Research your idea

There is nothing worse than replying to 2 or 3 emails in which the sender is being cagey about their “brilliant new idea” only to discover (often after spending time signing, scanning, and sending an NDA) that it is actually an idea for which there are over 250 apps available on the store. The key thing before contacting a developer is to make sure that your idea has not been done already. If it has, then either think of something else or find a unique selling point in your app that will make it stand out from the crowd.

Make sure your app is relevant

So your idea hasn’t been done before? The App Store has been open for over a year with over 65,000 applications so the next question should be “why hasn’t it been done”. There are three answers to this question: it’s impossible, it’s not a good idea, or it’s unique.

Impossible: When I say “impossible”, I mean that you’ve come up with something that the iPhone SDK won’t allow (it may still be a good idea). For example, you may have an idea to download soundclips off the internet and store them in the iPod library. A good idea in theory but the iPod library only has read access so you are limited to what you can do. There are several rules within the iPhone SDK which limit what can be done so be prepared that your idea may not be possible within those confines – there may, however, be workarounds (e.g. in the example above you could build a custom application to play the soundclips you’ve downloaded).

Bad Idea: The most common bad ideas I’ve had sent tend to be duplicating the functionality of an existing website into an iPhone app. You might have a killer idea on your website and be the market leader in a certain arena. This does not mean that converting it directly to the iPhone is going to be a good idea. If your idea is working on a website already, then it is already accessible from an iPhone (provided it’s not made in flash) so there is little benefit to making a custom application apart from it’ll look slightly better. It may be that there are a huge number of potential iPhone users who are put off by your website running on the device. In that case, you should consider making a web app. This is a way of using standard HTML and CSS to make a website look like an iPhone application but takes no extra knowledge than that of building your regular site. I’ve built a few web apps myself and found it to be incredibly easy if you are using something like UiUiKit.

Unique: You’ve checked the App Store and found no trace of your idea, you are certain it’s possible to do with the features of the device, and it’s not a simple port of an existing website into an application. In that case your app is probably a unique endeavour and should definitely be pursued!

Know your audience

When I’ve been pitching for web development work in the past, I’ve often had clients say to me “we should definitely make an iPhone app for this as well” to which I usually reply “why”. There is an unhealthy obsession at the moment with making applications simply for the fact that it shows you are modern. However, you can easily spend a large sum of money building an application for a small bit of street cred only to find out that none of your target audience actually use iPhones (or wouldn’t use your application anyway).

If your idea is simply duplicating functionality of your website, then you shouldn’t make it an iPhone application (or even a web app) unless more than 20% of your visitors are using an iPhone or you’ve had a lot of people ask for an app. You wouldn’t suddenly start supporting Internet Explorer 5.5 on the mac again but quite often you’ll find more people visiting your website with that than with an iPhone yet people will often overlook simple statistics to try and seem more modern.

Don’t make custom apps or websites for devices or browsers that your users aren’t using!

Understanding development costs

An iPhone app is not an easy thing to build and so, like a house or a website, you are paying for the expertise of the developer you commission to create your application. If you believe your idea is unique and you are going to make a large profit from it, then you may want to pay your developer for the application in a one-off fee the same way that you would pay a builder or any other tradesman. However, if you don’t have the finance to pay to have your idea built, then some developers will be open to the idea of building the idea for you for free but then taking a percentage of the profit that comes in from selling the app.

Negotiating for development costs is often very similar to the Dragon’s Den program in that you will negotiate in terms of equity (how much of the profit you are willing to share) in order to get an expert to build the application. However, where this often falls down is with prospective clients offering around 20% equity. If you come to the table with nothing but an idea (and aren’t planning on doing any designing, building, or marketing) then you can’t expect to find a developer that will build your app and agree to taking a small percentage.

In my own case, I prefer to be paid for the application but I will occasionally deal in terms of equity if I think the idea is good enough. Having said that, I refuse to take less than 50% if I’m expected to build an application from the ground up with no other form of payment – most other developers are the same.

It is important to note that it is not possible to give a straight up cost for an application before you’ve heard the idea. I’ve received several enquiries of the sort “can you tell me how much it’ll cost to get an app built”. Pricing is generally based on the amount of time required so if you want a basic utility then it will cost a great deal less than a complex 3D game. Bear in mind that you may be asking your developer to build a website or server software to run your applications (if you plan on using push notifications for example) and so these should be factored into your financial calculations.

Note: with all applications, Apple takes approximately 30% of the sale of each application to cover the costs of the App Store. This means that for every 59p sale, you keep approximately 42p. You are paid at the end of each month by Apple but you are paid by territory and if you haven’t earned over $150 in that territory then the amount rolls over to the next month that you do. For example, if you made $100 in one month in the USA, then you are under the $150 threshold. That rolls over to the next month. If you then made another $100 you would be over the threshold so at the end of that month you’d be sent $200. When you are negotiating with an iPhone developer, be sure to clarify if they are talking of their percentage in terms of sales price (before Apple takes it’s 30% cut) or profit (after Apple has taken it’s cut).

Building an app on your own

Apple provides all of the tools you need to make an iPhone application via it’s developer website at http://developer.apple.com/iphone/ although you will need to be using a mac with an intel processor. You can’t build iPhone applications on windows.

With the free SDK that Apple provides, you can use all of the features of the iPhone and test them in the iPhone Simulator that is also provided. You can’t, however, run the code on your own device or submit it to the App Store. To do that, you’ll need to get a developer license which costs $99 per year and can be purchased through the developer website above. Once you have the license, you’ll be able to generate provisioning profiles for your apps which will enable it to run on your own device or up to 100 other devices (e.g. friends, colleagues, testers).

All apps are written in Objective-C so I’d highly recommend you buy a book on the subject. If you are coming from a web-based background (e.g. PHP, Ruby, JavaScript, .net) then I’d also recommend you start by learning C before moving onto Objective-C. You may be raring to jump into the SDK and start using things like the accelerometer and location services, but if you don’t know how an array or a dictionary works, then you’ll never be able to build an app that works well.

Getting your apps into the App Store

The only things you need are your completed application code (that should have been tested extensively in both the simulator and on actual devices) and a developer license. Once you have these, you are able to generate the correct certificates to publish your application to the App Store. You will be asked to supply not only text such as descriptions, app title, and keywords, but also screenshots and a 512×512px image of your application icon for use in Apple’s promotional materials so make sure you have these available.

The actual process for submission has been under a lot of criticism but basically you submit your app and then wait for a while (usually around 14 days – Apple have placed an indicator of queue length on the iTunes submission portal now) to find out if your app has been rejected or accepted. If it’s been rejected then they should supply you with information about what is wrong and how to fix it. If it’s been accepted, then congratulations, your app is ready for prime time!

Note: a common question seems to be “can I submit an app with your developer license”. If we were to assume that I built you an iPhone app, then yes I could submit it to the app store using my license saving you $99. However, this would mean the app appeared under my company name rather than your own and all payments for the app would go into my bank account. Whilst this is possible, most clients would prefer that their company name is displayed and that all finance goes through them.

Copyright and other legalities

When Apple checks the application in it’s approval process, it does not take into account copyright or any other legalities of that type. This means that technically you could steal an idea such as “Super Mario Bros”, make a duplicate app, and then submit it. However, you are still liable for breaches of copyright and so could be sued by the correct copyright holders and have to repay damages. The basic rule of thumb is don’t use copyright images, text, or music, and don’t mimic other peoples ideas or intellectual property.

Contacting a developer

If after reading all of the above you are pleased with your idea and want to get an iPhone developer on board, you will need to contact them with the following pieces of information:

• A detailed explanation of your idea – if you are not comfortable with giving up your idea, then get the developer to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement (or NDA) which will prevent them from stealing the idea. It is worth pointing out to the developer that you have already done your research and know that your idea is unique before asking them to sign anything as you will be more likely to get a favourable response.
• What you are looking for – you’ll need to detail what you need the developer to do (e.g. build the app, suggest changes, recommend a designer, etc) and also if you are looking to pay outright for the code or enter into a profit-share agreement (and the potential terms of such an agreement).

I reply to all emails that I receive but many developers will not get back to you if the two points above are not fulfilled. The more detail you supply, the more likely it is that a developer will want to work with you and form a professional relationship as it shows that you are serious and have researched your idea rather than being someone interested in simply making a quick bit of cash by coping an existing flash game.

Summary

I hope that this article has given you a quick insight into how you can make your ideas more appealing to an iPhone developer and answers some of the more common questions about the process. If you have further questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments below or contact me. I’ll be updating this article as and when other common questions come in.

A couple of months ago, I was asked if I’d like to appear on Channel Five’s “The Gadget Show” to take part in a challenge about iPhone applications with Jason Bradbury and Suzi Perry. I had only been developing iPhone apps for a short while but decided to enter into the spirit of the challenge by jumping head first into some of the trickier aspects of the iPhone SDK. The show and results of the challenge aired last night so I thought it was time for me to do a write up of the application and the process of building it.

The Early Stages

My day-to-day job involves me working as a freelance PHP developer but I’m a huge Apple fan and have owned every iteration of the iPhone. It wasn’t long before I started toying with the idea of building iPhone apps, but the programming language was different to anything I’d ever done before. As a PHP developer, I found it very hard initially learning how to code in Objective-C (the coding language for iPhone apps). However, I purchased a couple of books including the excellent “iPhone SDK Development” and “Learn Objective-C on the Mac” and it wasn’t too long before I became an iPhone developer.

After making it on to the App Store with Magnetic Flux & Metal Detector [iTunes Link], I was asked if I’d be interested in making the iPhone Application for “The Gadget Show”. The initial concept was fairly simple: an application that allowed you to quickly choose from a list of questions to build a sentence which could be sent to your social networks. I agreed immediately and began working with my friend Liza Hayes on the design but hadn’t realised exactly what I’d let myself in for.

In order to work as expected, the application would need to access an SQLite database on the device, be able to store custom sentences input by the user to that database, be able to build a sentence based on building an SQL query, and use the networking features of the iPhone to post to both Facebook and Twitter. I had done a lot of work with Facebook Connect and the Twitter API in my web development work and I knew that Facebook had a custom integration of its API for the iPhone. Even so, the networking problems were going to be tricky to overcome. To add to all of this, Jason suggested that he’d like a way to show off the accelerometer in the iPhone, and I was interested in the settings panes and how we could make the app easily customisable.

Developing the app

The iPhone 3.0 OS had just been released, yet as a registered iPhone developer I was working on iPhone 3.1 so there were enumerable problems in switching my Xcode environment and devices back and forth between the two versions. This was compounded with problems with Facebook Connect in that it had been written for the 2.1 OS and so was not 100% compatible with 3.0 leading to some caffeine fuelled Googling!

We had decided that the accelerometer could be used in what Jason called “Fingerless Functionality” whereby you could shake the phone left and right to navigate around the Social Beacon wheel, and then tip the phone up and down to progress backwards and forwards through the option. A simple shake of the phone would be enough to regenerate a sentence. These parts were all very straightforward (especially the shake, which can be detected with one line of code in OS 3.0) yet we came to a usability problem once we thought about sending the message. We couldn’t use the shake or the down gesture, as these were used for regenerating the sentence on the final screen, so we needed to find another fingerless input method to post the message. The answer eventually came in the guise of the microphone: we could detect sound so that blowing into the mic would blow your message to the internet! Of course, this meant learning yet another aspect of the SDK that I had previously left untouched — Core Audio — but I’m always up for a challenge!

Distribution and the App Store

With various bugs overcome and a final test version working on my device, we were ready to distribute the app via the App Store. You may have heard some of the horror stories from the App Store — it can take a very long time and you end up being rejected without reason — but I have to say that I found the process to work incredibly well. It took 14 days from submission before Apple got back to us to say that the Application had been rejected due to a bug in the networking code (if you weren’t connected to the internet the app would hang, or worse, say that the message had been sent). They were incredibly helpful and gave a detailed explanation of the problem as well as including some sample code to show how the networking portion could be handled better. After a couple of hours fixing it up, we resubmitted and the app was available around the world a few days later.

We were of course competing against Suzi’s “Biker Blast-Off! [iTunes Link]” which was distributed at the same time, but crucially neither app was publicised on either Twitter or any other medium without mentioning the other with the same weight (so we’d invite people to try both apps). Within 3 days, Social Beacon was in the top 20 free social media applications whilst Biker Blast-Off was climbing up the overall free application charts worldwide and racking up a huge number of downloads. Interestingly, as both of our apps climbed higher, the reviews became more negative and I realised that this was true of nearly every app in the store. It seems that even if you are willing to give away a free product which could easily be charged for, people will still rip the idea to pieces (some comments on the game even saying “you’d need to pay me to play this game” – no pleasing some people!).

The Aftermath

The show was aired last night (and is available to watch online) and has the full story as well as the final figures and the winner of the challenge, but the story of the apps continues. Since the show, both applications have now shot back up into the charts with both apps appearing in the top 10 free applications in the UK App Store. Social Beacon is currently sitting pretty at spot number 4 and I couldn’t be happier with it.

A big thank you to the Gadget Show team (especially Colin Byrne, Chris Payne, and Jason Bradbury) and to Liza Hayes for her fantastic design work. It was a great experience and it looks like I’m going to be developing iPhone applications for a long time to come!

The first thing you will see when you open the web app is a prompt for your Gowalla username. You don’t need to login to the service, but it does need to know your username so it can search through your pack effectively (although you can also see your friends’ missing items if you want to help them out with any of your own spare items).

You will then be shown all of your items in a list. Tapping any of these (e.g. “Conference Badge”) will then show you which spots are likely to randomly give you the item in question when you check in.

The list will sometimes be broken into two sections: spot categories where you have a chance of finding the item on check in, and internal categories or spots. These internal categories are usually things such as states (e.g. “Texas” has quite a few items) or freebies (which I believe are items randomly dropped by devs) but are often actual spots (e.g. “Alamofire” – the offices of the developers).

With the standard categories, you can tap them to find spots in your local area (but you’ll be prompted to allow the site to use your location – your location information isn’t stored, it’s just used to determine your nearest spots).

If there are spots in your area, you can tap on them to view the spots information on the Gowalla website.

If you save the web app to your homescreen (press the ‘+’ symbol in Safari and choose “Save to Homescreen”) then you’ll get a pretty custom icon so it looks just like a normal iPhone app (which it may well become one day). I’ll be expanding the service offering as and when I find new things to include

Feedback

The site is in beta mode so there may be a few bugs and tweaks but if you have any feedback, please let me know. Happy Gowalla’ing!

Legal

The web app is not owned, maintained, or developed by Alamofire, Inc. – Gowalla and all other trademarks and imagery are copyright of Alamofire.

Initial Thoughts

My first thought was that the iPhone 3GS somehow felt nicer than the previous models of the iPhone. I remember upgrading from the original to the 3G and thinking that the new plastic back made it feel more comfy and it seems that again something has been done to the texture to make it seem more solid and comfortable. Although it looks exactly the same as the 3G, there are a few minor aesthetic details such as the lettering on the back now being the same colour as the Apple logo which makes it stand out a bit more.

The “oleophobic screen coating” (that’s oil resistant to you and me) really does work incredibly well. With previous iPhones, greasy finger marks on the screen wouldn’t go away even if you rubbed them with your t-shirt or trouser leg; they just smeared. With the new screen coating, one wipe with a t-shirt makes the screen look just like new. This is a very useful addition to my mind!

One other detail I noticed straight away is that the screen is a lot brighter. I had thought it was slightly better (in the same way that Snow Leopard is much clearer than Leopard although this is to do with a switch to the 2.2 gamma standard) but wasn’t aware of how much better until I placed it next to my old iPhone 3G – you can see the difference in the photo above. The key thing here is that both phones were set to the same brightness level so there really is an improvement in the hardware somewhere.

New Features

Compass – the new digital compass (or magnetometer if you prefer?) was one of the big talking points of the iPhone 3GS as it allows for far more accurate turn-by-turn navigation. It also added a sexy new app appropriately named “compass”. The compass app itself is fairly basic and I felt that the actual readings were quite slow to adjust. Additionally, making a very small change to the orientation of the phone doesn’t always reflect in the compass which is a little frustrating when you are trying to get it to point exactly North. Having said that, it’s good enough to get a basic idea of which way is which. The real area the compass shines in is in the updated Maps application where pressing the location button re-orientates the map to the direction you are facing. This is absolutely invaluable when navigating and is a feature I will be using heavily.

Voice Control – When it was announced at the WWDC Keynote, I felt that Phil Schiller sounded a bit stupid going on about how this great phone was now able to do voice commands seeing as it was something my Nokia could do 8 years ago. However, I now realise why he was quite as smug as he was. It really does work exactly as they demoed it. After I synced my contacts and music, I tried a few of the commands such as “phone Ben Dodson” (to which it replied “work, home, or mobile?”), “play panic at the disco”, “play more songs like this”, and “what song is this”. Every name and command I tried worked flawlessly so I was incredibly impressed. The real power is that with other phones you’d need to add a voice tag for each contact whereas with the iPhone, it just reads the text and interprets your voice accordingly so there is no need for you to record a voice command prior to using it. The app looks awesome as well!

Camera – The new camera app is fantastic. I can’t believe that it’s only a 3MP camera as the quality of the images is as good as some phones I’ve seen with 5 or even 7MP. The video app is simple to use (as you’d expect) and again the quality is very very good. It’s a shame it doesn’t film 720p but the colour balancing and overall quality make up for the relatively small resolution. The only negative I can find is that video at nighttime is fairly grainy (whereas in daylight it’s beautifully smooth) and the camera would really have benefited from having a flash. I was really hoping the rumours that the Apple logo would act as a flash light were true but it appears that it’s not the case… for this model at least!

I’ve got the need, the need for speed!

My main reason for buying the iPhone 3GS is that I wanted faster app loading times and generally quicker responses within the apps. Playing Sonic the Hedgehog on my 3G nearly bought me to tears as it was actually unplayable (I’m sure they only tested it on a 2nd generation iPod Touch…) and I’d always get frustrated playing Tap Tap Revenge 2 when the app would skip a little due to memory running out. So, speed was a big thing I was interested in.

I did not imagine it would be as good as it actually is.

The speed increases I’ve noticed so far have been nothing short of phenomenal for something that got a 50% speed boost and a doubling of RAM. Quite often, load times have been reduced by up to 4x and overall app reliability is nothing short of flawless. Here are a few stats based on some of my most commonly used and intensive apps:

Bejeweled 2 – app launch to menu screen
3G = 12.1s
3GS = 3.7s

iDracula – selecting “grave park – survival” on menu to actual gameplay
3G = 21.6s
3GS = 6.5s

Peggle – app launch to “touch to play” message
3G = 25.4s
3GS = 10.2s

Sonic the Hedgehog – app launch to “SEEEGGAAAAA” message
3G = 5.9s
3GS = 2.7s

Tap Tap Revenge 2 – app launch to main menu
3G = 6.4s
3GS = 3.3s

Tap Tap Revenge 2 – selecting “The Sound of Settling” on “Hard” to start of track
3G = 8.9s
3GS = 3.5s

All apps were tested on the 3.0 OS after an iPhone restart. They were timed using a stopwatch and each test was run 3 times and then averaged in order to minimise discrepancies.

Conclusions

The speed boost was definitely the biggest thing for me and I have to say that it has exceeded my expectations. The small range of stats above don’t accurately display how snappy everything has become. Previously, navigating the menus of Tap Tap Revenge 2 always a pause of around a second between each screen whereas now it’s instant. Also, actually playing the game could be incredibly frustrating as I knew I was in time but a memory glitch along the way would cause the tappers to move erratically causing you to miss them even though you hit the area at the right time. This was verified to me when playing on the 3GS as I got a 100% streak straight away without really trying too hard. Another game that suffered horribly on the 3G was Sonic the Hedgehog which really shouldn’t have been allowed to go on the App Store. It was probably ok on the 2nd Gen iPod Touch as that had a slightly faster CPU, but on the 3G it was just dismal with stuttering sound, obvious slow down and speed up, and a whole host of other glitches such as unresponsive controls. On the 3GS, it plays exactly as it always should have done – exactly the same as it did on the Mega Drive.

I haven’t even touched upon areas such as the speed increases in Safari rendering (pages are near instant – truly amazing mobile web browsing), the noticeably smoother animations between apps, or any of the other minor tweaks that make sure that the 3GS not only outperforms the 3G, but actually completely exceeds the speeds that were previously attainable.

However, there are one or two problems in all of this. For me, the biggest question mark hangs over how the App Store is going to be managed. The iPhone 3GS has much better hardware and allows for much better graphics which means that theoretically we should get into a situation where apps are available only for 3GS. However, it looks as if Apple is going to resist this route and that the 3GS upgrade is purely for across the board speed increases rather than in making more powerful apps. I can’t predict what is going to happen but I fear that there will be a lot of apps made that will only work on the 3GS but they won’t be labelled as such in the App Store (in the same way that Sonic the Hedgehog should have been labelled 2nd Gen iPod Touch only). This leads to a lot of frustration when you are paying £5.99 or so for a game which then won’t work on the existing hardware.

So, do I think the 3GS is worth the upgrade?

Yes. Yes I do.

Disclaimer: I don’t work for O2 and never have done. I used to be on the 3 mobile network in the UK as it was the cheapest before switching to O2 in order to get the iPhone. I bought the original iPhone about 4 months before the 3G came out (and so paid full price for it which was around £330 plus a £35 contract) and then upgraded to the iPhone 3G by paying £59 and upgrading to the £45 18-month contract. I will be buying the iPhone 3GS next Friday by taking out a second contract and letting the remaining 6 months on my current contract run out. Therefore, I have no reason to be supporting O2 as I would benefit greatly if they caved in and let people upgrade for free – the point I’m putting across is that there is good reason why they aren’t doing that and people need to understand why that is.

The iPhone 3GS

During the WWDC Keynote, Apple announced that the new model of the iPhone (the iPhone 3GS – the ‘S’ stands for ‘Speed’) would be released on the 19th of June in 6 countries at a price of $199 for the 16GB model and $299 for the 32GB model. Crucially, these were prices on a specific AT&T 24-month tariff for new customers. Here in the UK, the prices vary from ‘free’ to £280 or so (or even £550 if you choose Pay As You Go). Again these prices are for new customers only. So, as was bound to be the case, there are a large number of iPhone 3G customers who want to upgrade to the iPhone 3GS who are being told they have to finish their existing contracts before they can get the new model. This can be done in two ways; wait until your contract ends or pay to get out of it now. This very simple issue is the basis for all of “O2 Fail” comments over the past few days. Let’s look at why it has annoyed people so much…

“But last time…”

When the iPhone 3G as announced, O2 allowed original iPhone customers to terminate their contracts early at no cost and start a brand new contract. The only cost was that of the phone and was the same cost that applied to new customers. In my own case, this was around £59 as I moved up to the £45 a month contract (18 months). The reason O2 did this (when they and other carriers have never done this for a phone before) is because they didn’t subsidise the original iPhone. When you went to the Apple Store or to an O2 store, you paid the full retail price (which was around £330 for the 16GB model). Therefore, the contract you were on was purely making money based on calltime – that was a pretty sweet deal for O2 and so it was surprising they allowed people to upgrade.

In any case, most people seem to think that as it happened last time it should happen this time. They have failed to grasp the crucial word ’subsidy’. The original iPhone wasn’t subsidised, the iPhone 3G was (as is the iPhone 3GS). This means that a large portion of the money you now pay to O2 from your contract goes directly to Apple for the cost of the phone. It’s worth pointing out that this is the same with every other phone on the market with every other carrier (unless you’re using Pay As You Go in which case you pay the full price for the phone up front). So, if O2 were to say at this point “of course you can upgrade under the same conditions as last time” they would lose a HUGE amount of money as not only would they not have made any money on airtime, they would have lost the money on the subsidised phone.

What about paying off the remaining subsidy on my phone?

There have been a fair number of people asking this question – “why can’t I just buy out my subsidy and get a new contract”. The key problem here is that O2 would still not have made any money as they would have basically given you free airtime for the last 12 months. If you only pay your subsidised part, then they aren’t making money. This is where the crucial word ‘contract’ comes into use as you signed an agreement to pay a certain amount of money per month to cover the cost of the phone and the airtime.

But what about customer loyalty!?!

The follow up argument to the above is “but they’d make money on the airtime in my new contact”. So, you’ve just screwed O2 for the past 12 months by using their network without effectively paying for it and now you want a new contract where they will be able to make their money back? I don’t follow that for one instant as what happens when the next iPhone comes out in 12 months ? We’ll go back to square one with the argument being “they did it the last 2 times, why can’t I upgrade now” which means that again O2 will go without being paid for their network usage.

Ok, how about they just add my remaining contract to my new contract?

This is a slightly harder argument as in a way it makes some sense. Rather than waiting 6 months for my contract to expire and then upgrading to a new 18 month contract, why can’t O2 just let me upgrade now and add an additional 6 months to my new contract? This would work in theory but the problem is that you’ll start getting people on contracts from 18-36 months and I’ll guarantee that come next year they’ll be the first ones to ask for another extension putting them on 24-42 month contracts and so on. This is a similar problem to people extending loan terms forever and ever in that there comes a point where they simply aren’t going to pay it back. I don’t know the full details but I imagine there are some laws on how many times a contract can be extended as well in order to ensure fair fiscal management but don’t quote me on it!

Don’t they realise we’re in the middle of a recession!

This is by far the best argument I’ve seen used – people actually pointing out that due to the “credit crunch”, O2 should be lowering prices so they can get the phone cheaper. If the recession is really that bad, don’t you think it’s a little stupid of you to be arguing about getting a slightly faster iPhone? Surely you should be worrying about the price of basic essentials like food, clothes, and petrol rather than the ability to get a slightly better camera in your smart phone? And how do you think mobile phone carriers are doing in the economic crisis? They need to make money as well!

The Facebook Group

One of my other favourite things during this whole saga has been the Facebook group I DONT WANT TO PAY TO UPGRADE MY IPHONE! – I don’t think I even need to provide an argument against this.

My Point

I’ve spoken about the reasons why these arguments are flawed but my real point is that people don’t “need” the iPhone 3GS so I don’t understand why so many people are desperate to upgrade. I’m an iPhone developer and therefore want the new hardware so that I can write better apps that utilize it’s hardware, but to everybody else there is very little gain. Sure you get a slightly better camera, the ability to film video, and a digital compass (as well as a processor and RAM upgrade) but you get far more from the 3.0 upgrade than you do from the hardware upgrade.

I suppose my real point is that there are things called “contracts” that people have entered into – they are now throwing their toys out of the pram because they can’t get the latest shiny object from Apple without paying for it but unfortunately that’s just how it is and O2 are not going to change their minds. Why not? Because if they did they would lose huge amounts of money. At this point people decry the greedy networks and the fact that they are going to take their business elsewhere. The crucial point is that O2 is the only network that can cope with the iPhone properly and they are the only supplier so you either stay with them or you get a Palm Pre, a Google Android, or one of the new Windows Mobile phones from another supplier. But, I can guarantee that in 12 months when a new model of those phones comes out, the networks won’t let you upgrade early for free so you’ll be back where you started…. just with a rubbish phone instead!

The key point is that the iPhone 3GS has not been designed for existing iPhone 3G customers – it has been designed specifically to address the concerns of people who were deciding whether to get one of the other smartphones I mentioned or an iPhone. They have added MMS, Video, and a better camera – the three major flaws with the iPhone that any undecided customer would count as negatives. If you’re an iPhone 3G user at present, I highly doubt that you are going to stop becoming an iPhone user over this issue as you have already been sold on the idea of the phone and you know that no other phone currently suits your needs.

Besides, as a network O2 has proved itself to be far better than many other iPhone carriers (*cough* AT&T *cough*). They are supporting MMS on launch day (including video for those with the 3GS), the push notification system has worked flawlessly so far (I’ve been beta testing it), and they have internet tethering working as well (which also works very well – I’ll be coming back to the price of this later).

What can I do?

So if you’re read this and been swayed over to rational thinking rather than getting involved in the anti-O2 hype, what are your options for upgrading to the iPhone 3GS?

Wait. I know it’s difficult but you don’t need the iPhone 3GS. If you had a great need for video then you would have bought a different phone in the first place. If you bought your iPhone 3G on launch day, you should have 6 months of you contract left and this may be reduced to 0 months, 3 months, or 5 months depending on how much you’ve spent recently – take a look at the O2 Priority List for details.

Buy a Pay As You Go iPhone 3GS and sell your old iPhone 3G on eBay (or to a friend, etc). You get the full functionality, get to keep your number, and it’ll all work on launch day just by putting your existing SIM card into the new phone. Visual Voicemail, etc, will work as you’ll still be on a contract plan (the hardware between the contract and PAYG phones is the same). Plus you might even make money this way as the iPhone 3G’s are selling for a high price – best to get on their quickly though!

Pay off your existing contract. This route is the most expensive but you could pay off your existing contract and take out a new one – the price is generally the number of months remaining times your monthly rate so in my case it was £270 (£45 x 6). This is the easiest way but the most expensive.

Take out a second contract. This is what I’m going to be doing next Friday. Rather than paying off my contract in one lump sum, I’ll keep that contract and my iPhone 3G (I use it for app testing) but I’ll just get a new contract with the iPhone 3GS. This means I’ll be paying for 2 contracts for around 6 months but that spreads the cost a bit rather than having one big hit all at once. Also, you can downgrade your iPhone contract one level after 9 months so I’ll be able to move my iPhone 3G down to the £35 plan this month (and the £30 the month after) which will save some money – it also means I have a spare, live phone in case I need it for anything. This is again an expensive method but it spreads the cost rather than having it all in one hit – however, it may be subject to a second credit check to make sure you can afford two contracts at once.

What should O2 do?

To my mind, this whole saga could have been avoided if O2 still offered 12 month contracts. Of course, the main problem is that phones are getting more and more expensive and operators want to keep overall contract prices as low as possible so they look competitive. I believe it was 3 mobile who were the first to bring in 18 month contracts as they could do so incredibly cheaply – they got a huge market share simply because people didn’t realise what they were signing up for.

So, on the one hand you could have 12 month contracts but charge people a large amount a month so you cover both subsidy and airtime, or you can have 18-24 month contracts which are cheaper but then the customer has to pay out if they want to upgrade to the latest and greatest phone. Both have their issues and overall the cost is probably the same; the real difference is when you pay it. Personally, I would like to see mobile operators offer all three services so people can choose straight up if they want 12 months (high price, low lock-in), 18 months (medium price, medium lock-in), or 24 months (low price, high lock-in). That would avert this whole discussion on upgrading to new phone models!

Conclusion

So there you have it – O2 haven’t done anything wrong, they are simply doing the same as every other provider has done since they were created. We can shout all we like but they won’t back down on this issue as it doesn’t make any financial sense for them to do so. If you are desperate for the iPhone 3GS, then you’ll just have to pay for it or wait it out a bit longer.

Now, if I’ve convinced you to stop petitioning O2 about iPhone 3GS upgrades, perhaps I can convince you instead to spend your time petitioning them about their ridiculous Internet Tethering charges as that is a fight I believe can be won – £15 for 3GB of transfer is far, far too much and I can’t see any justification for it! So, give up the 3GS battle and instead shout about the tethering charges

Creating a new account

When you use the “redeem” section of iTunes, you type in your code and if you’re not logged in already it prompts you to. However, you can also register at this stage so I decided to set myself up a nice new US account. You have to link a credit card or payment method to your account and I initially tried to do this but it blocked me as the payment method wasn’t based in the US (either using a credit card or paypal). However, as I was redeeming a code, they have to give you the option of registering without a credit card as it might be you’ve given a $25 gift card to your nephew or something like that. Therefore, all I had to do was choose “no payment method” and then fill out the rest of the form. Email was easy as I run my own domain so just created a dummy email account, and faking an address is made very easy thanks to reverse geocoding. I simply went to getlatlon.com, picked a random place in Florida, and then used a reverse geo-coding app to convert that lat lon into a street address. Easy!

The app

Now that the account was created, my code was automatically redeemed and the app downloaded to my machine. It synced across to my iPhone with no problems and is now running happily. I’ve attached some screenshots below:

So as you can see, the app triggers a new “notifications” panel where you can enable or disable individual apps and the alerts that they are allowed to send you. I haven’t yet received any notifications but will update photos and any additional functionality as and when it happens.

Update: Just received my first push notification! I remember during the last Apple Keynote (the launch of the 3.0 beta) that the reason push hadn’t been introduced before is because it’s a complex system that has to be set up differently for every mobile provider. After an hour with no updates, I had begun to think that O2 wasn’t set up but it would appear that they are!

Note: Technically, this should fall under the iPhone Developer NDA. However, ever since iPhone Beta 3.0 was released to the development community, every Mac blog has published photos and detailed information without any kind of reproach from Apple so I feel that there is no problem in publishing these photos.

However, Steve Jobs finally announced that firmware 2.1 would be with us on Friday 12th September and would be a bug-fix only release. He claimed that the phone would be faster, backup time would be "dramatically reduced", would have a "decrease in call set-up failures and call drops", "faster installation of 3rd party applications", would fix a lot of app crashing bugs, and would have "improved performance in text messaging". There are 2 new features as far as I can see which are Genius playlist creation which came with iTunes 8 and a secure wipe of the phone in the event that the keypad lock is entered incorrectly too many times.

So does the update live up to all of the promises listed above? Well, yes it does on this occasion! The whole experience of using the phone is back to how it was with version 1.1.4 in that it's fast, responsive, and doesn't crash every few minutes. I'll go over a few of the key improvements i've seen from my own use over the last few days:

Application Installation / Crashes

I regularly install and uninstall apps on to my iPhone as I love trying out the latest new things to come along. However, in the past it would take an absolute age to install anything on the phone – in fact I gave up doing it via the App Store on the iPhone itself as that usually didn't work (or would take an hour or so by which point the battery was dead) and so had resorted to sideloading apps via iTunes. This still could take a good 10 minutes or so though which wasn't really acceptable. Once the apps were on, they would frequently crash or hang – several times I had to do a hard reset of the phone (hold the home button and power button down together for about 10 seconds). Amusingly, I only learnt about the hard reset after the 3rd time my iPhone crashed (screen wouldn't come on) and I thought the only way to fix it was to do a restore via iTunes.

Anyway, this is all water under the bridge now as I managed to get 26 applications installed via iTunes in less than 5 minutes and have installed several apps via the App Store on the iPhone itself in a couple of minutes. A vast improvement! Additionally, I haven't had a single app crash on me yet which is also much improved on previous performance. Apps seem to be quitting correctly and quickly as well. For instance, in the past if I closed down "Tap Tap Revenge" by pressing the home button, the app would disappear and the home screen would appear but the music would keep playing for another 5-10 seconds or so. Now it just quits as it should have done in the first place.

Location Services

I hadn't seen it reported widely but my location service was incredibly patchy. If I was in my house or at work, then pressing the "locate me" button would just lead to a little blue spinning circle which would never find me. I put this down to the iPhone 3G saying "I've got GPS – Use it even though it'll never work in this building" – there appeared to be no fallback to cell tower triangulation. This is fixed now though as within 2 seconds of pressing the button in my living room, I had been located to within 50m or so. GPS also seems to be a little faster outside but again it does a cell tower triangulation instantly before it even bothers with the GPS locater.

Now it just needs a decent turn-by-turn GPS app to make it really good – I managed to fake this the other day whilst I was lost in Manchester by loading up Google Maps and making it do directions from my current location to my destination. This all showed up fine and then I literally scrolled across the map as the little GPS dot moved. This worked absolutely fine but I couldn't help but think it would have worked a whole lot better if when the blue dot got near the edge of the screen then the map scrolled automatically!

SMS Typing

By far the most annoying bug was that after a little bit of use, going to type an SMS message became painfully slow. The keyboard just had a huge amount of lag for no reason! I eventually found a fix for this which was to quit the SMS app, then open it again and delete a character – it would then go back to full speed. No need for this now though as I've had no laggy text messages in the last few days!

iTunes Backup

Whether this is a fix in the firmware or for iTunes 8 I'm not sure but the iPhone now backs up in about 10 seconds. I have seen the same iPhone (with less apps and music) take an hour and a half to backup before now so this really is very impressive! I had previously disabled my backups by using the following command in Terminal (make sure iTunes is turned off)

This stops the iPhone doing a backup when it's connected to iTunes. However, I've now amended this to:

Now my backups are back up and running and are incredibly fast so I'll be leaving it on for the time being (although hopefully there won't be a need for a restore).

On a separate note, I'm again not sure if this is an iPhone 2.1 update or an iTunes 8 update but when you are looking at your iPhone through iTunes, it actually shows how much space is used up by Apps rather than sticking them under the category of Other. Very helpful!

Passcode Locking / Secure Wipe

Talking about doing backups leads me nicely into a new feature of iPhone 2.1 – the ability to have your iPhone wipe itself if someone enters in the passcode incorrectly more than 10 times. This in response to the controversy surrounding Apple when it turned out that you could bypass the passcode if you had a certain setting enabled. Now most people commented that no-one used the passcode and I agreed with them as I had never had it enabled before. However, now there is a secure wipe option, I have put it back on so that if someone steals my phone I know my data is safe. If they enter the code in wrong more than 10 times then my iPhone will just wipe itself similar to the Exchange Remote Wipe feature. My only bug bear with the process is that 10 times is a long time. I'd like to be able to change that number to 3 – I'm not going to enter it in wrong that many times (and if I do then my fast backup process as detailed above means I can restore it fairly quickly). One commentator said they'd like it changed so it wipes if you get it wrong the first time making each unlock a little like an episode of 24!

Genius Playlists

I haven't had much experience of this on my iPhone as I only have a small portion of my library loaded on to it, but it appears to work in the same way as genius within iTunes 8. The idea is that every time you sync, your library is sent up to the Apple Genius "cloud" where it is analysed and compared with other peoples libraries. it can then recommend you music in your library that goes with other music in your library leading to a nice playlist that blends together quite well. It's essentially the same as recommendations from last.fm but seems to work quite well. It should get better as more and more people use it as the cloud will have more data to analyse. The only improvement I can see to this (which is a long shot and won't ever happen) is if there was a way to get the tracks to mix into each other as you went between them in a playlist. I listen to a lot of dance music and it would be great if genius was clever enough to do a DJ style mix between them. There was an application on Dragons Den a few years ago that did that but I'm not sure what happened to it!

Summary

So the new firmware is a vast improvement and offers a few little extras as well such as secure wipe and Genius playlists. The other thing I've noticed is that the icons for the different networks you are on (e.g. GPRS, Edge, 3G) have been changed slightly – Why I don't know but they do look a little clearer!

If you don't have it already, then upgrade to both iPhone 2.1 and iTunes 8 – you'll be glad you did!

Well the most talked about features that have been added are 3G support (which allows for faster data transfer) and GPS (pin-point location service). The difference in speed between 3G and Edge is not that noticeable on most websites I’ve found, but when using applications like maps or mail it is an absolute godsend. Having said that, although pages take about the same amount of time to load, they seem to render a lot quicker (e.g. the screen stays white for a long period of time before suddenly filling up with content incredibly quickly). GPS was the main thing I was looking forward to and it seems to be a bit hit and miss. Sometimes I can enable it and it will have my exact location within about 4 seconds whereas other times it just never gets a lock. What makes this so annoying is that it doesn’t seem to use cell tower triangulation or wireless networks to get a rough approximation of my location as the old iPhone did. It just keeps hoping it will see a GPS satellite. I had been hoping that there would be an app that would automatically send my current location to a service such as Fire Eagle at regular intervals so that I could make some cool location mashups but with the current support it seems unlikely that it would work. Oh, and these 2 features drain the battery like you would not believe! Fortunately I don’t move too far outdoors so I’m always near a healthy electric supply!

The other differences between the iPhone and the iPhone 3G are very small but have actually meant more to me so far than 3G or GPS. The first is that the back is no longer metal but plastic. At first I thought this would be absolutely terrible but it actually makes the phone feel a lot more comfortable. Also, all of the buttons (such as the silent switch and power button) are all brushed metal so they feel a lot more reliable and well built. The other big improvement is that the sound quality is much improved on both the internal and external speaker. I can actually use the loudspeaker now whereas before it just sounded like a normal phone with the volume turned up a bit (very muffled).

The main enhancement has definitely been the introduction of iPhone 2.0, the much anticipated software upgrade available to both the old iPhone and the iPod Touch. With the software you can now have Exchange mail, contact searching, and run 3rd party applications on the device. It is this that seems to have become the main reason people want an iPhone 3G although to be honest I probably could have kept the old iPhone that I paid a ridiculous sum of money for only 3-4 months ago! I have several apps installed now including services for Twitter, Flickr, Last.fm, and Facebook, a VNC client, a lightsabre, a Guitar Hero style tapping game, Super Monkey Ball, and a mobile version of Things (which doesn’t sync yet but they promised a free upgrade that will). I’ll be posting some updates over the coming days about various exciting apps that have arrived or are hopefully coming soon. At the moment there is a real gap for an MSN Messenger client as I haven’t found one yet but they seem to be adding 10-20 apps per day so there should be one in the near future.

Another interesting development which Apple have introduced is MobileMe which is supposedly “Exchange for the rest of us”. It also has some of the best functioning “Web 2.0″ apps that I have ever seen at me.com. The idea is that all of your email, contacts, and calendar entries are stored online in a “cloud” and are then automatically pushed to your phone and computers. Now this seemed great for me as I’m always updating things on the phone and then either having to plug it into my mac or update it on there manually. I have both a MacBook and an iMac so it becomes a hassle trying to sync them all so it seemed like a very good idea. Unfortunately the launch has been marred by huge problems over the launch weekend (e.g. it didn’t work), some pissed off customers who didn’t agree with Apple’s marketing of the push system (e.g. showing a MacBook making a change that replicates instantly on the “cloud” but in reality it’s a 15 minute automated sync rather than the push capability used by the phone), and also with a small error in which they took £121 off your credit card instead of $1 to authorise the payments. However, all of this aside, MobileMe is absolutely great! I add items to my calendar on my mac and they then show up on my iPhone. I take a picture of someone on my iPhone and add it to their section in my address book and sure enough the photo is displayed on my MacBook the next time they email me. It all works incredibly well but then it should do for £59 per year!

My final thoughts on the whole iPhone thing revolve around iPhone specific sites. That is to say taking a normal website (e.g. facebook) and then having it detect if you are using an iPhone or not and then displaying specific content or styling for that device. Now normally I would be against such practices (remember IE4?) but in this case I have to say “why not”? The iPhone has completely redefined mobile internet (in my opinion and doubtless many others) and has a unique interface and styling that are begging to be exploited. The Facebook site is probably the best example for the way in which it seamlessly detects the iPhone and then displays a site that has been completely optimised for it (and styled to make it look like a native app). Now that there is the opportunity to run apps natively on the iPhone I’m sure a number of these sites will disappear but for those of us that can’t write objective-C (and I can’t say I have a great desire to start learning it) then it is the closest way we can get to writing apps for the iPhone. I am going to be making some sites specifically for the iPhone as well as some of my own personal systems which I’ll be able to now access remotely and do some cool stuff with. This debate is currently waging on the Web Standards Group Mailing List so I’d urge anyone with an opinion to sign up and discuss it there. Alternatively you can put your thoughts on this issue here by using the comment box below.