Probably one of the more important things is to have a realistic budget. If you're thinking anything less then a few grand, I can tell you you're not going to find a good developer in the states.

Try local meetup groups for iPhone devs, they're pretty common all over the country. If you can't find anyone, send me an email (in profile) and I can put you in touch with a dev.

I second this. I bill at $40/hr and I'm the cheapest iPhone developer I know.

Any developer who's remotely competent it working on his own apps, where he takes 100% of the risk and 70% of the profit. Unlike desktop/web programming, where you can sort of snatch the students before they get real jobs, every iPhone developer has a "real" job working for Apple. The only reason at all to work on contract apps is to reduce your risk because somebody is paying you up front.

If you want somebody decent who writes clean code, budget at least 5-10k and start interviewing developers. If they've got an app on the app store that you like, they pass the competence test. It also doesn't hurt to simply cold-call developers who've written something similar (but be aware anyone with a really successful app store app is going to focus on that, not contracting for random cold-callers. I get 15-20 coldcalls a week, and I only even call back 1-2% of those).

Thanks for the input. But a 5-10k budget for something like this to me seems amazingly high. The only things that seem even remotely complicated in this would be the offline synchronization, and the taking/uploading of photos. I don't know about the synchronization, but is it really difficult to create an app that can take a picture and upload it to a webservice?

I'm not trying to argue, I am genuinely interested in if this is actually a difficult thing to do....

I don't believe you will be happy with the results of any contracting situation. For instance, what you've described is a moving target. As soon as you change something that affects the server side API, you will need to rework the bits on the iPhone app. The contract dev will need to be re-engaged to fix that for you. Your question contains hints that you're vastly underestimating the scope: maybe blackberry, just some sync, caching, how hard is it to upload a photo, etc. You're ripe for being taken for an expensive ride by someone who isn't that good.

If you have less than $10K to spend you're better off investing in a macbook, some books and sending yourself or one of your in-house developers to an iPhone training course. I've not taken the iPhone version, but I took a Cocoa course at the Big Nerd Ranch and it was one of the better educational experiences I've ever had.

Another approach would be to hire an intern for three months to work on this project. A student with little professional experience would love the chance to get paid to learn iPhone development and end up with a real app to show for it. It's a win-win for you and the student.

The most common sentence an iPhone developer hears is "It's not that hard to do, it's just..." It may not be extremely complicated but it is time consuming. Small features sometimes require large amounts of code and with code comes testing, lots and lots of testing.

There is also basic economics at work here. The supply of iPhone developers does not fill the demand and therefore the price of iPhone devs goes up. You can go overseas and get something built for $500 but if you do that, I'm warning you, it will not turn out well.

The simple facts are if you aren't willing to invest the required amount of money in an iPhone app, is it really worth it to have it in the end?

It's a bad smell for many devs (not just iPhone devs) when a client says something like "It's not that hard" or "It's simple". This comes from managers, too, and it's a good indicator that the person belittling the work that goes into building software knows little as to what is involved.

You get what you pay for, so you should be looking for a developer that charges a fairly high fee.

Please don't take this the wrong way.

I get inquiries like this every day "I have $1k, build me X." Where X is a moving-target project.

The fact is, I don't even look at a project where the budget is under $5k. Every project expands in scope as it goes along. Every change, feature request, "misunderstanding" adds to the time to put together an app. To a developer, somebody who's trying to put something together on a shoestring budget is sending off vibes of unreliability, of focusing on cost over quality, is going to nitpick and obsess about every little thing. I realize that's a little unfair, but that's how other developers are going to perceive your request.

There's overhead too. I have to do an estimate; I have to research whether we can really use that control, how do we do this so that the numbskull apple reviewers will pass it, have to budget time to wrestle with the gnarly Apple bugs, have to walk you through signing up as a developer, getting the certificates, filling out the forms right, setting up codesign chains, helping you understand app submission... Doing a "hello world" app would probably have 10-15 hours just of overhead, and that's without researching anything complicated like how to do SOAP requests or whatever technology you're using.

Also, what I have said, and what others have said: lots of people want iPhone apps, and there are a small number of developers. There's lots of reasons with for this: one is that (at the risk of starting a flame war) ObjC is harder than some more modern languages because there's a lot of crap you have to think about (memory management) that you don't in, say, Python or Ruby. I bet a third of my time is spent worrying about memory. Plus there's a lot of Apple hoops to jump through that forms a pretty high effective barrier for developers.

And, when you think about it, all of the good people are working on their own apps. The only way to get anyone's attention is to pay them more money then (they think) they'll make spending equivalent time on their own app. Either that or pick a developer so incompetent they can't write their own apps, and obviously that's not what you want (but you'll find an awful lot of them below the $5k price point).

If your budget is that small, do what others have suggested and pick up a mac and some books and do it yourself. It will take you a lot longer than someone who has 5+ apps in the app store, but at least you can do it right within your budget.

Hi Drew,

I read your new post on your blog: http://sealedabstract.com/?p=515

And I must say, to anyone that is thinking of getting someone to develop an iPhone app, this is a must read!!!!

So, regarding that post, I have a couple questions. First, for context, I should mention, I am a developer myself (.Net), I read tons of blogs, I have casually read a fairly large amount of iPhone development related articles (just as they come through places like HN, not because of research).

So, a few questions if you don't mind, I have a feeling now that I am quite naive regarding the iPhone:

* developing on the iPhone, memory management, the issue with unknown screen size, etc....this gives me the impression that iPhone development is really quite "archaic" low level stuff...ie: nothing is easy or can be taken for granted. I would have thought that despite being a low power platform, no garbage collection, C Language, etc that Apple would have to a great degree abstracted a lot of this away. For example, my take a photo and upload requirement....I would have thought that there would be some sort of a Camera Control that could be embedded in a form, that would then inherit the inherent functionality of the control, and after the photo is taken, you would then have code that decides what to do with it (save, upload, etc) Do you really have to do great amounts of memory related programming to do this kind of task?

* The App store - I have read the horror stories and don't doubt your assertions. But for my app, I have no interest in listing it in the app store for general public consumption...if it has to be deployed via the app store, fine, but I don't want to market in any way to general consumers. Is there no 2nd tier of any kind for corporate aplications? I can't see the logic on Apple's part of making life so difficult for corporate developers (but I can see it for the consumer market)

* I've read several anecdotal stories of people writing graphics intensive apps/games in their spare time to learn the platform and doing well....this "fact" seems inconsistent with the idea that the simplest app is extremely difficult.

Anyways, I would really appreciate if you could address some of these. I'm getting a bit depressed on the notion of developing on this platform. Approximately 100% of my customers are already on blackberry platform, so I wonder if I should just say screw it and go there. I liked the superior UI, screensize, and multimedia capabilities of the iPhone, and I have no doubt that my customers would have any problem laying out the $ to equip field personnel with one, but from what I'm hearing, if you're not doing mass market stuff, its just not worth the bother.

I think your concerns could be better answered one-on-one than in this forum. Contact info on my website in profile.

It's not that anything you've described is hard, it's just a lot of work. Looking at what you've got up there, it's going to require quite a few iterations to get all those features added.

Out of curiosity, why aren't you raising your rates?

Quite simple, really. I keep a very, very small stable of clients (like two), who are solid, reliable, pay me every time I send a bill, follow the contract, understand that when they ask to add a feature it will cost them more, don't micro-manage, accept that I know what I'm doing, and provide me plenty of work.

I'd much rather work slightly below market for clients who are above market in terms of reliability and honesty.

Anecdote: the other day, a client decided now that he had 70% complete project X in front of him, what he really wanted was project Y (I told him this at the beginning). He wrote me an e-mail, saying "You were right, I was wrong, I've done some thinking and I want Y." He then paid me for X, and then paid me to turn it into Y.

Clients like that are hard to come by.

> should an app like this be fairly simple to develop for a moderately experienced iPhone developer?

Yes. The only thing really difficult that you want to do is syncing, which can be done by a competent developer.

Don't forget, though, that there needs to be some time spent designing a winning interface. You don't want users to have to type in markup with the keyboard; you need an intuitive way to do that on a mobile device. Little touches like that are the difference between something people use and something they don't use, and going through that process takes some time.

If by markup, I assume you mean bolding text, things like that, or did you mean something else?

I suppose that would be nice, I guess the iPhone doesn't come with a native rich text editor of some sort?

So do you happen to know anyone that might be interested ina project of this nature??

Well you mentioned forums and project editing, I naturally assumed there would be some sort of bbcode (or html, or equivalent) for markup. Typing that on an iphone keyboard would be a real PITA.

No, there's no rich text editor of any sort. You've got plain text entry and you can render HTML in Safari. That's it.

Sorry, I don't. I'm "booked", in the sense that I have too many projects of my own to take on any new clients. All the other developers I know are in the same boat. Like I said above, try cold-calling people who have done something similar.

I know a few of these guys personally. They started making iphone games but lately their success has been garnering them contracts with local businesses to make internal iphone applications. You might want to get in contact with them.

http://www.resolutegames.com/

I think you should provide a way for people to contact you.

Sorry, updated....

Actually, I prefer to think of your name being Trev Zorgo Zuld, like some kind of arcane coder from days long past, skilled in the obscurities of Fortran and COBOL.