The Roots
2009 was a massive year for Sourcebits. Hands down our best yet. We published almost 100 totally original apps for iPhone and Android and enjoyed some great press from Apple, Macworld, PC World, IGN, The Times, and Tech Crunch, earning awesome reviews while putting our incredible team leaders in the spotlight with a slew of interviews.
All through 2009, our iPhone apps featured regularly in the top spots at the App Store with many being staff-picked by Apple. Our Mac lineup, too, enjoyed the same attention with regular staff picks on the downloads page at apple.com. Yes, it’s been an outstanding year, with – all told – around 5 million downloads, an expanded staff of 200(!!), and over 500 unique inquiries for our contract development services. And as we’ve grown, so too has interest in our back story from individuals and smaller dev houses, so I’m going to take the remainder of this post to talk about our arrival as one of the top contract dev companies in the world. Huzzah!
We founded Sourcebits in early 2006, just three of us, with a background in medicine and software design, and immediately set to work producing Mac software focusing on the niche we were most familiar with: healthcare services. At that time the Mac was gaining big traction among mainstream PC users, beginning to gobble up serious mindshare if not market share, and so we began the business of porting Win-based health-related apps to Mac, and soon after porting PowerPC apps to Intel as Apple began transitioning their chip architecture. We made decent trade doing this for most of the year, but as 2007 approached we started getting many inquiries for Web and application development, more so than the healthcare related stuff.
In particular, we started getting requests from game makers and hardware vendors to port their apps and drivers over from Windows, which turned out to be a crucial milestone. We spent several months working on a bunch of ports, and all this porting gave our dev teams a massive new skill set in all the associated technologies, so in a pretty short stretch our guys became fluent in a huge range of database, graphical and interface APIs that we’d never really planned for. And as the applications became increasingly complex we also began focusing on the UI side, hiring a team of heavyweight icon and interface designers. At the same time we were also investing heavily in Adobe-based RIA and came out with a bunch of cool cross-platform apps like GeeMail, which cnet.com reviewed as offering an even better solution than Google for offline mail browsing. All this expertise, along with further inroads into RIA and new art direction proved crucial as Apple revealed the iPhone in late October.
It didn’t start out roses, though. At the beginning, with no App Store and no SDK, we were limited to peddling Web apps with no real earning potential. Remember, this was announced during the Worldwide Developer’s Conference… and I remember developers actually booing Steve during this part of his presentation. But we plugged away and got really really good at making Web apps, like one of the first ever Web-based image editors, PixelPerfect, and Tangled Decals, which showcases a cool new online shopping experience. But 5 months later that was so much water under the bridge as Apple revealed the SDK and the App Store for the first time. And this was the moment of 2008. The SDK and the App Store blew us all away. We never imagined we’d have such flexibility and power to create for iPhone, not after the Web apps fiasco, and our instant reaction was: oh yes more please thank you!!
Everything we’d been working on the past two years, the driver porting, game porting, UI design, the contract work making original Mac and Web apps, all this combined to put us in a spectacular front-running position for iPhone development. And Sourcebits was thrilled to join the first round of Apple-certified iPhone developers in March 2008, snagging one of just 3000 initial licenses.
By September we’d published our first iPhone game, the Plateau, which was a huge critical and commercial hit, but this paled compared to our next app, Night Stand, which reached the Top 3 on the US App Store in November, and even now continues to be a steady earner. We pushed ourselves to push the tech, coming up with Fun Booth, the first face-tracking app for iPhone – the kind of app that has been copied literally dozens of times, and Knocking Live Video, the first ever video chat app for iPhone – a feat not even Apple has pulled off yet. And we expanded our contract development services for iPhone and increased our staff of engineers and designers to 200. With renewed capacity and the iPhone wind at our backs, before the year was out Sourcebits was designing original apps for everyone from small idea labs to Sling Media, to Fortune 500 companies like General Electric and Coca Cola.
In 2009, with Google, Palm and Blackberry releasing SDKs and App Stores of their own, we also began porting our more popular iPhone apps over to these platforms. And on Android we’re already a category leader with Night Stand and hands down the best Facebook app for the platform: AndroidBook. We’re going to replicate the kind of synergy that led to our success with iPhone, in terms of design sense, proficiencies in programming and APIs, and expertise in the broader technologies. So for now we’re not about short-term profit taking on Android or elsewhere. We’re taking the long view and getting our crew up to speed in all directions. So if you’re looking for some take-away from our success so far, it’s simple: be prepared.
