I don’t have a lot of time to do my blogging, coding, and gaming… I have my day job which has been consuming more and more of my free time, including my time on weekends, and evenings. I bet many of you can relate to that, especially if you are doing mobile development in your spare time. I picked up mobile development a few years ago, as a way of getting back to the code. I’d been a developer many years ago, but as my career advanced, I started doing architecture, management, etc. The more I advanced the less I got to code.

Getting back to the code two years ago, was load of fun. It provided me with hands on experiences that many of my day job’s customers were dealing with. The ability to get back to this level of understanding has been invaluable. Having said that, I am also dealing with many of the challenges that customers and other developers are dealing with. A few of the ones I’ve been dealing with are:

• Keeping up with multiple device characteristics. Even though most of my development is on iOS, I am still dealing with iPhone vs. iPad, normal vs. Retina. I can only think that adding android or Windows phone will compound that challenge.
• Testing, and I don’t just mean the device problem. As a one person development team, I find that testing mobile apps to be difficult. I use the emulator to test as much as I can, but I also have to test on my devices. Of course, I don’t have all generations of the iPhone. To that end, I tend to force people to upgrade to “current” versions of iOS. This is probably not practical for most developers.
• UX/UI design. I am not a graphic artist. So even though I have ideas, I can’t always visualize them. So things don’t look as good as I want them.
• New toolkits. I am working on a game… Of course I am not an expert on all of the classes and methods within iOS, so adding a game platform library into the mix means I am even less of an expert. When should I use the toolkit vs. native? How to best optimize my apps performance

What are your biggest challenges?