Developing/building an app with no coding experience – app builders?

Evening

I have an idea for a biking related app but have no coding experience (& don’t have the time to learn). The idea I have is for a location based app so require a variety of GPS module options.

Does anybody have any experience with any app building software? Como? Goodbarber? Buildfire etc?

Cheers

I have no experience and have ended up partnering with a company with experience. It’s not the building its the maintenance that’s the issue. Maintenance effort is approx 30% of the build effort across iOS and android platforms.

If you using GPS and plan on expanding those feature, don’t go cordova / phonegap. (serious issues with ios going to sleep / background operations )

Start with developing it as a native app.

Just checking not like trailforks?
http://www.trailforks.com/

Thanks all

cdaimers – who did you partner with? How have you found the experience?

jwh – many thanks. Have you gone with phonegap? How has their support been?

mikewsmith – not seen that before & thankfully my idea is different enough for me to want to continue. Great app tho & fully downloaded. Dissappointed to not see any local (Cardiff) trails on there

as above, find someone who’s done it before and work with them.

just gettign stuff approved for the app store etc is going to be a steep learnign curve if you’ve not done it before and some of the development tools with decent libraries are quite spendy.

I’ve done an Android app using GPS and Maps, you can have the code if you want it. If you can wait a month I’ll do the app for you. (no charge).

I’ve just ‘finished’ my first app. A heart rate monitor monitor 😉 Using cordova, talking BLE to a Mio Link to read heart rates, track min, max and average over 15 minutes. It’s not exciting, but it is my first go at mobile (since J2ME anyway, eurgh).

I wasn’t aware of any ios issues with GPS with cordova, but I’m not using GPS for this app and I don’t have any ios devices (and the target audience for the app is me). I’ll have to look into it though, as my next app might use GPS in a later version and I might support ios too.

I’m a decent web developer, although slightly more backend than front, so using cordova was an easy enough choice for me. Still, if you haven’t done anything before it would be a steep learning curve.

I thought that an app builder was a kind of wordpress style way to build an app (using pre made modules & templates that all work requiring no coding experience on my part) & get it approved n loaded onto app stores . Wishful thinking then?

Eltonerino – sounds interesting, want a beta tester? I’ve got iOS 9, a TestFlight account and a mio fuse

2bit. I’m a .net developer normally so went down the Cordova route and used an iMac with Xcode to build for iOS.
I did not use any online build services.

My app was to be a GPS tracker but the issue I found was that iOS terminates background processes after a while so unless the screen is ON the process grinds to a halt. There are ways round it but they were so ugly I stopped.
Android was better as background process can run with out too much issue.

Also I found on IOS that unless you were moving enough it did not always register a change in GPS.

If you want info or pointers let me know. Email is in my profile… I’ve spent so may hours banging my head against my desk it may as well go to use for some one else.

If you are using the GPS solely while the app is active then there is little trouble in that. But feature creep is a terrible thing and that’s why I shelved my app until I have time to a native one…. Looking at apples swift with Xcode for the next version.