How to Make an iPhone App: Part One

Hackintosh Tools of the Trade Dave Prochnow

See part two on coding your App.

Love it or hate it, it's tough to argue about the success of the Apple App Store. While this venture might be a successful cash cow business model for Apple, how does business fare for the app developer? Pretty good, it turns out.

One of the poster children for successful app development is Joel Comm. Or, as he is better known, the developer of iFart. The sales claims for this little app blew away the competition, with sales of 113,885 downloads during a two-week period in December 2008.

Those are some pretty sobering statistics to digest while standing in the unemployment line. So what's a poor (read: really poor) developer to do? Why, make your own app, right? Not so fast, bucko.

Making an Apple iPhone/iPod Touch app is not a venture that should be undertaken lightly. There are two significant investments that you must be willing to make:

1. Financial investment: you will need an Intel-based Mac computer with Mac OS X 10.5.5 Leopard for developing your app, as well as a couple of test devices (preferably both an iPhone and an iPod Touch). Plus, you must be a registered member of the Apple iPhone Developer Program, which costs $99 for the basic edition.
2. Time investment: even the simplest iPhone app will take a considerable amount of time to develop. Yes, you could blow a simple app out your posterior in about two weeks' time, but a true sales contender could take a couple of months for development, testing, and distribution.

Granted, there are a couple of corners that you could cut for reducing development costs. You could be a rogue developer and rely solely on the iPhone SDK iPhone Simulator for your app testing. You could harvest the extensive library of Apple sample apps for your code. You could just "blow on your arm" for your app content. Even after all of these cost-saving efforts, however, you are still going to need an Intel-based Mac and a subscription to the Apple iPhone Developer Program.

Hackintosh mini Me:  Dave Prochnow

First things first, though; let's build a machine that's able to support the iPhone SDK app development environment. No, we aren't going to create the illegal kind of "Hackintosh," a non-Apple-branded Mac OS X clone computer -- rather, we are going to bundle the lowest-possible-cost Mac computer development platform. Be forewarned, this project will void your warranty.

My first attempt at creating an iPhone app dev system was housed on a 16GB CompactFlash media card. There are many sites that will guide you through this process. Unfortunately, this system wasn't stable enough to reliably code a major iPhone app.

My second attempt at creating an iPhone app dev system was a complete success. Furthermore, the investment (on my part) was minimal, because I already had many of the components on hand. Here is the complete laundry list for building your own Apple-based iPhone app dev system Apple-based from scratch.