iOS Are there any benefits of making my iPhone app open source?

pwaddles said:

I've built an app for the iPhone, its in the app store now, its called TimeMe, its pretty basic, but I think because its so basic it could serve really well as a demo to people on how to do timers, play sounds and handle iPhone rotation in XCode.

Heres a demo of it in use http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqZ-cyRIlDY its kinda cool, but also kinda useful/less.

What do you think? Is it worth making the source to this available, or am I wasting my time?

Cheers

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I think that people will appreciate you releasing the source as kindof a tutorial for other developers. However, if you are doing this for the traditional "open source" movement, I'd save your effort. Because of the app store I think the usual software life cycle for open-source would not work well.

pwaddles said:

I've built an app for the iPhone, its in the app store now, its called TimeMe, its pretty basic, but I think because its so basic it could serve really well as a demo to people on how to do timers, play sounds and handle iPhone rotation in XCode.

Heres a demo of it in use http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqZ-cyRIlDY its kinda cool, but also kinda useful/less.

What do you think? Is it worth making the source to this available, or am I wasting my time?

Cheers

Click to expand...

There's probably some people out there who would like to see this as an example. If you've got a site to post it on, and you just want to share it then you may as well.

Working with timers, and handling rotation are a couple of common problems that beginners have and it would make for a nice example.

Spending the time to put it on an open source repository etc. I think that would be a waste, I'd just zip it up, take a couple shots, write a small writeup and post it on a blog.

I posted a tutorial from someone on my blog about creating gradient tableview backgrounds, it ended up going into the double digits in tweets, and from what I can tell there's been over four thousand views in about a month and a half of that one page for a very simple tutorial. I imagine he got some hits/search engine juice to his own site since I linked up the article to it.

It's always good to upload your source to help new developers

As someone who wrote their first iPhone application last Sunday, I'd be interested in seeing your code.

As a matter of fact, I'll trade you my free OS X program with source for yours.

Make sure whatever you publish as open source is of good quality. If you go into a technical field, the code can essentially forever become part of your professional resume to any potential employer who googles such.