How to Make a No. 1 App With $99 and Three Hours of Work

By Wired: Game|Life March 5, 2014 1:57 PM Plugged In

(Source: WIRED)

By Ryan Rigney, Wired: Game|Life
 

You don’t need to be a programmer to break into the App Store’s top charts. All you need is 100 bucks and a free afternoon.

You’ll need a halfway decent idea, of course, but once you’ve got that nailed down, you can easily buy the source code, get an online tutorial on how to use it and within hours have a game ready to play. That explains why 95 of the 300 or so new apps released on Apple’s iTunes store one day last week were riffs on Flappy Bird, the mega-hit its creator pulledat the height of its popularity.

There’s Flappy Wings, Splashy Fish, even Crappy Bird.

For some reason, a surprising number of these apps, like Flying Cyrus, Cyrus Flyer and Jumping Miley, feature the disembodied head of pop star Miley Cyrus. One of the most downloaded of this unlikely sub-genre is Flappy Miley Wrecking Ball Pro, created by Gregory Storm. He uploaded the game on February 12, just two days after Flappy Bird flew the coop. Never mind that he’d only heard of Flappy Bird the week before. “I had no idea what a Flappy Bird was,” Storm said. “Never played it. Hadn’t seen it.”

So how was he able to create Flappy Miley so quickly? Easy: He bought everything he needed.
The first step was purchasing the source code to Flappy Crocodile.
On sites like Chupamobile, billed as “a stock photo agency, but for app development,” programmers can sell their app’s source code to others. This is hardly a new idea in the videogame business, but just as the democratization of development has allowed people to create games with small budgets and sell them at low prices, so too has it created a market where middleware mavens can sell source code to would-be developers for next to nothing.

You need an app for your restaurant? Chupamobile has templates for $50 each. Want to create a match-three game like Bejeweled? A clone of Tiny Wings? The rights to the source code are just a few clicks and a few bucks away. Just $99 gets you an open-ended, royalty-free license to use the Flappy Crocodile code to create a single app and sell it in perpetuity. Even if you make a million bucks, you don’t owe another cent to the guy who did the heavy lifting.

In the case of Flappy Crocodile, that guy is Vojtech Svarc, a 26-year-old app developer from the Czech Republic. He’s spent the past six years jumping from one online business to another: website scripting, e-books, Google AdSense and practically everything else. Svarc got into the app business about a year ago, but quickly realized that investing large amounts of cash into a single app and hoping it would be discovered among the 1 million or so already on the App Store might not be the best use of his time. Then he thought, What if building an app could be more like building a website?

“When building a website, there is no need to start from scratch as there [are] plenty of templates out there to choose from,” Svarc said. “Using templates cuts the cost and time down, and it allows you to get your products out there quickly.”

Svarc watched the App Store and noticed that any time an app made waves, similar apps would be buoyed to the top. Speed, he thought, was key to taking advantage of that. App templates would allow developers to build trendy apps in no time. “When I saw the media attention Flappy Bird was getting,” Svarc said, “I knew this [was] a ride I need to be on.”

So far, he says, about 100 developers have paid him $100 each to use Flappy Crocodile. Svarc says Tiny Flying Drizzy, which was the No. 1 free game on the App Store earlier this week, is based on his engine.

Anyone with a C-note and ten seconds can license the source code to a videogame. But what do you do then? Don’t you need programming skills to actually modify the code?

Nope. You don’t need any special skills at all. To prove it, I bought a license to use Flappy Crocodile.

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