[aresant]

Slightly off-topic but we're in the middle of building an iOS / Android SDK / library to drive improved location services.

Does anybody have any solid resources on SDK marketing directly to iOS and Android developers?

We've found some innovative ways to address the community (doesn't hurt to have an office packed with engineers to ask where they find solutions) but looking for ideas ranging from the best developer events, to publications, to PR agencies focused on devs, to marketing co's etc.

I have been surprised how hard it is to turn up prior-art on this subject.

[gorena]

Is this going to be open source? Or a commercial product? I don't think most iOS devs would want to use a closed-source library, not necessarily because they're averse to paying for something, but because the UX of using one is much worse.

- There's generally no dependency management, or you're forced into using Cocoapods, and using it in a bad way (binaries in your repo).

- You're at the will of the vendor for additional features (framework, Swift nullability/generics integration, bitcode), and, if they're even available, dependency bumps. This gets really painful. Every time I used a closed-source framework, it ends up being a nightmare.

This is compared to:

- Add line to Cartfile

- carthage update

- A little drag and drop

- Done, future releases will probably Just Work

You might have better luck with people that aren't necessarily "iOS devs", i.e. games, where using closed-source is more common and they might not even be using Xcode.

[smithclay]

Couple of companies come to mind:

* Realm.io has successfully positioned themselves as a thought leader in swift development for iOS by producing solid blog content and leading the Swift SF meetups (+ contributing to open-source projects).

* Crashlytics/Fabric.io is more interesting -- my experience with them has been entirely word-of-mouth (but they have a big presence at Twitter's developer conference/WWDC/Google IO, too).

* Parse generally has interesting, high-quality technical blog content: (https://blog.parse.com).

[NateLawson]

I agree that both Realm and Fabric have done an excellent job reaching out to developers. Fabric went to another level in providing a slick interface to make it easy to drop in and update their SDKs. I'd be excited to see that more generally available, maybe integrated with CocoaPods.

[coldcode]

My only fear with Fabric is how Twitter's layoffs affected them.

[ryanwaggoner]

No affiliation with this (not even a customer), but this might be useful for you: http://www.growamp.com

And...holy shit, they just raised their pricing by 5x. That's kind of insane. I was really on the fence about this at $500 / month, but if I really needed this now, I'd probably try building it myself. If you planned on paying for this for a year, that's $30k. Seems like you could recreate this for $30k, right?

[magicseth]

When we had a top 10 app, we had a check for devices running unreleased OSes and showed them a pop-up.

[devbug]

Well, you can get the emails for a whole bunch of iOS developers for a small fee...

[smilliken]

We (MixRank) help several SDK companies track apps that are using location services. This can be very useful for sales, marketing, and business intelligence. Reach out of you'd like to chat.