ummmmmm guys.....

[Fuzzy Fred]

i think you have to spend a hundred bucks to apple to get their software/not get your ass sued by them, and then its just time

if you need to do a website, that's adobe, and i think you can get everything done on mobile now through illustrator, and if you're a student, that's like 400 for the full adobe suite

[Schlatte]

you could make an android app for free... you just need Eclipse (a java programming IDE) or NetBeans (Eclipse is better for android stuff) with the android plugin- everything completely free- and program it...
apple pretty much a biatch as far as making apps goes..
Also: http://developer.apple.com/ should give you some info.. maybe.. idk...

[Schlatte]

Um so lets pretend i'm skilled in coding and ap design how many hours would it take me to put something like this together and how much would i charge a client?

depends on what system the website/database you want to connect your app to runs on... it's a implementation thing you know.. communicating between your server and the app... can be tricky sometimes (almost every time)... stand alone apps are always easier to program.... but you need the connection thing for sending updates, so yeah... it's not going to be super cheap... i can tell you that.

[Schlatte]

In another forum I visit regularly somebody wrote:

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.

There are also other costs that many developer neglect to take into account: project management, testing, equipment. Again, if we lowball that figure at $16,000 we're at $250,000. This number falls in line with Jonathan Wight's (@schwa) $50-150K estimate with the 22 day Obama app.

Take another hit, dude.

Now if you want to build backend services for your app, that number's going to go up even more. Everyone seems surprised that Instagram chewed through $500K in venture funding to build a new frontend and backend. I'm not.

so... yeah... I think you might be able to recalculate that down a little bit but that's all i got..

[jfrey]

You need to know first whether you need an actual app or what I'll call a "faux app"

Many apps, are often essentially webpages disguised with jquery or some other language to look like an app.

[D.o.S.]

You need to know first whether you need an actual app or what I'll call a "faux app"

Many apps, are often essentially webpages disguised with jquery or some other language to look like an app.

I think he's just looking to price the option out for a project or something.

And, really, that's dependent on who it's for (assuming you're talking freelance). To put in perspective, if Company A (who you dig as an entity and doesn't have much cash) asks for a quote, it'll be a bit lower than if Google or Apple comes knocking.

IME, YMMV, So-on-and-so-forth.