Racing Toward an iPhone App
WhippleHill had a great idea for an iPhone app for its education customers, but not much development money to get it done. Here's how they combined their business acumen with some Stanford students' iPhone smarts to develop a new app on the cheap, although it still took six months.
CIO — For Travis Warren, playtime on the iPhone is over.
His company, WhippleHill, which serves private schools across the country, spent the last six months working on an iPhone app that hooks into its Web-based services. WhippleHill plans to roll out the new iPhone app to some 350 schools next month.
"It took a long time to develop the app," says Warren, president and founder of WhippleHill. "We got lucky that our competitors aren't on the iPhone yet."
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The race to iPhone apps that provide real services—not just simple tools or cool games—has taken on Triple Crown momentum. Web service providers are looking beyond the iPhone's Safari browser for accessing their services, setting their sights on an iPhone client app delivered over the App Store.
Excitement bubbled when Apple announced the iPhone 3.0 update earlier this year; iPhone 3.0 will be available to users later this month. The new version lets SaaS providers charge for their services over the iPhone. "We're heading into the age of micro SaaS," says Gartner analyst Ken Dulaney.
But first, a warning: It's not easy building an iPhone app that taps into backend Web services. Just ask WhippleHill's Warren, who had to find creative ways to get his iPhone app project off the ground and then wade through technical hoops to bring it to market.
How to build an iPhone app for free
WhippleHill sells services to private schools so that teachers, administrators, coaches, parents and students can log in and get attendance records, contacts, schedules, progress reports and more. Twelve of WhippleHill's 15 advisory schools said they were willing to pay a $2,000 premium on their annual subscriptions to be able to tap into their dashboards over the iPhone. Yet this still wasn't enough to justify the high cost of building an iPhone app, Warren says.
So Warren sought cheaper software development with an Indian outsourcer with whom WhippleHill had contracted with in the past. But the outsourcer didn't have experience with the iPhone SDK, and thus tried to push WhippleHill toward a browser-based solution—that is, iPhone users on Safari would be routed to a mobile site with big links. "They didn't really get it," Warren says.
Warren's search for alternate options led him to a bunch of Stanford University students who had formed a company, TerribyClever. The students had written an award-winning iPhone app called iStanford (and later, Duke Mobile) that a Time Magazine story called a rival to Facebook Mobile.
