Full-Time Indie iOS Dev and Co-Founder of 1Button: A Top Dev Interview With Thomas Castel

Staying Fresh

The app store is growing every day at a rapid speed. How do you keep your ideas fresh and unique so your apps stand out?

We tried to develop our own style and our own visual identity made of simple colors and geometric shapes so that our products are easily identifiable. Even our sound effects have a specific style that is common to all our products.

It’s all in our heads but we often talk about our style. We try to focus on simplicity, which means simplifying both the functionalities (what we can do with the app) and the interface (how we use the app).

When we manage to simplify these aspects, it is easy to create an app that looks simple too. This way we can usually use only a few flat colors and simple geometric shapes, with perfect alignments.

For example, in Mr Jump, thanks to several simplifications we ended up with a full-screen and refined display: as the interaction is only based on one tap to jump (the character runs automatically), we don’t need to display any control buttons, players can tap anywhere. In the same way, we don’t need a pause button, because players would not have enough time to reach it before dying.

The one tap game, Mr Jump!

What does the future look like for 1Button?

We have a rough roadmap for 2017, but we don’t know what we will do next year. We are working on ways to make our activity more durable. For now, each time we launch a product, it is like a one-shot, which is a bit risky.

Are you using Swift in your apps at 1Button & how are you re-using code across multiple apps?

Swift looks extremely modern and it is very appealing, but we are still using Objective-C in our current projects.

In fact, we have a lot of existing code that we developed over years and that we reuse in all our projects. This code would not be compatible with a Swift project for various reasons such as memory management.

All our projects are stored in a dedicated git repository and we have created a sub-repository that all our apps use. This sub-repository contains all the libraries and the classes that we have created to manage various things such as the in-app purchases for example or the ads.

We improve these libraries continually because all our apps are based on them, old apps also benefit from the improvements :]

Where To Go From Here?

And that concludes our Top App Dev Interview with Thomas Castel. Huge thanks to Thomas for sharing his indie life, his neat clone app bot and finally running a successful company 1Button.

We hope you enjoyed this inspiring interview and if you’re thinking of starting your own company or eager to make the leap to become indie to take Thomas’ advice to heart.

If you are an app developer with a hit app or game in the top 100 in the App store, we’d love to hear from you. Please drop us a line anytime. If you have a request for any particular developer you’d like to hear from, please post your suggestion below!