We have an app for that
Sahil Lavingia '10 is no ordinary high-school senior. At 14, he entered logo design competitions online. He didn't win, but didn't give up. At 15, he found something he was better at: web design. Sahil has been serving web clients for three years, saving and investing his earnings for the future, when he hopes to be a successful entrepreneur.
Part of his plan includes designing applications for the popular iPhone. Sahil has developed four applications for sale in the official iPhone App Store. He spent two weeks over the summer doing a Stanford course that normally takes a semester, working for ten hours a day on the subject. After finishing the course, he immediately started to develop his first public-facing apps.
His applications include:
Taxi Lah - stores local information about each significant cab company in Singapore. Allows you to call cabs easily. Has a built-in trip calculator that lets you calculate price, distance, and time of a cab ride from a point A to a point B (can also use GPS to determine your current location).
Color Stream - tool to manage colors and color palettes. You can figure out what colors appear in pictures (that you can take directly with your camera), or you can use the built-in color scheme generator.
Color Stream Lite - a free version of Color Stream with limited functionality to allow users to test the basic features of the app.
Twizzle - a free app making Twitter easier to use on the iPhone.
It costs $99 to be a part of Apple's developer program. After that, it's up to a developer to develop his/her applications without any real support from Apple (besides one phone call per year). After the developer is happy with his/her application, it can be submitted to Apple which then goes through a two-week approval process. Upon approval, the application becomes available to download through Apple's official medium: the App Store. Both paid and free apps have to go through this process.
Sahil explains the payment process: "I get paid by each customer who buys my app. Just like one would pay Starbucks for a cup of coffee, one would pay me every time they want to buy a new app of mine. Each purchase is a one-time fee and comes with free updates forever. I get paid by Apple at the end of every following month."
What's next for Sahil? He doesn't know, but says: "I had no clue I was going to get paid developing for the iPhone a few months ago, and it would be foolish to even guess where I'll be in the coming years. Hopefully somewhere nice."
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SAS Alum and her dance company performing in Chameleon