Easy Peasy iPhone and Android App Creation. For Dummies.

June 6, 2014 8:18 AM

I'm not looking to create the next Flappy Bird and make $50k a month, I'm just looking to create apps that go with my published books, and man, is there a lot of choices out there. Help me suss them out!

What I'd love to use is something similar to AppMaker or iBuildApp, where you click and drag and Hey Presto! You've got an app ready for Play and iTunes.

But reading the fine print, there seems to be ongoing costs associated with these folks. It's almost like they are an intermediary between you and the above stores and the minute you stop paying their annual or monthly or one time fee, your app disappears from the stores.

Am I reading this correctly?

My apps will be predominantly text and photo based, with the ability to enter and save text on a daily basis.

My hunch is that I'm missing something. I'm a member of Udemy, so if there's a course there that you'd recommend, they are having a 75% off sale.

I welcome any input - articles, courses, websites, books - that will give me the most bang for my limited programming and graphic design buck.

posted by John Kennedy Toole Box to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

Who is going to be entering and saving the text on a daily basis? If it's you and this is basically just an informative type thing (blog, etc) and there won't be a need for user interaction then you can create a website that works for phones. That way you don't have to make one app for iPhones and one for Androids and all that.

What you want is a "responsive" design theme (there are a bunch of these out there for Wordpress for $50-$100). This will work as a regular website and will scale down to work on a phone as well without you having to make two sites. Once you pay for the template, you'd just need to buy a domain and pay for hosting which is pretty cheap.
posted by dawkins_7 at 8:25 AM on June 6, 2014

Response by poster: dawkins_7: the end user/purchaser would be entering text on a daily basis, similar to keeping a diary or journal, and would need the ability to save that text and go back and forth to review it, if they wanted to. Thank you for your answer!
posted by John Kennedy Toole Box at 8:29 AM on June 6, 2014

Well, Apple just announced a new programming language, Swift, which, among other things, is designed to make iPhone app creation much easier for first-time developers.

I haven't tried it out yet, but it sounds like it might fit your needs.
posted by mekily at 12:26 AM on June 7, 2014