How to make a free Android or iPhone app for your band!

(Download my own app, as an example and NOT a devious ploy to get you to listen to my own music!)

Musicians and Bands, create and distribute your own Android App for free!

One of the best ways to engage fans these days is through a smartphone app. Once your app is installed on someone's phone, they can have access to all of your material, stores, gig info, and you can even send them pop-up messages to inform them of new information in real time! If you're like most musicians, though, figuring out how to design, program, test and distribute one is a bit too much for us to accomplish - although with some time and dedication, also not completely out of the question, but we'll focus on a fast track to getting an app out to your listeners and potential fans, bypassing all the hard work of setting up a "design environment" and building an app from scratch. 

A new product has emerged called ibuildapp.com, which takes all the hard work of learning how to design and create app's for iPhone and Android out of the equation. They have a workflow of  simple drag-and-drop / point-and-click actions, making it within anyone's reach to design an app to promote their music.

Once you've created your free ibuildapp.com account, you can get right to designing you new app. Although there is a somewhat limited selection of templates, I found one that I could use with a little modification to make work for me. (more on that later).

As you start designing, there are a few things to consider. You will be able to design and distribute your own Android, iPhone and "web app", but not all of this can be free. If you require distributing your app on the iPhone/iPad/iPod, you will need to pay to be able to distribute through their official store. In order to distribute on the official Android market, you will also have to pay a yearly fee, but you still have the option to distribute your Android app by yourself as long as the end user allows "non-market apps" to be installed on their device. In comparison, the Android Market (Google Play) is significantly cheaper at $25 per year compared to $200 per year for the Apple/iTunes distribution. Also, on the Apple/iTunes market, they have strict design concepts and may reject your app and request revisions before it will be allowed on the market.

If you just want to get a cool, free, smartphone-enabled website, you can do that using ibuildapp.com's "Web App" feature, which allows you to create what looks and interacts like an Android or iPhone app, but is simply a hyperlink that is opened in the smartphones browser - (and it will actually work on iPhone because it does not use Flash, which an iPhone simply can't do, despite the claims that the iPhone is "cutting edge" and "technically advanced" - for some reason it still won't do Flash - oh, that's right, because Apple refuses to pay the licensing for it...) - so for free you can give your listeners an Android/iPhone experience on any web-connected smartphone by just passing out a hyperlink.

Another thing to consider as you start designing your first app, is that although you can make your app for free using ibuildapp.com, the free accounts will have some ibuildapp branding as well as advertising in some of the design elements you may decide to use in your app. If you want to avoid those things, you will have to pay for a yearly ibuildapp account.

Next post I'll walk you through a detailed example of how to create your own app on ibuildapp.

(Download my own app, as an example and NOT a devious ploy to get you to listen to my own music!)

Chris Olson is a veteran of the Seattle Grunge scene of the late 80’s and 90’s as both a musician and a sound engineer. He has shared the stage with members of Pearl Jam, Nirvana and Soundgarden to name just a few. Spanning multiple genres, it’s hard to quantify in one statement, but here’s a shot:  “If Johann Sebastian Bach, Robert Johnson, Jimi Hendrix, Mark Knopfler, Ottmar Liebert and Kurt Cobain formed a band together, you’d get the genre bending collection of tracks found in Chris Olson’s discography!”