Ask HN: Good resource for finding a iPhone developer?

Quite simple, really. I keep a very, very small stable of clients (like two), who are solid, reliable, pay me every time I send a bill, follow the contract, understand that when they ask to add a feature it will cost them more, don't micro-manage, accept that I know what I'm doing, and provide me plenty of work.

I'd much rather work slightly below market for clients who are above market in terms of reliability and honesty.

Anecdote: the other day, a client decided now that he had 70% complete project X in front of him, what he really wanted was project Y (I told him this at the beginning). He wrote me an e-mail, saying "You were right, I was wrong, I've done some thinking and I want Y." He then paid me for X, and then paid me to turn it into Y.

Clients like that are hard to come by.

It's not that anything you've described is hard, it's just a lot of work. Looking at what you've got up there, it's going to require quite a few iterations to get all those features added.

I don't believe you will be happy with the results of any contracting situation. For instance, what you've described is a moving target. As soon as you change something that affects the server side API, you will need to rework the bits on the iPhone app. The contract dev will need to be re-engaged to fix that for you. Your question contains hints that you're vastly underestimating the scope: maybe blackberry, just some sync, caching, how hard is it to upload a photo, etc. You're ripe for being taken for an expensive ride by someone who isn't that good.

If you have less than $10K to spend you're better off investing in a macbook, some books and sending yourself or one of your in-house developers to an iPhone training course. I've not taken the iPhone version, but I took a Cocoa course at the Big Nerd Ranch and it was one of the better educational experiences I've ever had.

Another approach would be to hire an intern for three months to work on this project. A student with little professional experience would love the chance to get paid to learn iPhone development and end up with a real app to show for it. It's a win-win for you and the student.

The most common sentence an iPhone developer hears is "It's not that hard to do, it's just..." It may not be extremely complicated but it is time consuming. Small features sometimes require large amounts of code and with code comes testing, lots and lots of testing.

There is also basic economics at work here. The supply of iPhone developers does not fill the demand and therefore the price of iPhone devs goes up. You can go overseas and get something built for $500 but if you do that, I'm warning you, it will not turn out well.

The simple facts are if you aren't willing to invest the required amount of money in an iPhone app, is it really worth it to have it in the end?

Please don't take this the wrong way.

I get inquiries like this every day "I have $1k, build me X." Where X is a moving-target project.

The fact is, I don't even look at a project where the budget is under $5k. Every project expands in scope as it goes along. Every change, feature request, "misunderstanding" adds to the time to put together an app. To a developer, somebody who's trying to put something together on a shoestring budget is sending off vibes of unreliability, of focusing on cost over quality, is going to nitpick and obsess about every little thing. I realize that's a little unfair, but that's how other developers are going to perceive your request.

There's overhead too. I have to do an estimate; I have to research whether we can really use that control, how do we do this so that the numbskull apple reviewers will pass it, have to budget time to wrestle with the gnarly Apple bugs, have to walk you through signing up as a developer, getting the certificates, filling out the forms right, setting up codesign chains, helping you understand app submission... Doing a "hello world" app would probably have 10-15 hours just of overhead, and that's without researching anything complicated like how to do SOAP requests or whatever technology you're using.

Also, what I have said, and what others have said: lots of people want iPhone apps, and there are a small number of developers. There's lots of reasons with for this: one is that (at the risk of starting a flame war) ObjC is harder than some more modern languages because there's a lot of crap you have to think about (memory management) that you don't in, say, Python or Ruby. I bet a third of my time is spent worrying about memory. Plus there's a lot of Apple hoops to jump through that forms a pretty high effective barrier for developers.

And, when you think about it, all of the good people are working on their own apps. The only way to get anyone's attention is to pay them more money then (they think) they'll make spending equivalent time on their own app. Either that or pick a developer so incompetent they can't write their own apps, and obviously that's not what you want (but you'll find an awful lot of them below the $5k price point).

If your budget is that small, do what others have suggested and pick up a mac and some books and do it yourself. It will take you a lot longer than someone who has 5+ apps in the app store, but at least you can do it right within your budget.