Posts tagged with fotofling
Apr 12th, 2010 by flingsoft
In the beginning, the idea was simple… find a hole in the iPhone application landscape and fill it with something people needed. This hasn’t changed much obviously, but the amount of gaps in those first six months were so much greater than they are now. So we decided to tackle something that was relatively simple and something we felt was much needed. It was a way to get us into the store quickly, push us into iPhone development, and really just dip our toe in the water. From all of this, FotoFling was born. It was originally actually called MySnapFoo, so really happy that we changed that along the way.
FotoFling Development
FotoFling started off as something very very simple; “build MMS functionality into the iPhone platform”. Digging a little deeper, we soon discovered that our goals were much greater than what was allowed by the iPhone OS and the SDK. For example:
- No access to the SMS sub-system to send messages.
- Limited access to the user’s phonebook to negotiate between mobile/non-mobile numbers.
And so our first approach was very rudimentary. We decided to use a server side solution to handle the photo sending and make use of the e-mail to text messaging gateways of carriers to send the SMS notifications. This was for several reasons:
- Again, no access to the SMS sub-system to send messages.
- Cost of using API for SMS sending was fairly obscene depending on volume. Meaning, it just wouldn’t scale financially.
- No way to send an SMS other than using a major third party platform.
We pushed forward and soon our prototype was up and running. Our initial foray into iPhone design was complete with a clever catchy retro design and the functionality was pretty solid. We were ready to launch, it was June of 2008.
Apple’s Sign-Up and Review Process
Behind the scenes, we had been in the “sign-up” queue with a million other developers for months and after many back and forth exchanges with Apple developer support, we finally got our approval e-mail. It was clearly the most amount of time I have ever spent in order to give someone $99. So new developer account in hand, final binaries compiled, META information for the store ready and SUBMIT FOR APPROVAL. Woohoo!
And we waited…. for two months. Finally at the end of September 2008 (1 day after my birthday, Happy Birthday!) our little app showed up on the iTunes App Store. Priced at $1.99, we quickly moved to the top of the Photography category and ended up in the top 100 of the store overall.
We were feeling pretty good, but then things changed in the store.
Apple Policies Cost Us
Apple got lazy on policing apps that were submitted and soon we had a number of competitors. Competition is typically good, but most of the apps were from the same company and they actually were the SAME APP. Sure some were green and others red and had different names, but the interface was identical. This absolutely killed us in the long run and before two months was up there were over 20 apps that did the same thing, many of which were duplicates. They fixed this, but it took over 6 months to get there.
There is no way to tell how much launching earlier would have helped from the lack of competition, but this is all speculation. Also, the lack of real app monitoring post our release always would have cost us substantially. We are over it now, but it was brutal for all developers… not just us.
Customer Feedback
Now our app wasn’t perfect by any means, but some of the negative reactions from customers was almost insane and proves how well Apple does “hiding” the iPhone’s inadequacies. The biggest negative we heard was “this is not real MMS!”. The tricky thing here is that there was no way to do “real MMS” on the iPhone at this time. The whole point of what we were all doing was to give iPhone users an alternative way to accomplish this. So, while we were doing our best to put out a functional app that user’s would want to use, we got slammed in reviews (that you can’t respond to) about features that you literally couldn’t make the phone do. It was painful for us and we had no way in the iTunes store to tell our users…
FotoFling’s Status Now
The original FotoFling was AT&T only and that soon gave birth to FotoFling Worldwide. We dropped pricing, played with naming and UI elements, etc. We still get downloaded across the world which is strange given that we only support certain markets, but the prospect of “Free MMS” really appeals to some people.
To date, we have sent over one million messages and we are very proud of that fact.
We are not actively doing new development on this as the market is over-saturated and of course the fact that Apple has built MMS into the iPhone OS itself. We thank everyone who has purchased and will continue to support the infrastructure that runs this. We are actively working on new apps for ourselves and clients, but we will never forget how it all started!
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iphone, fotofling,
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