additionally it is also a very good method to analyze different perspections of a product or service which is what I try to do in my research. Price is often excluded because it could influence the perception of respondents (and appears so now). But I chose to include it, because I assume that a technical quality analysis could always be useful in different ways (help developers in a good direction or decrease costs. This is already proved for computer and enterprise software, but it has a gap in literature in the case of mobile app software). Therefore, I try to analyze how important and how interesting app developers and owners find the technical quality by including different price levels. If someone chooses a higher price for better services, I assume that a technical quality analysis might indeed provide value from the perception of developers and owners.
Overall, it is an academic research about consumer behavior and perceptions about a relative new service (therefore the link to Innovation Management) because very few research is done about software quality of apps from a developers or owners perspective. That's why marketing aspects are included too. In the end, academic researches will always be public accessible, and I try to close some of the gap of the technical quality services about the software of apps. I cannot close the whole gap because due to the fact I am no software developer I can not include all aspects unfortunately, so in this case mainly 'human technology interaction' aspects).
I hope this will make myself and my survey more clear. If you have still some questions, feel free to ask them.
Thank you for your comment and I appreciate it if you are still willing to participate
mtclo said:
Overall, it is an academic research about consumer behavior and perceptions about a relative new service (therefore the link to Innovation Management) because very few research is done about software quality of apps from a developers or owners perspective.
...
I am no software developer
...
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If you want to learn what software development is REALLY like, this is THE BEST site I have ever seen: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/
IMO there are no effective methods of objectively evaluating software quality and I think this is a widely held opinion by those with SW dev experience*. Many attempts have been made, with bug tracking systems for example, and pretty much all have failed to objectively evaluate quality. Very good QA people can find many more bugs than average QA people. QA team size matters. Defining a single bug precisely is difficult.
(*At least in the common real world. Things may be somewhat different in the military and super-super reliable part of the industry that uses at least 10 times more developers for projects than the apps and other common development areas.)
Maybe the closest we could get to measuring quality would be MTBF, but even in other engineering areas, this is pretty difficult to accurately calculate, and it's value is questionable. And software is SO different than other areas. Eg. If hackers (who can make serious money finding a zero day bug) or others never find a specific bug that exists, nobody will ever know about it. OTOH, if a hard disk or bridge fails, somebody will likely know about it.
I've been doing SW dev professionally for 25 years, and personal/hobbyist for 15 years before that, dating back to becoming a teen in the mid 1970's when microprocessors were first arriving.
My education was in electronics however, and I'm a practical "get it done" dev who has never pondered sort algorithms academically.
I LOVE coming up with wonderful software designs that are elegant, minimizes bugs and easy to extend and accommodate future features. In my case, I created an Android FM App named Spirit2 that I took care in designing to have good characteristics.
OTOH, my Spirit1 FM app was never designed, it was quickly thrown together with hack after hack added for years. The code is a mess and it's now almost impossible to add a new feature without breaking existing functionality. Spirit1 served a good purpose, getting an app out quickly, but I had to solve the goal of getting a better quality app out by designing a new one: Spirit2.
IMO, a surprising amount of real code out there in the world today was, at least initially (with reverb for decades), quickly hacked together, not really designed well, or otherwise "very suboptimal". This includes large enterprise systems, monstrosities like the ObamaCare system, and the systems running our banks.
And most consumer apps are so full of bugs it's not funny. Big deal, the app crashes and needs to be restarted. Most people would never know if it's the fault of the app, the hardware or the operating system.
I'd like to think that my opinions above could be more important than just filling out a survey, especially if it makes you reconsider your ideas going into this.
Again, I'll HIGHLY recommend reading this site for an hour or 2, to you or anyone involved or interested in the REAL world of software development: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/
I have no connection with Joel, and haven't been on his site in many months at least. But I have spend at LEAST dozens of hours gleaning new insights and even entertainment there over the last 10+ years. Most of the time I end up back on his site when someone posts a link from slashdot or similar tech discussion sites.
ETA: Oh, and Joel's company does bug tracking software, so I'm sure he has well formed opinions on software quality: http://www.fogcreek.com/ Tracking (and fixing) bugs is still useful of course, even if there are no good objective quality measurements. But I'll be happy to step aside and reconsider if his opinions on that differ from mine,
mikereidis said:
If you want to learn what software development is REALLY like, this is THE BEST site I have ever seen:
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
mikereidis said:
IMO there are no effective methods of objectively evaluating software quality and I think this is a widely held opinion by those with SW dev experience*. Many attempts have been made, with bug tracking systems for example, and pretty much all have failed to objectively evaluate quality. Very good QA people can find many more bugs than average QA people. QA team size matters. Defining a single bug precisely is difficult.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
mikereidis said:
OTOH, my Spirit1 FM app was never designed, it was quickly thrown together with hack after hack added for years. The code is a mess and it's now almost impossible to add a new feature without breaking existing functionality. Spirit1 served a good purpose, getting an app out quickly, but I had to solve the goal of getting a better quality app out by designing a new one: Spirit2.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
mikereidis said:
And most consumer apps are so full of bugs it's not funny. Big deal, the app crashes and needs to be restarted. Most people would never know if it's the fault of the app, the hardware or the operating system.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thank your for your tip. I could definitely use it for my literature review. Though, as I mentioned before, I am not capable to cover all software development aspects because I had to narrow the scope according to the guidelines of the Master thesis and according to my knowledge field (I hope this is the right description).
Furthermore, I think I had to define my definition of technical quality of software better. I am aware of the fact that the word 'quality' has a lot of meanings and definitions. In my thesis I have defined technical quality as the maintainability of the source code of software. I narrowed my scope in the research to tools that inspect code quality by reporting on duplicated codes, code complexity, code design, et cetera. Think about tools as SonarQube or VeraCode. However, these tools focus mainly on large enterprise software systems or general computer software. Therefore, my research is focused on code quality of app software for Android, iOS or Windows for mobile devices.
And finally to make my intentions of my research fully clear, is that I won't develop such a tool but I want to analyze if such tools for mobile apps would have any potential on the market and would some features like a quality label or the level of reporting detail have any influence. You already acknowledge that consumers would not be aware what causes bugs or other problems. In some cases, these problems might be caused by faults in the source code. Consumers would have no influence in that case, but app developers do. Code analyses might improve the source code or decrease costs by decreasing development time. Therefore, my target group are app developers or app owners (like managers of companies that develop apps) and I want to analyze if these people would be interested in such tools if it could, for example, improve the maintainability of an app and/or decreasing costs. Eventually, as my research results will become public and it appears that such tools might provide value to app developers and/or app owners, than it can be a motivation to develop such tools. Each individual will be free in deciding what to do with my results.
Hope it is clear now
I appreciate your additional thinking and it could indeed provide value and ideas for my research.
Hi everyone,
Hereby a reminder of the survey about the demand for mobile app quality analysis services. I hope you are willing to spend only 5 minutes of your time to help me with this research to graduate.
I have received feedback that the original survey was too vague and complicated. Therefore, I have improved the survey to make it more easy to fill in.
To access the improved version, please use the following link: survey.sogosurvey.com/k/SsUYPUSsWsPsPsP
I would appreciate it very much, if you are willing to complete this survey.
Thank you.
I’m looking for an Android programmer to help with crafting & tuning our UI / UX and writing client code to test out our authentication and application specific API’s (JSON/REST), that are currently in development. Java proficiency and a willingness to learn Xamarin.
Q1. What’s a reasonable $$/hr. should I offer?
Q2. Is it reasonable to think I can find someone with these skills that’s comfortable to work with loose specifications and contribute their own creativity, or will most people want a formal detailed specification?
Q3. If we work well together I’d like to ask them to join our start-up where their contributions to the company would be treated as capital in exchange for ownership (stock). Can I expect that talent like I’m looking for will generally want to run their own show?
Q4. Where can I find this person?
Thanks !!
Re:
It depends on deadline time, complexity of your application and experience of the developer. Your question does not explain about any of those specifications.
Fair Enough
GenieKnudson said:
It depends on deadline time, complexity of your application and experience of the developer. Your question does not explain about any of those specifications.
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Thanks for the response GenieKnudson. In a perfect world I'd like the work to start right away. Initial work is on the user interface / experience. Next would be code to exercise & test the API's we're currently working on in Microsoft Azure, (REST/JSON API's for authentication, permissions, picture processing and proprietary). Then work on the application itself. So I could pay a code monkey to do what I say then go away, but the nature of the work requires collaboration and creative input. Instead of a mercenary I'd like to find someone interested in joining the team. As for experience I'd trade years of coding experience for good knowledge of contemporary tools, architectures & design.
Our startup is too young to afford a full time employee, but we have money to pay for services, and the potential of employment and partial ownership in the business. I’m very confident in our business prospects as my partners and I are seasoned, each with a long track record of success and reward.
As I read what I’ve written I think we need to find someone physically local to me or one of our developers.
HI all. I'm doing some research, trying to determine what to expect for ROI for having an app developed and released to Android and Apple App store. I'm finding it very difficult since there is a wide range of types of apps which comes with vastly different development costs as well as different revenue structures for different apps. I'd love feedback from anyone that has developed and released an app for profit. It's worth noting I am not a developer but hiring this out. I've spoken with a couple firms and the price is a little steeper than I thought and want to ensure it's a wise venture and investment before I get too deep into it.
Thank you to anyone that can add some input based on their experiences.