Category Archives: iPhone Development

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Rapid Geosearch for Mobile App Developers

Geosearching a large database of places, for places which are near your current location, is a surprisingly wicked theoretical problem, especially for mobile app developers. Understanding the problem, and how the solution works, has important applications which go well beyond geosearch.

The difficulty is the search is two dimensional. To find a set of places which are near your current location, you have to match both latitude and longitude. But there is no relationship between latitude and longitude. You cannot infer a longitude, if you have the latitude, they are separate entities. Latitude and longitude are independent search criteria.

Why independent search criteria are a challenge

Say you want to find all places which are within a kilometre of your current location. Given your current location, you can easily convert a latitude into a range of values which is roughly a kilometre wide. Similarly you can convert a longitude into a range of values which is roughly a kilometre wide. But this is where the trouble starts.

Once you have your strip of land, you can search for places within that strip which are also within the range of longitudes you want. But consider what that strip of land you just requested actually represents; if you ask the database for all results within a range of latitude values, what you are actually asking for is all of the locations within a strip of land which encircles the entire world.

If your database contains millions of places, and you ask your database to return all the places within a world encompassing strip of land, your intermediate search result may contain many thousands of candidate places. If you started with latitude, filtering this long list of latitude candidates, for places which are also within the desired longitude range, can place impractical demands on your database’s computation capability – particularly if you are using a mobile device to perform the search.

Searching Latitude and Longitude, for nearby places.

Searching Latitude and Longitude, for nearby places.

Performing a traditional search, where you start with the first search criterion (the latitude), then refine the search using the second criterion (the longitude), is clearly very inefficient. What we need is a method of filtering the list, which allows us to efficiently apply both latitude and longitude to our search simultaneously.

R-Tree – A search which applies multiple criteria simultaneously

The secret of R-Tree is that it divides the problem domain into a series of concentric boxes. Each box contains smaller boxes, until at the end of the search, the last “branch” of the “tree”, the final box contains the results you want.

Even though the top level outer boxes contain thousands of results, the mobile app does not have to look at all of these results – all the mobile app sees is a manageable series of boxes. Searching the boxes is like opening a set of Russian dolls, one inside the other. The final results of your search, the results which the mobile app needs to display, are inside the innermost box.

Most importantly, defining the search algorithm as opening a series of concentric boxes, each box closer to the results you want, means you are applying both indices, latitude and longitude, simultaneously – which allows much more efficient filtering of results, than would be the case with searching latitude and longitude independently (world encompassing strips of land).

R-Tree search divides the problem in a series of concentric boxes.

R-Tree search divides the problem into a series of concentric boxes.

R-Tree your next mobile app development project!

The best part of R-Tree search is that it is fully supported by sqlite, which in turn is fully supported by the iPhone App Development and Android App Development environments.

You do not have to build the concentric index boxes yourself, the Sqlite R-Tree package will take care of the technical details of building and maintaining an efficient R-Tree index to your places data. All you have to do is specify which fields should be part of the R-tree search index (in this case, the fields you want are latitude and longitude).

If you wish to develop an Android App or iPhone App, which requires blinding fast geosearch, or if you have an esoteric data search problem which just doesn’t seem to be responding to normal database performance tuning, consider R-Tree – it might be the solution you need.

And of course, R-Tree is also well supported by server technology – so you can, if you choose, perform blinding fast geosearches using a server call, rather than embedding the data in your mobile app.

If you would like to know more about R-tree, and multiple independent database index search techniques and tricks, contact me for more information.

Apple iWatch App Development: The great unknown

Apple iWatch App Development - Opportunity or Timewaster?

Apple iWatch – Opportunity or Timewaster?

Will people buy Apple iWatches? Will users download Apple iWatch Apps, rewarding Apple iWatch App Developers for their time and effort? How will the public respond to Apple iWatch?

The truth is nobody knows. But the war of ideas and predictions is heating up fast as release day in April approaches.

Apple creative director Ken Segall has been mounting a spirited defence of iWatch against sharp criticism of its perceived battery life and cost issues.

You have to give CNN’s David Goldman a little credit.

With Apple’s next potential revolution still a few months away, he’s going for the gusto.

He’s not just saying that the Apple Watch won’t be as big as previous Apple hits. He’s saying the Apple Watch will flop. Period.

That’s the kind of bravado we like to see. Especially since no product in modern Apple history has ever flopped, despite the many who have predicted otherwise.

Read More…

iWatch battery life – showstopper or inconvenience?

Fighting words from one of the top Apple execs. But I’m not so sure. One of the reasons the late Steve Jobs resisted embracing 3G in iPhones was 3G is a battery killer. Public pressure forced Apple into the 3G race, as users refused to tolerate the slower cellular 2G network speed, but for a time iPhone batteries took a dive – the first Apple 3G models, you were lucky if they lasted the day.

It is this precise criticism of iWatch – the short battery life, 10 hours or less by some reports, which I think is likely to make or break the first generation iWatches. Can you really tolerate a watch, no matter how smart, which will last less than a day of normal use? I mean, we’re all used to plugging our mobiles into the charger when we get to the office – but will we remember to plug in the watch?

There are a large number of people who will buy the new iWatch because it is the next shiny. As a techie geek, I’m fighting the inner temptation to camp out in front of the Apple store. But the rational part of me is telling me to hang back, wait and see.

Of course, I might still release an iWatch App project or two.

The risk of letting an opportunity slip

One of my biggest regrets is I didn’t hop on the Bitcoin revolution. Back in 2009, I downloaded a Bitcoin miner, I had a spare PC – I spent a few minutes trying to make it work, then got frustrated, bored with what seemed like pointless effort, and promptly forgot about it. Back then, in 2009, a normal PC could easily mine several hundred bitcoins over a few months. They were a curio, worthless, a geek toy. The people who stuck with it, who spent a few extra minutes making their new bitcoin software run, are now multimillionaires.

Similarly, nobody in the app world can forget the early days of the iPhone App developer goldrush. It is still possible to make serious money with iPhone apps, but in the early days it was ridiculous – pretty nearly every app written in the first wave made the authors a fortune. The app store was almost empty, so the competition was close to non-existent.

Will iWatch app development be another gold rush? Maybe. Will you be able to live with yourself, if the iWatch pioneers make a fortune, and you hesitated? When in retrospect it will all have seemed so obvious?

If you would like to discuss iWatch app development, please contact me, for more information.

A Freemium Mobile App Development backlash?

A gathering backlash against some freemium mobile apps?

A gathering backlash against some freemium mobile apps?

Freemium Mobile Apps – apps which are free to download, but which offer in-app purchases. A few days ago, I discussed different ways of monetising apps, and how the Freemium model appears to dominate the industry.

However there are signs of a potentially serious backlash against tactics some freemium mobile app developers are using, to encourage users to purchase in-game options.

According to Game Revolution

… The thing is, our industry has become bad; society’s view of our industry has become bad. We try to get as much money out of the player as possible. That’s what the job of the [casual] game designer has become. That’s how people see us.

…What we’re doing is selling games to children. I think it’s so disgusting. We sell them $100 packages of fake currency and make their parents pay because we can easily manipulate them. This is the thinking of the gambling industry.

Read More…

To put this into perspective, not every iPhone App project or Android App project which contains in-app purchases is “evil”. If you want to give people a taste of your app’s functionality, then it is entirely reasonable to present basic functionality in a free mobile app, then encourage people to purchase additional capabilities. For example, Angry Birds – you could play a few levels on the free version of the game, then you could buy the “full” version, then there was ONE in-app purchase option – the “great eagle”, which allowed you to blast through frustratingly difficult levels, to see the next level. Good clean fun – simple costs, you know what you are buying.

But clearly there is a line which it is dangerous to cross. If your app targets children – encourages them to spend ridiculous sums of real money buying food bricks for their pet dragon or walrus or whatever, so their faithful electronic companion doesn’t starve and die, to me this is a high risk strategy. There’s a real risk your mobile game might end up at the top of someone’s list of evil. Such a design might even trigger a consumer campaign to remove your product from app store or play store.

My advice is, everything in moderation. By all means throw in a few in-app purchases – its a fantastic way of boosting revenue. Who knows what apps we would never have known, without the financial incentive provided by profits from in-app purchase options.

If you would like to discuss app monetisation strategies, please feel free to get in touch.

Fast Text Searching in a Mobile App

Searching large text fields (as in thousands of words) for small key phrases is traditionally a difficult problem, especially when the search has to be performed by a mobile app, using an Android or iPhone handset’s limited computing power.

Linear Text Search

Your mobile app could search for your key phrase by checking every letter in your text, as the possible starting point for the phrase you want to find. This works when the text you are searching is short – but if you are attempting to search many thousands of words of text, a linear search is slow, even at modern computing speeds.


Search: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Key Phrase: lazy dog
Algorithm: check each letter
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

Text Map Search

The alternative is to partially pre-run the search when developing the mobile app. You can’t predict the keywords a user will enter, but you can create a searchable text map of the relationships between words and phrases in the text to be searched, to allow code to rapidly search the map, rather than having to check every letter of every word of the text to be searched.


Search: The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Key Phrase: lazy dog
Algorithm: pre-run search
L -> La -> Lazy -> Lazy Dog

How do you pre-run a search? You could research efficient word search structures – suffix trees, and other exotic data representations. After a significant amount of effort you would be able to create a search engine, which was much faster than a linear search of every letter in your text.

Or you could use the full text index feature of the SQLite database engine, which is fully supported in both the Android App and iPhone App environments.

SQLite Full Text Index

The SQLite full text index engine is very fast – correctly configured, it can search 10s of megabytes of text stored in your mobile app, fast enough so your code can update a list of hits in realtime, as the user types into the search box (obviously its a bit smoother if the database search is running in a different thread). In my experience the limitation on search speed is usually how quickly your code can create tables of data to represent the search results, rather than executing the search itself – so during performance tuning, it is worth considering minimum phrase lengths (e.g. don’t start the search until the user has entered at least 3-4 characters), to limit the number of results which are likely to be generated by a given search.

Creating a SQLite Full Text Index table is very similar to creating a normal database table. If the text to be searched is fixed (i.e. doesn’t change when the mobile app is used), the text search SQLite database can be created when the app is built, and accessed immediately, as soon as the user starts the mobile app.

Other Full Text Index Options

Full Text Index databases are also well supported by web technology. On most Linux boxes you can choose between a SQLite Full Text Search Database or a MySQL Full Text Search Database.

The Next Step

If you are thinking of developing an iPhone app or Android App, or any other kind of mobile app, which needs to present users with the ability to search a large chunk of text very rapidly, please contact me, for advice on optimal ways of implementing such a search.

Trivia Crack – One of the most profitable mobile apps

Trivia Crack - a simple idea which has taken the mobile app game world by storm.

Trivia Crack – a simple idea which has taken the mobile app game world by storm.

When you think of blockbuster mobile app games, you normally think of huge hollywood budgets, million dollar special effects and 10s of thousands of hours of mobile app development effort.

The reality is, some of the biggest iPhone Apps and Android Apps are nothing of the sort – they are simple ideas which caught on, earning a fortune for their creators.

One of the biggest games to date is Trivia Crack – a mobile app based on the old favourite Trivial Pursuit.

According to Venture Beat

After catching on big time in the U.S. and Canada, Trivia Crack has expanded to countries like U.K. — and this is helping fuel its domination of the mobile app markets.

Trivia Crack is the top downloaded game on mobile in the world, according to developer Etermax and industry-tracking firm App Annie. Since its debut, this app has racked up more than 125 million downloads worldwide. It has also managed to reach the No. 1 spot on the overall app download chart in important countries like the United States and Canada. With mobile gaming revenue reaching $25 billion in 2014, Etermax carved out a piece of that for itself by appealing to casual players with a trivia app that hooks heavily into social media.

Trivia Crack pits players against their friends in a Trivial Pursuit-style quest of knowledge. It already has over 200,000 unique questions, and — thanks to its players — it gets 2,000 new questions every day.

Important Lessons

There are some important lessons we can learn from the success of the Trivia Crack game.

  1. The use of social media – friends challenge each other via social media, which helps to propel the explosive growth of app users
  2. The enlistment of users to supply new questions – these guys don’t even have to think up new questions themselves, they get their users to do it for free.
  3. Simplicity – the game doesn’t pack in every imaginable feature, or heavy servings of Hollywood Glitz, it is just Trivial Pursuit, with a few adaptions to make it more attractive in a mobile app environment.

If you have an idea for developing an iPhone App Game or Android App Game, and you are worried that your idea is too simple to work – please don’t let that stop you. Because when appealing to mobile users who are snatching a few few seconds from their busy schedule, simple is good. And if users like your idea, you could have a runaway success on your hands.

Contact Me to discuss your mobile app development idea now.

Where’s the money in Mobile App Development?

How to make money from mobile app development

How to make money from mobile app development

App Developer magazine has printed an excellent article which describes how some people are making vast fortunes from mobile app development.

According to App Developer magazine

Show Me the Money!

The profit model for apps has shifted dramatically in the last couple of years. Distimo’s Unveiling the Secrets behind App Store Category Dynamics report was very illuminating. It revealed that 90 percent of all revenue generated on Google Play and 74 percent of Apple App Store revenue in February 2014 came from games. In the consumer space, games are clearly where it’s at.

For business the rise of enterprise apps is an important trend. An interesting post at Developer Economics last year suggested that the average revenue per developer involved in app development is four times higher for the enterprise than for the consumer segment.

Obviously much depends on your skills, your ideas, and your contacts, but choosing your focus is only the beginning.

Mobile Apps are high risk, high reward. It takes careful planning, dedication and commitment to create a mobile app success. But for the owners of successful mobile apps, the profits can be extraordinary. For example, according to the article in App Developer magazine

… one of the top games right now is Supercell’s Clash of Clans, which makes more than $1 million per day.

A million dollars per day

How do you maximise your chance of your iPhone App development or Android App development being successful? The answer, as always, is do your homework. Research what the owners of successful apps are doing to achieve that success, and copy the elements of their success which are compatible with your iPhone App or Android App idea.

One of the most important decisions when developing a mobile app is the revenue model. According to App Developer magazine

When it comes to business models, for consumer apps there’s no contest. Premium apps with a price tag are fading fast. The freemium model, whereby the app is free at the point of download, but includes in-app purchases and sometimes advertising, is dominant.

The Distimo report found that 85 percent of iPhone apps and 78.6 percent of iPad apps are free with in-app purchases. That figure is even higher for Android. A special report from App Annie last June found that a staggering 98 percent of worldwide revenue on Google Play is generated by freemium apps, and 90 percent of those freemium apps are games.

Consumers are increasingly reluctant to spend money acquiring an app, but they are growing more willing to spend on content within apps, especially after they’ve invested some time.

In my experience, the number of downloads a mobile app achieves strongly influences the position of the mobile app’s listing in Apple App Store or Google Play Store. Free apps get a lot more downloads, which puts paid for apps at a potential disadvantage.

The Freemium mobile app model can overcome this disadvantage – with freemium, you get all the advantages of a free app, but you also create an opportunity to convince users to pay a fee for premium features.

I strongly recommend you read the Full Article, if you are serious about creating a profitable mobile app.

If you have an idea for an iPhone App or Android App, and would like to discuss various revenue models, and how they might be implemented, please Contact Me

Mobile App Development: Native or Web?

Web App vs Native Mobile App - a Big Development Decision

Web App vs Native Mobile App – an Important Development Decision

Software Development Times has written an excellent article about one of the important early development decisions which needs to be made when developing a mobile app – should you use native mobile app development tools, or should you present your app functionality using web technology – HTML, CSS and Javascript?

According to SDT:

Native apps maximize performance and user experience

Native development is, on average, the most widely adopted approach. Forrester’s latest Business Technographics Global Developer Survey found that, overall, developers build native apps 38% of the time, hybrid apps 22% of the time, and Web apps 27% of the time. That’s not surprising: Native apps offer a great combination of performance and user experience. And when done right, they deliver a high level of customer satisfaction compared to Web applications, as well as enable superior offline processing and storage capability.

But regardless of these benefits, native apps are a challenge to maintain. Developers we’ve worked with report porting costs of 50% to 70% of the cost of the original app for every new mobile operating system the app needs to run on. Plan to support iOS, Android, BlackBerry and Windows? That’s an increase in development costs of 150% to 210%.

Web apps minimize costs and improve agility

While developers on average spend more time building native apps, at least 74% spend time building with a Web-based approach. But with native’s advantages in performance and user satisfaction, why would anyone want to use Web technologies?

Unless an unlimited development budget is available, taking a native-only approach exceeds the reach of many development teams. A good rule of thumb is to estimate 20% to 25% in additional porting costs when using Web technologies, significantly less than the cost of an all-native approach.

Web Apps vs Native Apps

Web Apps, at least for some types of apps, offer a cost advantage if you plan to target a large number of mobile platforms (iOS, Android, Blackberry, Microsoft, etc.).

HOWEVER, web apps in my experience present a challenge if you want to create an app which appears to be native – you can spend a lot of time and effort making web buttons look exactly like native buttons, only to have all the rules change next time Apple or Android upgrade their operating system.

In addition, there are many types of app functionality which would perform poorly if implemented using web app technology. For example, if your app presents a long list of database entries, particularly if you want the contents of the database list to update automatically as the user types text into a search field, the inferior performance of web app technology very quickly becomes an issue – if your database contains more than a 50 entries, it is very difficult to make a web app provide acceptable search performance, without developing native mobile app components to augment the search – which kindof defeats the purpose of using web app technology.

In general I advise clients NOT to opt for the web app approach, unless the functionality of their mobile app is simple and not computationally demanding. While the lure of being able to port the bulk of your app to different mobile platforms with minimal changes might seem attractive, in my experience the risk of unsatisfactory mobile app performance, and the difficulty of achieving that vital last 1% of polish to make the web app into a compelling user experience, more than outweighs any benefits.

The Facebook Web App Experience

I’m not alone in my assessment of the significant challenges associated with creating high quality web apps. Facebook chose to redevelop their web app into a native iPhone app, because of the stability and performance issues their team encountered during development of their web app.

https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/under-the-hood-rebuilding-facebook-for-ios/10151036091753920

Scaling up with HTML5

As mobile usage exploded over the last few years, our priority was to ensure that regardless of device, platform, network, or region, Facebook users had a good experience on their mobile devices. To support thousands of devices and multiple mobile platforms, we leveraged HTML5 to build and distribute Facebook mobile experiences across iOS and other platforms.

By allowing us to write once and ship across multiple platforms, HTML5 has historically allowed us to keep the Facebook mobile experience current and widely available, and has been instrumental in getting us to where we are today. We chose to use HTML5 because not only did it let us leverage much of the same code for iOS, Android, and the mobile web, but it also allowed us to iterate on experiences quickly by launching and testing new features without having to release new versions of our apps.

So while utilizing web technology has allowed us to support more than 500 million people using Facebook on more than 7000 supported devices, we realized that when it comes to platforms like iOS, people expect a fast, reliable experience and our iOS app was falling short. Now that our mobile services had breadth, we wanted depth. So, we rewrote Facebook for iOS from the ground up (I really did open up Xcode and click “New Project”) with a focus on quality and leveraging the advances that have been made in iOS development.

(Re-)Building for speed

One of the biggest advantages we’ve gained from building on native iOS has been the ability to make the app fast. Now, when you scroll through your news feed on the new Facebook for iOS, you’ll notice that it feels much faster than before. One way we have achieved this is by re-balancing where we perform certain tasks. For example, in iOS, the main thread drives the UI and handles touch events, so the more work we do on the main thread, the slower the app feels. Instead, we take care to perform computationally expensive tasks in the background. This means all our networking activity, JSON parsing, NSManagedObject creation, and saving to disk never touches the main thread.

To give another example, we use Core Text to lay out many of our strings, but layout calculations can quickly become a bottleneck. With our new iOS app, when we download new content, we asynchronously calculate the sizes for all these strings, cache our CTFramesetters (which can be expensive to create), and then use all these calculations later when we present the story into our UITableView.

If you would like advice on whether your proposed iPhone App or Android App is a good fit for being developed as a web app, or whether you should choose the native mobile app development option, please Contact Me

iOS App Development – More Revenue than Hollywood

Apps vs Holly - the rapid growth of mobile app development.

iOS App Development vs Hollywood – the rapid growth of mobile app development.

Last year, software development – iOS app development – generated 14.3 billion dollars, more revenue than Hollywood.

According to ReadWrite:

As analyst Horace Dediu pointed out on his Asymco blog, iOS apps drew in more bucks last year than the movie business. Earlier this month, Apple announced iPhone and iPad developers raked in as much as $10 billion in 2014. Tack on the 30% or so that Apple itself made on top, and the roughly $14.3 billion exceeds the $10 billion or so Hollywood made at the U.S. box office.

Its not just the numbers which are astounding, its the meteoric pace at which mobile app development has overtaken the movie business which has shocked observers. As the graph above shows, just 2 years ago the app business was half the size of today. The rapid growth trend shows no sign of slowing down.

The interesting question in my mind is – just how long will Hollywood stay in the movie business, given that the skills required for mobile app development and movie production overlap in so many ways?

Will we see a slow “brain drain”, as the best Hollywood film engineers are tempted by the fabulous rewards of mobile app development? Or will we see a great convergence, as Hollywood and mobile app developers join forces to ensure that every movie has an app, or apps become more movie like? Or movies become more app like?

What is clear is there is still potential to make a lot of money developing Android apps and developing iPhone apps. And, just as it is in Hollywood, its not always the big production houses which take the prize – there is plenty of room for newcomers to make their mark, and cash in on the multi-billion dollar mobile app development market.

How to write a mobile app

A nice graphic to denote writing your own app

Writing your own app can save you money and be a lot of fun

Writing an iPhone App or Android App is expensive. Even the simplest mobile apps usually need at least a week or two of skilled developer time to construct.

If you have technical skills, perhaps past coding experience, one obvious solution to save money is to write your own app.

Why write your own app? Beside saving money, writing your own app can be a lot of fun. Writing an app is a creative experience, like painting a picture or composing a song.

How do you start?

You could do what I did – invest hundreds of hours of your time into learning how to create apps for your mobile app platform of choice.

Or you could ask an expert for help – you could cut through all the time consuming trial and error, and ask me to help set up your development environment.

I can get you started with app development essentials:

  • How to set up your development environment.
  • How to create your first app
  • How to transition between different app forms
  • How to create fancy graphics and transitions
  • How to package your app for publication on app store
  • What is the best development option for leveraging your previous coding skills

How long will it take?

The length of time it takes to get started with app development depends on your previous coding experience, and what mobile app platform you want to start with.

For example, if you have a background in developing web apps, you could leverage those skills by using a cross platform development environment like Cordova, which provides a framework for creating an app using HTML web pages.

If you have a choice of starting with iPhone or Android, I recommend you start with iPhone – though the Apple development environment only runs on Apple Mac computers. The Android app development environment is more difficult to set up than the iPhone app development environment, and creating your first Android app is a steeper initial learning curve. However, once you are past the initial learning curve, both environments are very similar in terms of the effort required to create an app.

If part of your app is too complicated for your current level of experience, I’m happy to assist, by creating blocks of code which you can insert into your app. But you can still potentially save a bundle by developing as much of your app as you can, yourself.

Lesson Plan

My recommendation is to start by booking 3 x one hour sessions, spaced 1 week apart.

  1. First Lesson – setting up your mobile app development environment.
  2. Second Lesson – developing your first app
  3. Third Lesson – deploying your app to app store or play store

You can book additional lessons as required. I charge $100 + GST per one hour session. The lessons are conducted using Skype, because Skype lets you share your computer screen, so I can see exactly what is happening, and give you realtime advice on how to achieve you mobile app development goals.

Contact me now for more information on how to develop your own app.

The Best iPhone App and iPad App Games of 2014

The Guardian has published a list of the best iPhone and iPad games of 2014.

Some of the games are obvious – developments of the Angry Birds and Candy Crush mobile app franchises, feeding the insatiable demand from fans for new variations of these mega games.

Others are much less obvious – my favourite from the less obvious list is “Papers Please”, an iPhone App in which you play a Soviet style border agent charged with examining the papers of potential subversives who want to enter your glorious Communist nation. I mean, who would have thought such a crazy idea would win a string of awards, and become one of the most popular games on App Store? The answer, of course, is whoever commissioned the creation of the Papers Please mobile app, and followed their dream to its successful conclusion.

App Store Screenshot from the Papers Please game.

App Store Screenshot from the Papers Please game.

What is more than obvious from the list, is there is still plenty of room at the top. Even simple iPhone App and Android App ideas sometimes hit the big time, as was demonstrated by the iconic iPhone App Bubble Ball. Bubble Ball, which for a short time knocked Angry Birds off the top of the chart, was created in just a couple of weeks by 14 year old Robert Nay. The game has been downloaded over 16 million times. The basic game is free, but clever use of in-app purchases to unlock new levels, has also unlocked substantial wealth for the creator of the game.

Who knows what next year’s top iPhone App and Android App games will be? I’m sure we’ll see new versions of tried and trusted mega games, but there will also be surprises, totally unexpected ideas which take the mobile app world by storm.

One of those winning, wealth creating iPhone App or Android App ideas could be your mobile app idea.

Contact Me if you would like to transform your idea into a mobile app. It might be your app which appears on the list of award winning ideas for 2015.