What do I need specifically to make an application similar to Vine?

Great question, you first need to gage your knowledge and ability. The best thing you can do, having no iOS programming experience yet, is to follow the tutorials provided. They are great. You will learn a lot and enjoy it!

Once you are confident you can build the crystal ball app, blog reader app, and the self-destructing message app, those will give you a great foundation of many vital basics of programming iOS applications. After, I would recommend looking at source code on GitHub for similar apps. Parse.com has tutorials on how to make an instagram style app.

Hi Ahmed,

That's a great goal to have! In my experience, I've learned a lot by trying to rebuild other apps. (Just watch out for copyright issues if you try to publish the app; I'm not sure what that entails.)

The thing you'll discover quickly is that there's a huge difference between what an iOS app can do and what a web service can do. Vine is both an app and a web service. A lot of my friends who tell me about their app ideas are really not asking for an app at all, they're asking for a web service; it's an entirely different animal.

Here's the difference: an iOS app does not by itself have the ability to allow users to communicate with one another through the app. (The exception is with Game Center apps, which must be used strictly for games.) You need a web service to do the communicating for you—that's in part what all these PHP and Ruby courses are for in Team Treehouse. A web service is, at its most basic, a computer (server) that is connected to the internet; you would tell the iOS app to connect to the server, and the server would have user accounts on it, it would host the videos that people upload, etc. A web service can be anything from a simple RSS blog that you get recent posts from, to a video service that hosts millions of videos. The catch is, the more users you have—and the more complex your service is—the more money it costs to run that service. You're basically paying a company to maintain the computer, the internet connection, to backup the data, distribute the data to different regions of the country/world for quick access, and so on. (It's really not a great idea to try to run things off your home computer.)

So an iOS app like you're describing has to be build on top of a web service. By itself the iOS app can't establish the necessary connection between phones/devices, and it can't maintain a database of all the user-submitted videos. There are a lot of different approaches to building that necessary web service, just as there are a lot of different approaches to building an iOS app.

I could go into more detail, but it would probably be way too much information to digest.

I suggest starting with the fundamentals of iOS development. Even with as much as I know about this sort of thing, I'm not sure I know enough to develop that kind of app. It would definitely be a lot of work. But I can tell you this: all those fundamentals become super important when you're trying to build a large scale app. I can't tell you how many times I keep going back to the fundamentals because I didn't learn them well enough.

Maybe a good question would be, what's your interest in app development? Do you like coding? Or do you want to get an idea out there?

Well, if you don't know anything about developing for iOS, then starting on the iOS Development Track is a good place to start.

If you've got some programming background, or are just super keen to start messing around in XCode, you could maybe skip to the Crystal Ball app part of the track and then go back and do the basics.

On the other hand, if you're already pretty familiar with working in XCode and writing Objective-C, the fourth stage of the track should tell you what you need. Between the fist four stages of that track, and the reference materials included with XCode, and all the questions and answers on StackExchange, you should be able to figure out all you need to get your app going.

If all that seems just too intimidating, and you need a smoother entrance into programming, the Introduction to Programming course is a good place to get going.

Hey Mike! Thank you for your valuable input. I thought about what you said regarding how a website can play a crucial rule in developing your idea rather than an application. I have what it takes to come out with a good idea and working on the application's design, but I lack implementation which is the most important step. I want to build apps. I want to know how things work. I want to know the code responsible for generating a certain feature.

Awesome! Thank you so much Mike. I'm not intending to make a similar app to Vine. I was just curious about the tools developers use to make an application that offers the features Vine offers in order to have the same knowledge and maybe apply it later on a different idea.
I don't think that I'll go for a company and make them design/code an application for me, the process will require big amounts of money for sure. I also want to build something on my own, it's amazing how you can make awesome things with this kind of Knowledge. I will start by the instructions you gave regarding how to start and what to learn. Thank you for your help!

Nice, Ahmed Hamdy ! I recommend you just stick with iOS development then if you're not trying to build a full-fledged app that has a web service background. You'll find it really rewarding to know something really well. And there are a lot of apps you can make without a web service; you just have to begin to understand at what point you need a web service. (Generally whenever you want one person's device to talk to another.) Best of luck!

ahmed hamdi First of all try to exercise a "Self-Destructing Messaging App for the iPhone" and you will understand the principles of iOS programming. It was really useful to me - I had the same question in the beginning "what I have to know to do an app like Vine or Instagram". While you are doing you understand iOS more and more.