Developers Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Apple announces Apple Design Award winners at WWDC 2013

by Kelly Hodgkins (Jun 10th, 2013)

The WWDC keynote may be over, but the developer's conference is just getting underway. First on tap is the Apple Design Awards, which recognize the best of the best in the iOS and OS X App Store. The initial list, as reported by the official App Store twitter account, is presented below. ...

50 billion apps downloaded, $10 billion paid to devs

by Michael Grothaus (Jun 10th, 2013)

Tim Cook has just announced that over 50 billion apps have been downloaded from the App Store. The store now has over 900,000 apps, with 375,000 of those apps iPad-only. Currently there are over 575 million iTunes accounts. Cook has also announced that over $10 billion has been paid out to ...

Apple announces it has 6 million registered developers

by Kelly Hodgkins (Jun 10th, 2013)

Apple kicked off WWDC with its typical heap of numbers about the developer community, Apple retail and more. At WWDC, participants traveled from more than 66 countries to attend, with 64 percent attending for the first time. The developer program has over 6 million registered developers, with ...

App Camp for Girls would introduce girls to coding

by Mike Schramm (Jun 4th, 2013)

The App Camp for Girls is a recently unveiled Indiegogo project that's designed to provide support for young girls interested in putting together iPhone and mobile apps. The camp itself is planned for a run in Portland later this year, and will allow girls to go through all of the steps of ...

Terraria digging its way into mobile platforms

by Mike Schramm (Jun 3rd, 2013)

Terraria is a Steam title that just recently arrived on consoles, and now publisher 505 Games has announced that it's coming to iOS as well. The game is a 2D variant of the Minecraft-style sandbox genre, where players can hack away at squares of various types, recombining and reusing them to ...

Burstly restructures, now offers three services for code-to-ship functionality

by Mike Schramm (May 21st, 2013)

Burstly acquired the beta testing service TestFlight just a few months ago, and TestFlight released a mobile analytics service called FlightPath soon after that. Now, Burstly has announced that it is restructuring its offerings, to set up a full set of services to take developers from developing ...

Unity makes mobile tools free for small devs

by Mike Schramm (May 21st, 2013)

Unity has announced that it's making its mobile game development tools free to use for most independent and small studios. Unity has always been a popular engine both for mobile game development and for cross-platform game creation, but up until now, you had to pay about $800 to actually publish ...

WWDC 2013 now sold out

by Kelly Hodgkins (Apr 25th, 2013)

WWDC tickets went on sale today, and the event sold out within minutes. This year, Apple developers were prepared to buy their tickets as the company pre-announced the ticket sales one day in advance. In previous years, the conference was announced and tickets went on sale at the same ...

Google Drive adds apps folders and customer properties for developers

by Kelly Hodgkins (Apr 5th, 2013)

Google realizes the importance of its Drive online file storage service in our always-on, always-connected world. To make Drive better for users and developers alike, Google has added two new features, app data folders and custom properties, to its Drive SDK. The app data folder serves as a ...

Matt Rix and Owen Goss prepare for a Snow Siege

by Mike Schramm (Mar 26th, 2013)

After a long absence from the App Store, developer Matt Rix will soon be back with Snow Siege, a game that's the result of a new collaborative effort between Rix and Owen Goss called Milkbag Games. I met up with Rix at GDC this week to talk about the new game and how it all came together. Rix ...

FlightPath from TestFlight features realtime analytics for developers

by Mike Schramm (Mar 21st, 2013)

TestFlight has long been known by developers as a very useful tool for testing iOS apps (even outside of Apple's distribution system), and for a while now there's also been a TestFlight SDK, which developers can insert into their app code to track various testers and their actions in the app. ...

Study: Only 16% of users will retry a malfunctioning app

by Kelly Hodgkins (Mar 12th, 2013)

Developers -- first impressions are important when you are selling an app. According to a new study by Compuware that was reported by TechCrunch, you only have one chance, maybe two, to get a customer to become a regular user of your app. If glitches force a customer to try your app a third or ...

Mothership releases Prepo 2, helps devs create app icons and retina artwork

by Kelly Hodgkins (Mar 7th, 2013)

One of the challenges facing developers isn't always writing clean code. A small development team also has to contend with images and icons, which are often the first things a user sees when he stumbles upon your app and takes it on its maiden run. One app that promises to make artwork and ...

Daily iPhone App: Real Racing 3 is a showcase of the best (and not quite) that iOS has to offer

by Mike Schramm (Feb 28th, 2013)

Here's the bottom line on this one, right away: Real Racing 3 is an amazing game, and EA has put it on the App Store for free. Go grab it and be awed, right now. That said, I do have one issue with this game, and it's that I'm actually a terrible driver. I do fine on real roads at ...

Apple rejecting iOS apps for "cookie tracking"

by Kelly Hodgkins (Feb 26th, 2013)

Apple is moving developers towards adopting the company's own iOS 6 tracking technology and not their homegrown methods. One of these alternative techniques is cookie tracking and, according to a report in TechCrunch, Apple may be rejecting apps that use this method. To understand how we got ...