Tuesday, January 18, 2011

14 Year Old "Tech Prodigy" Developed IPhone's Number 1 Free Apps

Image Source: http://www.deseretnews.com
Most 14 year old kids spend most of their free time hanging out with friends playing basketball or video games, or simply going to the mall window shopping or just walking around. In simple words, they spend their free time doing "nothing". But this is not the case for a 14 year-old 8th grader from Spanish Folk, Utah named Robert Nay. Being addressed now as a "tech prodigy", Robert Nay has a bit different hobby from other teenagers of his age. His hobby - writing source codes for IPhone applications. Believe it or not, this hobby turned out to be a global success as far as IPhone apps is concerned.

Spending most of his free time at the Spanish Folk Public Library reading programming books and source coding, Robert Nay developed the most downloaded free application for IPhone called "Bubble Ball". Bubble Ball is a very simple and straightforward game: all you have to do is to guide the small ball from one side of the screen to the other by following an obstacle. Nay wrote the application using Corona Tools, a software development kit by Ansca Mobile. Nay first used Objective C and GameSalad in developing the application, but he later shifted to Corona as it provided him the ease of creating, porting and publishing the game both IPhone iOS and Andriod.




Bubble Ball was released last December 29, 2010, and in just a span of three weeks, this free application reached an eye-popping 2 million downloads, thus dethroning former #1 apps Angry Birds by Chillingo. Well just in case you don't have any idea on what this kid has accomplished, Angry Birds was designed and developed by 17 professionals - just to be dethroned by a mere 14 year-old 8th grader. According to reports from Mobilized reports, Bubble Ball even reached over 400,000 downloads on a single day.

If Robert Nay charged $1 per download of Bubble Ball, he would have been a kid millionaire, earning $2 million dollars in just 3 weeks (that's too much for a 14 year old teen). Interviews from ABC news reveled that Robert Nay is currently developing another application after Bubble Ball.


Wished all teens in this world are determined as this "tech prodigy" teen. Click here to watch ABC New's interview with Robert Nay.

Disclaimer: Images used in this blog post are not owned by the author. Credits to the images go to the link in which the images were linked. 


1 comment:

  1. Pretty interesting. Those source codes can break the best of the minds

    ReplyDelete