As curious iOS developers, having had the Apple TV for a week, @RuxandraNistor and I decided that it’s time to try and make an Apple TV app. We didn’t have an idea for an app, but we knew we wanted to make one.
Being two iOS developers with limited time for side projects, a lack of experience when it comes to digital design and a strong desire to not make any APIs or backend development, it was quite hard for us to come up with a good idea for an app.
As we had no content, we thought that we could either build a game, or find an external API to give us content. The one thing we always kept coming back to was that it’s very hard and annoying to input text in an Apple TV app. So whatever app we were building, if we showed content to the user, that content had to be browsable, and not searchable. So I could say goodbye to my idea of making a beer journal (like Vivino, but for beers), an iOS project I started and never finished.
As I like tennis, I’d like an app that gives me real time scores for tennis games, ATP and WTA rankings, tournament draws and results and all other kind of tennis news. But all that content was not easy to find in a way that made it easy for us to show it on the Apple TV.
Then we thought that the idea was to complex: we just wanted to make a simple app to see what’s up with tvOS. So we thought of making 9GAG for Apple TV. We were very pleased with the idea, until we realised that there’s no official API for 9GAG, nor an RSS feed for it. So we looked into other similar websites (BoredPanda, BuzzFeed, etc), with no success: none of them had a good API or RSS feed.
So in the end, we chose to make a simple game. Three hours later, we had our first prototype running. Now we need to add more complexity, make it pretty and make it catchy. More about that in a future post.