I had an idea for a phone app. Never programmed an app before though. Not sure how big a deal it is to create one or how much programming experience you need.
App would need the ability to find and network with other users, and to share short video clips (3-10seconds).
Making an app for Android or iOS is relatively easy. You will need a good bit of space and bandwidth for passing the videos back and forth though, even small ones, so there will be ongoing hosting costs there that will scale up with the user count.
If you have some html/css/js experience it might be easier to start with something like Cordova.
I would say it's not an effort you throw together on a few weekends unless you're already pretty familiar with the technologies used and development methods. Certainly not impossible to start learning though! What kind of experience do you have with any sort of coding?
Disclaimer - I'm not a dedicated mobile developer, but I've worked on some apps with people who are and have some familiarity with the process. I wouldn't proclaim to be expert though. I'm more of an UX and front-end guy.
Take a look at appy pie and see if you could do a test or demo?
Matt B wrote: If you have some html/css/js experience it might be easier to start with something like Cordova. I would say it's not an effort you throw together on a few weekends unless you're already pretty familiar with the technologies used and development methods. Certainly not impossible to start learning though! What kind of experience do you have with any sort of coding? Disclaimer - I'm not a dedicated mobile developer, but I've worked on some apps with people who are and have some familiarity with the process. I wouldn't proclaim to be expert though. I'm more of an UX and front-end guy.
I'm not an experienced programmer. Just some basic HTML/CSS/JS experience, like you mentioned. I might be able to enlist the Baroness' help too.
I've got plenty of spare time on my hands at the moment. And I have two ideas that would make a nice complimentary complete package, but could be a stand alone app if one would be a lot easier to create than the other.
(This is probably a pipe dream given my skill level and that this is likely to actually be a bigger project than I'm imagining. But I don't want to write the idea off immediately.)
In reply to oldtin: Ok, so if you don't actually want to actually develop it yourself you can use any number of templated drag-n-drop app makers, but what's the fun in that? 
For Android, you can download the Android Development Studio and then install the appropriate SDKs for the platforms you want to develop for free of charge. There is an entire "Getting Started" tutorial for Android but it requires you know the Java programming language first. So, start there - and there are good free resources for that as well and about a million books on the subject. If you want to also cover Apple devices - you have an entire different programming language (swift or ObjectiveC), tool suite and SDKs to master but much of the effort to learn to program in any language will translate to just having to relearn the syntactic make-up of of another. The concepts remain mostly in place. You have quite a bit of ground to cover to make the leap from " a little web markup" to any basic object oriented programming, and then the leap to how to actually use it to get things done - but if you manage to get your feet wet you will be able to make decisions about what you think you can bite off and what you need to pay for.
If time is of the essence - this is might be one of those times where you develop a flow diagram and whiteboard the functionality you want, then write a business plan. Get bids for the design and development work from some starving app developers - there are online communities where you can do this. I'm not sure how well you understand the infrastructure you will need to have in place in order for app users to communicate with each other - but depending on your plans that can be as simple as paying for hosting, to leveraging someone else's cloud stack to having to develop your own suite of server side applications. You will spend tons more money on what is behind the curtain than building a client application.
Beer Baron wrote:Matt B wrote: If you have some html/css/js experience it might be easier to start with something like Cordova. I would say it's not an effort you throw together on a few weekends unless you're already pretty familiar with the technologies used and development methods. Certainly not impossible to start learning though! What kind of experience do you have with any sort of coding? Disclaimer - I'm not a dedicated mobile developer, but I've worked on some apps with people who are and have some familiarity with the process. I wouldn't proclaim to be expert though. I'm more of an UX and front-end guy.I'm not an experienced programmer. Just some basic HTML/CSS/JS experience, like you mentioned. I might be able to enlist the Baroness' help too. I've got plenty of spare time on my hands at the moment. And I have two ideas that would make a nice complimentary complete package, but could be a stand alone app if one would be a lot easier to create than the other. (This is probably a pipe dream given my skill level and that this is likely to actually be a bigger project than I'm imagining. But I don't want to write the idea off immediately.)
If that's the case then I like Huckleberry's suggestion to dig in and start learning the basics, if only to better understand the implications/requirements of the functionality you have in-mind and what you want help with. Rather than trying to build your original idea first, you probably want to start with some more basic object-oriented programming basics and start looking at what language you want to develop in (native iOS/Android or something OS-agnostic like Cordova or Xamarin).
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