The evolution of an app

When Apple's App Store launched in 2008, the new marketplace spawned a digital sausage-making operation of epic proportion. Behind the scenes, millions of crazy app ideas have flourished or floundered, funding spigots have gushed or gone dry, and for every developer who strikes it rich, thousands of wanna-be app kings have crashed and burned.

To explore the process of bringing apps into being, the San Jose Mercury News followed the creators behind Tape App, a social-networking platform that allows users to upload and contribute short clips to larger collaborative videos. From the original brainstorm in 2014 to Tape's launch on the App Store last month, the story of its founders and the development team they chose provides a rare glimpse into the high-stakes and the ins and outs of modern-day app-making.

In this case, the idea was inspired by a bit of serendipity. On vacation in New York, LA music-industry entrepreneur Garret Alan Jiroux, 29, and business partner Chase Pino, 30, found themselves having a bit of fun taking videos of each other.

"There was a lot of passing around and dropping of phones. We'd been thinking about doing an app for a while, and it suddenly popped into our heads to do one that would let people collaborate on a video together," Jiroux said.

But in between the idea and the launch came the tough part, with a winding path through funding, programming, naming, marketing and beta-testing over the course of a year. Compromise was the norm.

"It got pretty intense at times because we had to discard some of the features that people liked," says Tony Scherba, co-owner and president of Yeti, a small 4-year-old startup on a back alley in San Francisco's SoMa neighborhood.

A year later, and after investing what Jiroux says was "upwards of a quarter-million dollars," Tape App officially launched May 19 on the App Store.

Here, then, is the Evolution of an App.

©2015 San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.)
Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.