I hope you all had a great time over the holidays, I was working a lot but was able to enjoy the relative quiet of the holiday period to get some stuff done. There are a lot of new features I’d like to update you about and I will over the next few weeks (albeit slower than usual). Despite my best efforts I still didn’t finish the full Uber clone app course but I’m getting REALLY close. There isn’t that much work left to do though and I’m starting to trickle out the module lessons.
I hope to be done with this before the middle of January but I suck at deadlines… I’ll make this up by doing two modules in February and by the fact that the Uber course will have roughly 30 lessons which is a HUGE amount of content.
I’m already trickling out a few lessons (just published two today). I’ll try to keep this up and push them out at a good rate through the month. As a small teaser check out this screenshot from the simulator (notice that it’s the simulator so the map doesn’t look as good as it does on the device):
A community member sent me this link which is an overview from an outsourcing company about the cost of building an Uber like application. For the impatient they estimate the amount of total work at 5000 hours costing between 20USD to 150USD per hour. Which means the unrealistic minimum cost of such an app is 100,000USD and a more realistic value would be over the 200,000USD range!
That sounds about right, building a full featured complex mobile app with backend server and taking it through the whole process with QA etc. isn’t cheap. I’m sure though that if these guys would have used Codename One the costs would have gone down significantly and would go down further now that they could use this app as a starting point.
Price Changes in the Academy
When we launched the Codename One Academy we set the price for the Build Real World Full Stack Java Apps course at 399USD and provided some installment options.
Now that we’ll add the Uber module it doesn’t make sense to keep the same pricing in place so we’ll raise the price to 499 within a couple of weeks. I’ll send out more details about this before we do this but if you want to avoid the price increase now is a good time to upgrade.
| If you already purchased the course or buy it before the price hike you have it forever. Future price changes won’t impact you regardless of updates we make to this course |
We intend to do something like this for every app we add to the course, we should add a social media app around April and that will probably trigger a similar price hike to 599 USD. We will probably cap this at some point though.
Plugin Release & Updates
We did a minor plugin update to 3.8.1 over the last weekend so people would get access to some new features and bug fixes. I have a blog post from Steve pending for next week that was waiting for this plugin update.
Blogging will still be slow through January as I try to catch up to all the tasks and finish the course.
5 Comments
Sure it didn’t take you 5000 hours for building this uber clone. BUT, you didn’t reinvent the wheel …
As they said in article, 5000 hours is estimated for the following services :
“Design / iOS and Android native app development / Backend development / Web development / Project management / Quality assurance
According to our estimates of similar projects, the time it takes to build a taxi-hailing app, including an app for drivers and an app for riders, is somewhere near 5000 hours.”
It seems you would like to justify your academy price changes …. (maybe I’m wrong ! 🙂
Nevertheless, I’m pretty agree that Codenameone might help to build both android and iOS app. And congrats for this clone 🙂
My feeling is that to build a complex application, Codenameone still lacks robustness, for example in the management of threads .
My justification for raising the price is the students. It doesn’t make sense that a student who bought a course for 399USD without additional 5 hours of material will pay the same price as the person who buys it after that additional material is there. It creates a negative incentive for the purchase.
I liked the Uber analysis which is why I linked to their site (with a follow link) despite the fact that they don’t use Codename One. I think a lot of companies like that lowball estimates and give the whole industry a bad name, their estimates seem solid. I think the equivalent app with Codename One would cost 3500-4000 hours as we won’t impact server costs or QA costs. Personally I spent 50-60 hours so far and would probably spend under 100 building my version. The goal is for this to be doable in a week for an experienced programmer. I’m assuming I’m roughly 10x more proficient in Codename One than a typical decent Codename One programmer and I’m not doing *everything* within the app. All of this information should help someone who is looking to upgrade make an informed judgement call on the value proposition.
I’d appreciate a more concrete example of what you think we lack in terms of threads?
I’m assuming you are looking at some of the capabilities from the newer thread API’s introduced in Java 5? These are very problematic to port and mostly useful for heavily threaded server environments. I don’t think they make a lot of sense in real world mobile apps.
Hi Shai
I am going to sign up for the course at the end of the month. I have a very weird request. Some of us cannot afford the pro subscription but badly need a JavaScript build for one of our apps. Could there be an arrangement for startups like us? We’ve been on basic subscription for over a year.
Hi,
I’m afraid that would be unfair to the enterprise account holders who pay for this functionality. Notice that the license is very permissive so you can upgrade and cancel. You would have a month to get the JavaScript version working to speed.
Financially basic subscribers cover their cost but enterprise and to a lesser degree pro subscribers keep this company running.
Seems fair enough then.