This Is What Happened When I Tried to Create My First App

At 2 a.m. on my ninth day of troubleshooting, I lost my mind. I had expected to face some obstacles as an amateur app developer, but I hadn't foreseen this. Alone in a room whose landscape comprised ziggurats of crude design sketches and empty Red Bull cans, I was wrestling with a picture of bacon dumplings. It didn't have enough dots per inch for an Android smartphone screen, and I didn't have a version of Photoshop that would let me fix it. Even if I got my hands on a friend's copy, I was looking at doing this all over again for the larger screen of the iPhone 6. And then God only knew if I would find the resolve to dream up special features for the 6 Plus. Frustrated and over-caffeinated, I switched tasks, checking to see if my app's interactive map worked. It geolocated me into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. I slammed the laptop closed.

I blame my exasperation on the increased ease of entry into the app-development market. Having a world-changing idea is so common it's almost a side effect of smartphone ownership, but only in the past few years have regular people been able to turn concepts into reality. Five years ago I would have had to know Objective-C, the programming language for Apple iOS coding. But in 2010 dozens of user-friendly app-creation platforms appeared. In January 2010 there were 120,000 published iOS apps. Twelve months later there were more than 350,000 in the iTunes Store. Last year more than 6 million app developers existed in Apple's ecosystem.

If I was going to make a million dollars, which was (obviously) the plan, I needed my idea to capture the public's imagination. That idea? Bacon Now, a geolocation app that would provide directions to restaurants serving critically acclaimed bacon dishes in U.S. cities, starting with New York. The app would also include geofencing features: If a user wandered within 100 yards of, say, a bacon-infused bourbon cocktail, his phone would buzz with an alert.

Idea in hand, I spent a nonrefundable $99 developer fee on an account through Apple's developer website. This granted access to a Software Developer Kit, where the actual programming takes place, and a video tutorial for learning some basics. I started playing the first video: "The G-L resolve-multisample-framebuffer Apple has now become"—at this point there is an expectant pause, as if the narrator were about to reveal the exceedingly simple secret to success in programming—"the G-L blit-framebuffer," he concludes. "It's pretty simple." I slumped back in my chair.

So I needed help. Thankfully, there's a lot of it out there. On a Pinterest-like site called dribbble.com, I found dozens of designers who could build Bacon Now, customized with whatever features my cholesterol-lined heart might desire, for around $100 an hour, or $10,000 in total. There was another option, appmakr.com, that would allow me to design an app the same way I would a blog on WordPress or Tumblr: Choose a few premade tabs; customize some colors, pictures, and headers; and the app is essentially complete. The downside: It's full of distracting ads.

In the end I went with Bizness Apps. For $59 a month this service offered tabs that I could customize for each dish, a premade GPS-enabled map that I populated with my own data points, and a feature that let me draw circles around each restaurant for geofencing. Within the design dashboard was a simulator I could use to see instantly how my app functioned, like the Preview button in WordPress. When I was done I hit Publish, and my entire app was compressed into a bite-size file, ready to upload to app stores. The whole thing couldn't have been easier.

Or so it seemed until I was in my 50th or 60th hour of troubleshooting and tinkering, lubricating my aching eyeballs with industrial-strength Systane eyedrops. Whenever I ran into a question I didn't know the answer to (is white font on a black background a design faux pas? If your app frequently crashes at the load screen, is that a design faux pas?) I looked for advice at lukew.com, the website of Luke Wroblewski, a product director at Google whose website aggregates advice from expert app developers.

Almasty

Sometimes I came away with solutions. Always I came away with new ideas. What if I added background sounds of bacon sizzling, or a section for user-submitted photos? These ideas would lead to new questions, and eventually I'd be digging for answers within Bizness Apps' cavernous user forum. Most beginner-app threads, I found, start with "I have this problem …" followed by a flurry of responses along the lines of "Me too!" followed by, well, nothing else. At that point I'd email my Bizness Apps account manager, Jade, who was very helpful. She even occasionally logged in to my account to fix a bug herself, though I got the sense that any more intervention would require me to buy the premium White Label package for an additional $10 per month.

EXPENSES INCURRED:

(a) Bizness Apps annual membership, $504;

(b) Apple developer fee, $99;

(c) image licensing rights, $40;

(d) Google Play developer fee, $25;

(e) domain for app home page, $15

This continual loss of money was as disheartening as the loss of time. With a $504 annual fee to Bizness Apps, $99 for Apple's developer fee, $25 for Android's developer fee, $40 to purchase hi-res images for the app's icon, and $15 for the app's home page, my expenses totaled $683. Apple and Android take 30 cents for each purchase of the 99-cent app, so to break even I'd have to sell just over 100 apps per month. Considering Apple users download 2 billion apps a month alone, this figure seems achievable.

But that stat needs a bit of context: Two-thirds of smartphone users download zero apps per month, and the top 7 percent of most active users account for nearly half of all downloads—purchases that consist mostly of top-25 apps with huge marketing budgets. Search "bacon" in the app store and you'll see Bacon Now buried beneath other dreamers' work, including an app called Bacon Farts ("Now with 76 Awesome Fart Sounds!"). This is almost as demoralizing as my Android stats page, which tells me that, since the app went live a few days ago, I've tallied only one download. (Hi, mom.) It's too soon to tell how I'll do in the Apple App Store, but I think it's safe to say that Peanut Butter Now is delayed indefinitely.

Though Bacon Now has so far fallen $999,999 short of my $1 million goal, I can say that a nonprogrammer building a basic, functioning app is most definitely, sort of, doable. Bacon Now does what I planned, and while it won't have Google knocking on my door, it's not visually offensive. So I'm satisfied. I, a person who has only ever been called a computer genius after resetting his parents' wireless router by turning it off and then on again, have joined the revolution. I made an app, and you can buy it.