iPad app – Streaming Speech

I have spent the last month finding out about the price of building apps for the iPad, as I want to do a second edition of my first publication, ‘Streaming Speech: Listening and Pronunciation for Advanced Learners of English‘. Trawling around the internet, the lowest figure I found for a simple app was 4,000 (British pounds), and I discovered one company that said it would only deal with companies, not individuals, with a starting budget of 8,000. Then after-care (updating, fixing bugs) would be separately charged. Quotes for my specific project came in around 8,000-10,000 plus tax. Also interesting was the time-scale they mentioned to build the app – from four to eight weeks. That, to me, is very fast.

The received wisdom is that the expertise, and comparatively cheap labour, is to be found in India. But my style of work involves sitting down with someone who has expertise and talking with them about what I want, but being really open to suggestions from them. Some of the best ideas have come in situations where I have worked with a technology partner, and we have had a conversation in which they said: ‘Hmm that would be very difficult to do, but have you thought of doing this, which is really easy to do?’ Sharing the creative process, rather than just sending someone a detailed brief and expecting them to get on with it.

So I have gone with a company – Firsty Group – that is relatively local (ninety minutes away by car), who have already demonstrated some expertise in the area of manipulating sound and text, and who want to operate on an income sharing basis, whereby the build-cost for the app is reduced, but they retain an interest in the continued existence of the app. I like that.