Developers Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

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 ...

Holiday iOS game sales: Sega, Square Enix and plenty more

by Mike Schramm (Dec 20th, 2012)

We told you to expect more holiday sales, and here they are. First up, Sega is hosting a round of holiday drops, including Jet Set Radio for just US$1.99, Crazy Taxi for the same price, and the new Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing for just 99 cents. Great prices on those great games, so ...

OpenFeint investor Peter Relan reveals plans for OpenKit, open-sourced back-end services

by Mike Schramm (Dec 12th, 2012)

Peter Relan is the founder of the social gaming incubator YouWeb, and he's probably most familiar to us here at TUAW as the main investor in OpenFeint, the huge social gaming network for iOS and other mobile platforms that was later bought by a Japanese company, and just this week is getting ...

Curiosity version 2 is 'what the experiment always should have been'

by Mike Schramm (Dec 11th, 2012)

Peter Molyneux's experimental game company 22 Cans is already hard at work on its next title, Godus, which it's trying to fund through Kickstarter. But the company's also still updating its first title, Curiosity, and version 2.0 has arrived on the App Store today. This is a significant update, ...

Former Halo creator working on Morning Star for iOS

by Mike Schramm (Dec 11th, 2012)

Alex Seropian is one of the first game developers I ever interviewed -- he's one of the original creators of Halo back at Bungie Studios (back when it was being planned as a real-time strategy title for the Mac), and I met up with him when I worked at a PR firm one floor below his company ...

GREE tweaks US operations, invests in MunkyFun

by Mike Schramm (Dec 6th, 2012)

GREE is a very large Japanese social network similar to Facebook or Twitter that has been trying to secure some mindspace in the West by acquiring game developers and their large audiences. The company is making a heavy investment in MunkyFun, makers of My Horse and Bounty Bots, for $3 million. ...