As an iPhone developer, few mistakes are more costly than telling people what you do. Gone are the days when hopeless romantics thought they had a book in them; today they’re full of app ideas:
“I’d like to think I’ve got an app in me,” said one guy I met at a New Year’s Eve party.
What can you do but smile and brace yourself? A game with ninja badgers, an app for detecting cheating spouses, and a tool for measuring the size of your penis and uploading the results to Facebook. I’ve heard them all and wish I’d picked a profession with fewer talking points. Like taxidermy.
Worse is when you’re introduced by your line of work: “Here’s the iPhone developer I was telling you about,” they’ll say. “His name’s Nick,” almost in afterthought. You’ll soon be the sounding board for a thousand drunken app concepts. They should have just hired a clown.
“How about one that finds the nearest [bar/strip club/hooker]?” some idiot will offer. “I’d buy it,” he’ll add, as if to seal its position in the top 100.
When I’m feeling antisocial I tell people I’m a web developer. Nobody bothers a web developer. The longest conversation you can hold with one lasts three minutes. The title exists to blend boredom with confusion — suggesting, perhaps, that you build housing estates for spiders.
If nothing else, it’s taught me that people value great software over great websites; as a web developer, I’m rarely offered exciting website ideas or encouraged to talk at length about upcoming launches. As an iPhone developer, I can’t escape it: within three minutes the theme has turned from the crisis in Haiti to samurai raccoons and dick-measuring apps.
The real Curse of the iPhone developer is not the App Store approval process, having to talk to people at parties, or worrying that you’ll never be invited back; it’s wrestling with a million ideas and deciding which not to build next.
