In our series Getting It, weâll give you all you need to know to get started with and excel at a wide range of technology, both on and offline. Here, weâre walking you through the process of creating your own app by examining five software tools to get the job done.
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There was a time when creating your own website, starting your own online store, or launching your own app would have required either advanced coding skills or enough money to hire someone with said skills. These days, though, enough companies have tools and business that make the process as speedy as an hour in some cases, and at minimal cost.
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Sites like Wix, Weebly and Squarespace make drag-and-drop website creation a breeze, while Shopify and Woocommerce let you pop up a web store during your lunch break. Easy app creation has lagged a bit behind in this field, but that has changed dramatically over the course of the last few years. You can now use a range of sites to whip up an app in no time, without having extensive computer skills, and weâll take a look at five of those sites below.
Of course, the kind of apps you get from these tools tend to be on the relatively simple side. Youâll still need to be able to code or hire an app-development company to create more complex apps and games. But for simple form- or information-based apps, these services will do just fine. Specifically, youâll be able to create an app that might not make you millions, but they will add value to existing businesses or websites. If you have a content-based site or an online store, for example, you can create an app that lets people shop more easily or sort through your articles with a press of the screen.
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Getting Started
Before we get on to comparing the services you can use to create your own app, youâll need credentials as an app publisher, so that you can distribute and/or sell your creations.
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To be able to distribute apps made for Android through the Google Play store, you need to sign in here with your Google account, accept the terms and pay a $25 registration fee. To become an app seller for the iOS platform through the iTunes store, youâll need to head here, pay a $99 annual fee and sign in using your Apple credentials. After those initial fees, both Google and Apple take 30 percent of sales once your app is published.
Five App Development Platforms
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AppyPie. The tagline for this web-based app builder is: âMake an app, easy as pie.â Say what you will about the slogan, but itâs accurate; you really can whip up an app on this site without too many clicks, or design knowledge. You start by choosing your appâs category, and then a basic layout. Then, by clicking through a demo of the app on a sample on-screen phone, you can adjust text, and add pages, colors, photos, media, links and more. You have pretty robust control over the flow and architecture of the app, and the site is extremely responsive.
Pricing ranges from a free plan that embeds AppyPie advertising in your app and only lets you tweak your creation for 48 hours, to $15, $30 and $50 monthly plans that offer unlimited app editing and stepped-up platform distribution. The $15 plan, for instance, allows you to build apps for Android only, while the $50 plan will cover all the major platforms including Microsoft and Apple.
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AppMakr. With a decidedly less-slick interface than AppyPie, AppMakr is nonetheless easy to use. It excels in making icon-based apps. Just like AppyPie, youâre given a mock-up of a smartphone and youâre able to drag icons directly onto its face from a menu of choices at the right. Unlike AppyPie however, apps built through this tool are better at linking to content rather than providing native content. Drag the âblogâ icon over for example, and youâll be asked to enter your blogâs RSS feed address. Same for the ânewsâ function. But if you have an existing blog or website, this provides an easy way to take it mobile. You can also change the look of each icon and customize the background image. Changes to architecture, however, arenât as robust as they are with AppyPie.
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Using the free version of AppMakr will let you create an ad-free mobile website. Two dollars per month lets you develop an Android-only app with AppMakr branding; $39 per month lets you create up to ten Android apps with no branding and lets you publish your app wherever youâd like, as you get the source code; and $99 per year lets you publish an Android app in the Google Play store or an iOS app on iTunes with no branding.
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AppInstitute. This is another extremely user-friendly online app builder. One differentiating factor is that when you begin your app-building process on this site, youâll be asked to choose a template based on your goals, such as: âSell Stuff,â âGet Bookingsâ or âEarn Loyalty.â After clicking on the tab that best represents your needs, you can further hone your app by choosing the proper category such as âchurch,â âcoffee shop,â or âgood cause.â
Another unique feature of AppInstitute is that after you choose your basic template, you can enter your phone number and youâll be instantly sent a link to your pre-made app. Of course, youâll want to spend some time making it your own, but itâs a fun feature to get the instant gratification of a working app in seconds. (Of course, itâs also a clever way by which AppInstitute gets ahold of your phone number.)
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While AppInstitute is generally well-regarded, in our testing we did find that it was slow to respond, often glitchy and a bit counterintuitive in terms of customizing your app. Still, there are good videos and a live chat service that can help you get rolling fairly quickly.
This service is also by far the most expensive we tested, with monthly plans ranging from $40 to $115 per month. In order to publish an Android-friendly app, youâll need to shell out $70 per month, with the $115 price point gaining you access to an iOS version of your app as well.
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GoodBarber. Despite its strange name, GoodBarber is a solid choice for online app building. It puts the smartphone mock-up front and center in its design ontology, so you can click through the app as if it were live and see your changes take effect immediately. While this makes understanding the logic of your app quite easy, it makes designing it a little more difficult.
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Say you wanted to change a block of text in the app. It would make sense that all you would need to do would be to click on it. This, however, doesnât work. Because the app is âlive,â clicking on anything takes you to the relevant section of the app. To make changes to sections, you need to use the navigation tools at the right which break the design process into different chunks such as menus, icons and sections. This takes a little getting used to, and requires more clicking around than the other apps mentioned here, but once you get the hang of it, the level of customization possible is truly impressive.
GoodBarber also offers app checking tools, so that before you are ready to publish an Android version of your app for instance, it would give you a checklist of completed items and those that still need to be fixed (such as naming your app). The site offers a 30-day trial after which it costs $32 per month for an Android app and $96 per month for Android and iOS.
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GameSalad. While information-based apps can help add value to your business, games offer you a chance to create an app that truly holds the potential to earn money. A quick look at the top-grossing iOS apps on website AppAnnie, shows that over half are games, with other top spots largely occupied by free entertainment and social media apps like Hulu, Netflix and Facebook.
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If you want to make your own game and try to sell it through iTunes or Google Play, GameSalad offers a great way to give it a go. Unlike the other app creators in this list, GameSalad consists of software you need to download to your desktop. The company says that you could create a game in as little time as an hour, but in reality, it will take a bit longerâeven if you start with one of their pre-made but customizable games. The software isnât quite drag and drop, so youâll want to spend some time going through the video tutorials to get a hang for the system.
When you are ready to publish your game, a fee of $29 per month will get the job done and let you publish to all the major platforms including Android and iOS.
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Building your first mobile app can be a challenging experience. To get you started Iâve compiled this 12-step introductory guide. This article is part two. If you haven't yet, be sure to read How To Build Your First Mobile App In 12 Steps: Part 1 to review steps 1 through 6.Step 8: Design the App âSkinsâ
âSkinsâ are what designers/developers call the individual screens needed for the app. Your designerâs job is now to come up with high-resolution versions of what were previously your wireframes.
In this step it is crucial to include all comments from your prototype testers (see Step 6). After all, you are trying to build an app your target audience is actually going to use, therefore their feedback should guide you toward to the perfect UI-User Interface.
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Step 9: Test Again (Yes, Again)
Once your designer has completed the design skins, youâre up for another round of testing. Donât think that you are all set with what youâve done so far. For the first time you have your actual app concept completely in place, all the graphics inserted, and all text as it should be. Which means you can finally test your app in the way it will really look and feel.
To test your app, two great testing apps come to mind: Solidify and Framer. These apps allow you to import your app designs and add links where needed to test the flow from screen to screen.
Donât confuse this stage with Step 6 (wireframing). At first it was about creating the basic look and feel of the app. Here youâve implemented the actual design and made it clickable.
Step 10: Revise and Continue to Build
Once youâve given your design a test drive and collected more feedback from future users, you should use these new ideas to polish your app idea. You can still ask your designer to change the layout, and you can still tell your developer to change something on the back end.
Step 11: Refine Each Detail
As you continue to build you will want to have a constant look at your new app. On Android, for example, it is easy to install your app file on a device to test its functionality in a live environment. iOS is different. There you will require a platform like TestFlight to download and test your app as it proceeds.
How To Earn Money Creating Own App Free
This step is the last step in the app development process. You can monitor your app all the way until your product is complete.
Step 12: Release Time!
App marketplaces have very different policies when it comes to publishing a new app. Android, for example, does not review newly submitted apps right away. Theyâll pass by at some point and check it out but you are able to instantly add your app to Google Play.
iOS, once again, is different here. Apple reserves the right to review and approve your app before it can go live. There is no set timeframe for this, but you can expect at least a week before you hear back from them.
To overcome this hold there is something else you can do: submit your app to PreApps. As you can probably guess from its name, PreApps is an app marketplace that gives developers the opportunity to reach early adopters (a.k.a. 'lead users' -- people who like to be first at trying out new inventions) and receive some of the very earliest feedback on your masterpiece.
Once youâve gotten your app listed on the app stores of choice, it is time to market your app and get it seen, but that's a topic for a whole other future article!
Read all of Melanie Haselmayrâs articles on AllBusiness.com.
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How To Earn Money On Apps
Here's the twist: Neither Raben nor Carolan are programmers. Their apps were built with Google's App Inventor, one of a wave of new tools designed to allow people without programming experience to create apps and games for their phones and tablets. 'That thing caught on like wildfire in the forums,' says Jason Tyler, author of the recently released instructional book Google App Inventor for Android. 'This is not just for us nerds.'
GameSalad is a similar application for Mac OS, which streamlines the process of creating Web, iPad and, of course, iPhone games to a point where nonprogrammers have found success in the notoriously crowded App Store. Jennifer McGettigan, who uses GameSalad primarily to create children's games (a typical title: Fairytale Preschool! ), found the tool while employed as a nurse. 'When I started using GameSalad,' she says, 'I had never seen a line of code.' McGettigan now has more than 50 games in the App Store, and creating iPhone games has become her full-time job.
How It Works
Smartphones may inspire countless 'wouldn't it be cool if..' moments, but the gulf between those who can conceive of apps and those who can build them is expansive, and filled with codeâcold, syntactical, inscrutable code. This barrier is nearly universal. IPhone developers should be familiar with a programming language called Objective-C. Android developers should be versed in Java. Anyone who wants to code an app for Microsoft Windows Phone had better know C#.
What App Inventor and GameSalad do is automate the creation of code, hiding it from view. Much the way Photoshop is an application for editing images, and iMovie is an application for creating videos, App Inventor and GameSalad are applications for creating.. apps.
GameSalad's jarringly stripped-down appearance belies its capabilities. It comes preloaded with sample apps, giving users the ability to tinker immediately. Basic but functional versions of common types of gamesâtop-down racers, variations of the Angry Birds concept, and plenty of shootersâprovide jumping-off points for a fairly wide range of projects.
Using GameSalad feels more like editing a PowerPoint presentation than developing a mobile application. Two hours after opening the program, I had my own side-scrolling space shooter in the can. It wasn't quite ready for the App Storeâmy 'spaceship' was a crude cutout of my head, and my 'laser battles' took place against a photo background of my living roomâbut nonetheless, it was a game. A few more days of practice could have netted something presentable. It's easy to let your imagination run away with GameSalad, which is probably the point.
Google's App Inventor is a bit more intimidating. A Web-based tool, Google's take on DIY app creation feels more like a simplified version of a traditional developer tool than a piece of consumer software. While it doesn't ask of its users any specific programming knowledge, it does require them to haveâor be willing to developâsome understanding of the basics of app architecture, such as how the code interacts with the elements that end up onscreen. What keeps this sometime abstract experience grounded is one novel feature: App Inventor connects directly to your Android phone in real time, allowing you to test your app on your phone as you make changes.
Using App Inventor can feel like an academic exercise. While primarily intended to open up app creation to the greater public, App Inventor is also touted by Google as a teaching tool, bolstered by a tremendous collection of how-to guides, many of them geared toward absolute beginners. My entire time with App Inventor was spent with a tutorial open in a second window, and I also availed myself of guides produced by a large and sympathetic online community. In the end, I got a functional piece of software, but it was several steps shy of a polished app.
What to Expect
For nonprogrammers hoping to get into app development for mobile devices, GameSalad and App Inventor extend a welcome lifeline. The apps they produce, though, are inherently limited. In other words, established programmers and game designers have nothing to fear. Not yet.
GameSalad and, to a lesser extent, App Inventor trade certain capabilities for ease of use. For many types of projects, this isn't an issue. A well-designed 2D shoot'em-up game made in GameSalad can be just as fun and rich as a similar app developed with more advanced tools.
But many of the most popular titles in the App Store and Android Market, such as 3D games and full-feature social-networking apps, are impossible to build with a modular, drag-and-drop creation tool. Even new developers might chafe against the constraints; GameSalad, for example, uses a single physics model for object movement and interaction. The physics engine may feel natural in a Pong-style game, but if you need to design, say, a complex suspension system for a car game, you'll find your options are limited.
For Google, beginner-friendly app creation is still an experiment. App Inventor is offered for free, as is membership in Google's Android Developer program, but the company doesn't yet officially endorse the uploading of App Inventor apps to the Android Market. There are various tutorials and services available to help prepare apps for publication, but this omission seems like a tacit acknowledgment that App Inventor isn't quite ready for the big time.
GameSalad, on the other hand, is explicitly geared toward releasing titles in Apple's mobile and desktop app stores. The free version of the app produces games ready to be submitted to the App Store. The paid version, which costs $499 a year, lets you insert Apple iAds into applications, an important and increasingly common source of revenue. Then, of course, there's Apple's iOS developer feeâ$99 per yearâto distribute any apps through the App Store.
While it's possible to make real money using these toolsâMcGettigan says she is happy with the income from her apps, and that GameSalad enabled her to achieve a lifelong dream of working in the gaming industryâsuch stories are the exception rather than the rule. But that's unfortunately true for trained programmers, too.
In the end, the biggest drawback to DIY-app-creation software is the high expectations it inspires. App Inventor and GameSalad may topple formidable entry barriers for newbies, but writing code is just one of a heap of challenges facing a new developer. These tools won't guarantee an app is attractive, intuitively designed, enjoyable to use or marketable. They can help make sure good app concepts don't get needlessly shelved; coming up with that winning idea, however, is still up to you.
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