This is the presentation I presented to an audience of about 70 at the May iOS MeetUp in Shibuya, Tokyo on Saturday 16th May 2015. The main iPhone app in the presentation is KanjiKing available in my Allan's Apps on the App Store.

1. Making an Apple Watch
App with Zero coding
skills!
by Allan Cook
Saturday 16th May 2015, Shibuya

2. The purpose of this presentation is
to run through the process of
having no experience of making an
iOS app to getting one in the App
Store. In particular in getting an
Apple Watch app in the App Store.

3. Can anybody
remember this?

5. I first discovered computing when I was
about 15. I had a Commodore 64, which
was basically one of the first home
computers and mostly for kids who used
them to play games on it. Basically the 64
referred to its 64KB of memory!
I remember getting an interest in
programming and I made a simple
questionnaire program, but after a few
questions the memory was full up and I lost
interest in programming.

6. That was my first introduction to
coding and I think I maybe read
how to make a simple program from
a book. After making the program I
edited it to add the questions.

7. That was in the mid 80s, so about 30
years ago, just as the home
computer boom started. I guess I
was just entering my teens!
30 years later and I pretty much did the
same thing! Over those 30 years the
home computer market hasn't really
changed much!!! The 64KB has
become 64GB and the computer is now
in my pocket! That's it!!!

8. After looking at the cool
images of what the iWatch
would look like I got really
excited. I had just spent
15,000yen on a Nike
Fuelband and I used it
everyday, even though it
had a very simple display!
In comparison the iWatch
looked amazing!
But...

9. I also write for CNN's iReport and I wrote a review when the "Apple
Watch" was released.

10. ...I loved iWatch, it looked like
something out of Star Trek. But
Apple Watch looked like a
basic digital watch out of the
20th century! It didn't like look
the high-tech must have device
the world had been waiting for.

11. And so my goal became to make an app for
Apple Watch.
But the Apple Watch became a bit of a
puzzle! It was tiny, figuring out what you could
do with such a small screen intrigued me!
And the app I already had in mind was another
quiz app for Kanji which I had been learning for
many years!
I figured single kanji would be small so would
work well with the small Apple Watch space.

12. This is pretty much the plan I
had for the Apple Watch
KanjiKing app I had in January.

13. • Become an IOS developer.
• Download and learn Xcode.
• Learn FREE skills from online tutorials and MOOC's.
• Understand the iTunes Connect submission
requirements.
• Make a trial iPhone app and submit it to iTunes.
• Get an Apple Watch app in the App Store for its
release day.
Key steps to getting an in the App Store.

14. It's really easy to become an iOS developer.
All you need to do is pay the yearly fee of
$99.
When submitting an app to iTunes
connect there is a lot to prepare, and a
lot of rules to follow.
One important requirements is that you
need your own website for your
customers to refer to.
1. Becoming an iOS Developer

16. Xcode is Apples iOS development app
and it's free and easy to download. But
it does take a lot of space on your Mac.
By searching the web there are a lot of
tutorials on how to make your first app.
Through them you can learn basic
Xcode and coding skills for free.
2. Download and instal Xcode.
3. Learn FREE skills online

17. There are also many MOOCs and some of
them even provide certificates on completion.
The biggest MOOC is Udemy and it has a lot
of great free and paid for courses. I have
only started using Udemy recently and didn't
use them while I was making my apps
because I hadn't discovered it then. But it's
a really good place to start out in Xcode.

21. I decided to make a trial app for iPhone just to
get to know the submission process. So I
made my Apple Watch game on an iPhone.
Throughout January 2015 I spent a lot of time
learning about Xcode and making simple iPhone
apps. Initially, my main teacher was Matt Heaney
apps. His video tutorials were excellent and I learnt
how to make a Flappy Birdlike app, a Helicopter app
and a Quiz app.
Before being able to write code you need to edit
code. And that's what I did. I played around with
the apps I had made to see how they worked.

23. There are many basic apps that
programmers learn to build up their skills.
Of course "Hello world" is the first, then
there are more complicated ones such as
a click counter, a calculator, and a quiz
app. By editing the quiz code I had learnt
I was able to make an app by imputing
Kanji and their English translations from
memory. For the first app there were only
about 60 kanji so it was pretty easy.

24. And the result was...

25. When you have completed your app
submission you'll receive an email.
Then you need to wait about 7-9
days for Apple to review your app.
Success!
My first app was up and ready for
download in the App Store.

26. Just before I put the first app in the App
Store I realised the limitations of my
coding skills. From what I had learnt I
could make an app similar to the one I
had learnt.the limitations of learning
from the web are that it can be hard to
improve an app in the way you want.
So I asked a coding friend who also
wanted to make an iOS app to help me.

27. However! I quickly discovered, due to
time, it wasn't very practical. In Tokyo we
pretty much work 9-9! Which means
Monday-Friday's are no go for hobby
work! So only Saturday and Sunday was
available! Discovering the Apple review
cycle was 7 days, waiting a week, or
maybe 2 weeks for code, was more of a
hindrance than a help! I realised if I
wanted code I would have to figure it out
for myself or do without!

28. As soon as the app was up on
iTunes I posted about it on
Facebook and encouraged friends
to write a review.
Reviews will help the app to get noticed
and are good advertisements. However,
the reviews disappear with each upgrade
and also your star ranking only relates to 1
country! So if you get 100x5 stars but
each is in a different country they won't
show up!

30. Looking at data from the app would be
my next main lesson. The weekly
downloads were only a few each week.
But, I discovered after about 2 weeks of
a stable number of downloads there
was a huge peak which recorded as
about a 1000% increase in just 1 day! I
wondered why this happened and how
long it would stay at that level!

32. The peak disappeared straight away!
Weekly it went from 13-140-40-18-5. So
it was just a glitch! But where did it
come from?
I looked on the Internet and discovered a
number of sites were advertising the app.
The ads seemed to be computer
generated from data from the iTunes Store.

35. I then wondered if this glitch would appear
for every app! If I made 10 apps and they
were all downloaded about 150x in a week
it would be 1,500. And of course my app
was a really basic app. If I could make a
pretty decent app that was downloaded
10x as much that would be 15,000
downloads! It seemed like a decent
starting point to think about making a small
revenue!

37. After a few weeks of looking at the data
I decided to make more similar apps
pretty much to get more download
data. And to see if that peak returned!
I then decided to try to see what
happened when I actually SOLD
an app instead of giving it away for
free!

40. By now the original app had been
downloaded for free about 200 times
in a month.
In a week my first Tier 1 (120yen/
$1) app had sold 8 copies!
After playing around with different
designs, GUI's and styles I was
ready to make the Apple Watch
app.

45. My plan had been to make the
KanjiKing game on the Apple Watch but
my coding skills in Apple Watch weren't
good enough to make it work! Apple
Watch apps use slightly different code
and my coding skills were still between
a code editing, and a code writing level!
So I decided to can the coding and just
make a GUI based app!

46. This was the result.

48. For Apple Watch, prior to its release, the review
time was only 3 days!
That was really helpful because it was the
first time I had an app rejected!
Because Apple Watch
was so new Apple
wanted to make it really
easy to use so I had to
add an instruction menu.

49. Success! The app was accepted and would go on sale
in the Apple Store from day 1. It was priced at 120yen.

52. So I half archived my original goal of
making a KanjiKing quiz app for the
Apple Watch. But I was satisfied, maybe
it would have been really popular! After
making a lot of KanjiKing apps I felt I
wanted to move on and do something
different so I made versions of a basic
calculator app for Apple Watch.

54. So now, I'm back to learning basic coding
and I want to make more complicated apps
such as games. And if possible I'd like to
get a chance to collaborate with some
other programmers on projects and even
get experience in a software company.