Basically i work for a weekly newspaper and we want to design an app and we want it design it using Quark Appstudio.

What are the costs involved with this?
has anyone done it?

$25 for a Google Developer Account https://support.google.com/googlepla...r/113468?hl=en

Bear in mind that unless the app adds some special functionality, Apple may suggest you'd just be better creating a mobile compatible version of your newspaper online.

Signing up for an Apple Developer Account is $99.

AppStudio is a great choice for creating professional publications, but it comes at a price.

It's $499.95 per month to deploy to Android and Apple platforms, plus the cost of developer accounts for those platforms as pointed out by the posters above.

You'll get 2500 issue downloads included in that monthly price, and you'll have to pay for additional downloads.

http://www.appstudio.net/Plans/

http://www.appstudio.net/Plans/Add-ons.aspx

Sorry to quote myself, but I wanted to add something to my first point. When I say Apple might suggest you do a mobile compatible version of the paper online, what I mean is that you could spend the time, money and effort to develop the app, and submit it to Apple, at which point they may reject it on the grounds that it doesn't do anything that a mobile website couldn't do.

If you're going to do this, I would very strongly recommend that you read Apple's developer guidelines before you start.

Yes I agree but I dont think that should be a problem if the app is a functional app. That would be a optimised mobile representation of the print media.

I think the issue was when the app store first opened people were just basically submitting apps that literally did nothing but link to a website, so one of the dev guidelines is that any app you submit basically has to have useful functionality ( whatever that means )

Anyway in this case I don't think it would makes sense to do your own app which would take a lot of time effort and money.

I have a friend who publishes a magazine that you can buy in whsmith which is for a niche hobby. I won't mention the name of the magazine (probably against T and C's of this site). I think he tried out Yudu for a while so perhaps you could check them out, as they do all the major platforms.

The only reason I think my friend stopped was it was just not economically viable.

But his magazine is aimed at a hobby that mostly only the 60's and over type of age bracket do and that age group just don't really do digital and much prefer print.

Reminds me of these threads...;
http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1638938

http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?t=1653514

Also if you intend to publish on Newsstand, I think Apple get to take a 30% cut of your sales for each issue not just any app sale.

What a lot of companies would do in this situation is create a mobile-optimised website and then maybe wrap it in an app too to offer it on the app stores. But doing a proper mobile website (a la Financial Times) means you don't need to automatically give Apple such a large cut for not doing a lot.

In addition you need to have an Apple Mac in order to develop apps for iOS.

I looked into the possibility of porting my published Android app to iOS and came across this (for me) insurmountable hurdle straight away.

Yes so you end up purchasing a MAC so you can develop for Android and iOS, with a VM for Windows.

What a terrible way to develop on windows!

You could do a multiboot. And it's not that terrible in VM either, depending on what you do. I have W8 in a VM for Win RT on a W7 machine.

I got the cheapest intel mac mini I could find on ebay. (I'm not sure about the newer ones but it was quite easy to upgrade both the processor and memory on the older Intel ones) to publish an iOS app. Disk space is not very important for dev work

The revenue I made from it paid for my mac book pro a few times over, so something to think about.

Sorry, I don't want any Apple stuff, but that's just me. I don't believe in paying double for hardware just for some pretty rounded corners.

I prefer the ethos of Open Source. Especially since my app (fairly specialised) is free.