My first iPhone App was A Crossword Solver.  It was way back in September 2008 and the rush was on to get something into the App Store.

Stories were everywhere about people making huge sums of money.  Simple Apps like iBeer were the bane of developers everywhere as we could see they were making millions over such a simple concept.

I thought I'd do something that was useful and, at the time, did not exist yet in the app store.  A Crossword Solver seemed like a simple idea.  I knew how to program in SQL  all I needed was some sample code that used an SQL database.  There were a number of free word lists on the internet so I figured I could get the data quite easily as well.  I didn't include definitions as I didn't have the rights to that sort of thing.  I also didn't include links to online websites as I wasn't sure of the legality of it, though some developers just did it anyway.

So I get the app done in about a week and send it to the approval process.  It hits the store about 2 weeks later, back then this seemed like a long turnaround for approval.  By the time it hit the store there were about 5 apps that did basically the same thing as mine.  My app did have the advantage, in my opinion, of a better search method, that could look for single or multiple missing letters.  But in hindsight the interface didn't look great and I've changed it several times since it's debut.

Still I eagerly awaited the results.  The first day it made me a profit of around $20 Aussie dollars.  It was downhill after that.  Currently it makes between $2 and $5.

So what went wrong?  Well even the best dictionary, utilities at the time didn't go that well.  I thought maybe there wasn't a big demand for this type and another app I thought would be easy to do was A Blackjack Card Counter.  Although it has small beginnings it became news around the world.  More on that in my next blog.

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