Wow what a year it’s been this year. I released my first iOS app, Oracle for Dota 2 o 18th of April. Since then I have released quite a few more apps, and got much more downloads then I ever expected.

These are my total downloads stats for my apps this year:

Looking back at when I first released my first app I was over the moon to get a few downloads, I never really expected these sort of results in my first year. I remember making my first cent from an app – even through it took months of work to get working, it was a huge milestone as I done all the work myself.

Since then I have earned some more with most of it being invested back into software to help me make apps or hardware for my Youtube channel such as a microphone. Currently I am using a headset which has the side effect of picking up keyboard typing sounds, lucky the software I use has noise cancellation which can get rid of 90% of this. I like the look of the Blue Yeti stand alone microphone but can’t really justify getting it at this stage!

Quite often I have also seen as I progressed people asking for advice and getting stuck on problems when making an app. The best advice I have to offer is persistence, and work on something your passionate about. For my first app I choose to do it about Dota 2 – a game I play quite often (Perhaps to much!), what I throught were simple ideas to implement ended up being much more complicated in practice. However by working through it step by step I was able to solve these problems – this can be applied to anythign your working on. Every App I develop has given me more skills for the next App, and also enabled me to create Apps faster then before – some of my top ones were only created in a few days.

This brings me to another thing I’ve been having lately. I’m not sure if there is a App Development term for it, but it’s called “Writers Block” – I haven’t really had any new App Ideas come about lately. So I have been focusing my efforts into my youtube channel to help people with swift development. Next year I am taking a course on Unity, so I’m hoping I can apply these skills to mobile games development for iOS and Android.

Until next time.