People are shifting their dependence from the desktop computer to the tablet and the smartphone. We have come to expect our small portable devices to do most things we used to do on the computer, but in a more portable and personalised way.
But what about the people behind the apps for smartphones and tablets that turn the small device into our indispensable assistant?
There is a small but budding nucleus of Maltese programmers who are busy developing apps for the new mobile operating systems, especially the iOS for Apple devices and the Google Android.
i-Tech spoke to some of the developers to see how they are faring in this new exciting area of software development for mobile platforms.
“I have been interested in programming since I was 12 and it has been the main focus in my life. I used different languages on different platforms, but when I touched my first Apple iPhone, it had a different feel,” Chris Borg, a young software developer told iTech. He has just partnered with two other peer programmers to launch a start up company (www.xcampteam.com) that develops iOS applications and websites in Malta.
“The applications on the iPhone are beautiful and they are very powerful. The power of these applications is incredible for a mobile device. I started my research on Apple’s developers’ site. The tools amazed me with their consistency, simplicity and beautiful user interface (UI) tools while keeping the power of the applications.”
Mr Borg explained how Objective-C, the language used on the iOS platform for the iPhone and iPad, is different from other languages such as Java and C# which are used on Android and PCs.
“It is quite difficult to learn, but I discovered that it provides a way that makes programming very powerful and very organised. Apple uses different but powerful standards. The language is also based on the most powerful software development language (C language) which is used in any type of machine. So if I need total control, I could switch to this language at any time. Other devices such as Android lack this power as they use the Java programming language, and it is not as powerful as C. Rarely any good games are done with Java.”
This power has to be tamed, and it’s a process that developers have to go through, and face a new set of challenges.
“You either need to come up with a new innovative idea or else see where others have failed by listening to users’ complaints on the iTunes reviews and improve on them. Whatever app you do, you need to be passionate about the idea and enjoy developing it,” insists Neville Attard, an award-winning Maltese software developer who currently lectures in programming and creative computing at St. Martin’s Institute of IT.
“The developer needs to keep focused on the problem he is trying to solve for his customers. He also needs to have that extra attention to detail that surprises the user and makes the app stand out from the crowd. There are over 250,000 in the iTunes app store, but most of them are unpolished.”
This polish is an important ingredient in successful apps like Angry Birds, the game that took the world by storm. Getting feedback is very important, especially from friends and people you trust, as this can lead to improvements.
Can you make a living or even a career out of app development for the iOS?
“That is my dream actually. But the competition is fierce,” admits Mr Attard. “Even if you create the coolest app ever, you need to get the word out there. You have to target the US market and to do that you need to invest a lot of time in marketing. If 50 per cent of the time is spent on developing, another 50 per cent should be spent on marketing.”
Maybe companies and not individual developers are in a better position to exploit the new opportunities presented by the new mobile platforms whose number of user is increasing exponentially around the world.
“The technical bit is the easy bit. Getting a million downloads or buys is the trick,” warns Jonathan Camilleri Bowman, managing director at Maltese software development and outsourcing company 2i, which has offices in Europe, North America and Asia.
“We are mainly a services company whereby as opposed to building internal apps we assist our clients into realising their own. Most customers see this medium as an alternative or an addition to have a website – reaching out to more people on the go – using geo-location services to provide more interesting functionality.
“A recent one we created for Dhalia Real Estate for example lets you search a property for rent or sale within a parameterised distance from your current location – so all of a sudden the search become personal.”
Mr Camilleri Bowman believes that the delivery of common websites has reached its saturation point quite a long time ago both locally and abroad, so his company needed to reassess the markets and technologies they were using to really give their clients that competitive advantage they are after and to have available a new medium to reach their customers.
As a company he can’t complain much about the availability of the skills in this area of software development, but then again, such skills are not widely available and then it always depends on quality and not quantity of the skills found on the market. “I believe the market still has a long maturity process to go through before they start realising the mobile potential. Many think of it as a waste of time, with no real benefit. I believe people with an idea or something they would like to promote or sell should consider the mobile app industry or mobile tailored applications,” Mr Camilleri Bowman said.
A group of iPhone game developers has created a Facebook group to support each other and share their experience in this new area of development. The group is open and can be found through a search for “iPhone Game Dev Malta”. There is also a Facebook page called “Digital Games Production: Malta” dedicated to the nascent local industry of digital game development.