SYDNEY: Last year was the most successful year for Apple. In 2014 Apple lashed out all the rivals and set best ever records. in these achievements of Apple Australia has played a vital role. Aussies developed many games for iOS which lift the graph of Apple to new heights.
At present there are over 1.3 million apps available on iOS App Store and these apps have been over 7.5 billion times.
The most downloaded of all these apps is, of course, Angry Birds with over 2 billion downloads alone. Oh, and Apple reported over $500 million worth of sales in the App Store in the first week of 2015. Not bad.
Australia has been a big contributor, with dozens of Aussie-made apps topping the charts across the world since the App Store’s inception in 2008. One of these is the most downloaded of all time, the game Fruit Ninja. Developed by Halfbrick Studios in Brisbane, by 2014 it had been downloaded over 500 million times.
Phil Larsen with Alex Butterfield and Gemma Refalo, members of his Fruit Ninja team. Photographer: Russell Brown. Source: News Corp Australia
More recently, the success of Crossy Road, a mobile game that reached number one right across the world has shone a light on the indie developer scene in Australia. The aim of the game is to simply get a chicken to cross the road, although a few obstacles make it harder than it sounds.
Crossy Road itself was developed by Matthew Hall, 39, a developer who grew up on a sheep farm in Western Australia. While he had worked for some bigger companies in the past, his true success has come from developing games for the App Store. His first number one app came in 2010, his second in 2012 and then of course Crossy Road in 2014, with over 20 million downloads since November. All of these made at his home in rural Victoria.
He says the App Store has allowed bedroom coders to thrive, taking away the problem that indie developers had with consoles and allowing them to get their games on millions of devices without the need for a big company to push it.
While Mr Hall has had his own independent success with the help of a few partners, there’s a place in Melbourne that is helping studios to develop brilliant indie games.
The Arcade, is a not-for-profit organisation that houses over 22 brands and around 70 people with the sole goal of fostering local app development.
Simon Joslin, 30, who is one of the founders of the Voxel Agents, a studio based in The Arcade which created the number one game Train Conductor, couldn’t praise The Arcade enough.
“We benefit immensely by being in The Arcade. It’s great for the social aspect, but everyone is happy to help and to share resources around. It’s also good to have new perspectives from other people, something you don’t have when working alone,” he said.
Train Conductor itself is a game which involves connecting trains to tracks while avoiding other trains. Since the first game, the team has released two sequels.
