Helpful Resources To Create Your Own Mobile Apps

Since the Internet is now in everyone’s pocket, there are multiple opportunities to market to them. As I pointed out in my post yesterday, you shouldn’t just focus on an app or mobile web, you should do both.

For my friends out there that are ninja coders; congratulations you’re ahead of the curve! Code up your App, code up your mobile website, and start leveraging the massive amounts of traffic.

For those of you that lack the coding skills, there are many options to help you get started. A lot of the “bigger corporations” want you to think you need to pay $100K+ to get a good app developed. While that maybe true for those of you trying to bring a unique idea to light, but for the most-part you can at least start earning money without blowing your life-savings.

Here are some of my recommend resources:

Chupamobile.com – This is an excellent site for those looking to buy or even sell their app source code. For the average cost of one hundred bucks you can have your own app source code that’s ready to re-skin and bring to market. If you are OK with Photoshop and can use Xcode (for iOS), then it’s likely you can do this yourself. However, Chupamobile offers a re-skin service for an average price of around $300. Hint: To save money, checkout ODesk/Freelancer for someone to re-skin.

Como.com [Special 30% Off For IMGrind Visitors] – These guys are excellent for getting your own app going using RSS feeds from your website (especially easy if you use WordPress). We got started using them a couple of years ago and the price was $99/month. They’ve now lowered it to $39/month and have added a bunch of new features. Very easy WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) web-browser editor.

CodeCanyon.net – For the Grinders who are cheap like me, you can find a couple of hidden gems over here. Now please be aware there is also some crap here so be smart with your purchases. Prices are much lower than Chupa though and can also help give you some good ideas.

NextPeer.com – The buzz right now seems to be around multi-player. People like to challenge their friends, regardless what type of app it is. For years, my brother and I battled over Words With Friends. NextPeer offers this service for those of you that can code it in (or you can provide to your developer).

Chartboost.com – Just like web advertising, mobile advertising has many different options when it comes to integrating with third party ads. Chartboost has been delivering fairly steady eCPMS across the board for several months now, so they’re definitely worth checking out.

AppAnnie.com – This is a great place to help you discover and monitor trends. Their paid plan in quite expensive, but if you’re just looking to get an idea for an app, then you can access that data for free.

Distimo.com – Another place for app analytics (recently acquired by AppAnnie).  You can view their leaderboards and get a good idea of what’s working out there.

SensorTower.com – Keyword tracking and app intelligence.  Just like with web folks, we need to be tracking everything, especially if you’re sending paid traffic.  There is ALWAYS room for optimization so make sure you’re tracking.  Their pro plan has a 14 day free trial and is then ~ $80/month.  Like I say though, if you plan on sending paid traffic, this will help you optimize those costs.

If I wanted to make this post REALLY long I could go on and on with more helpful tools.  But for the most part these will give you all a good starting point to developing your own apps.  It’s not rocket-science like you may think.  With some research and a little bit of capital you can have your own app online and ready for promotion.

Ryan Gray

Ryan Gray is the founder and CEO of NameHero, one of the fastest growing independent web hosts in the United States. Ryan has been working online since 1998 and has over two-decades experience in Internet Entrepreneurship.