AppMakr raised $1 million for no-code iPhone

IPhone app maker gets funding from Mitch Kapor, Bill Tai, Rich Chen, Bill Lee and more

The idea, of making no-code apps for the iPhone, is getting a fair amount of attention these days. Game Salad recently announced a no-code game making tool. Adventure Maker,  Mobile Roadie,and Yapper each have their own version of an iPhone app making tool.

So, it's not surprising when one more tool makes its way to the party, along with some sweet funding. 

AppMakr announced Tuesday  that it's raised $1 million in seed funding from a number of venture capitalists and angel investors, including Mitch Kapor, Bill Lee, Bill Tai and George Zachary of Charles River Ventures, Rich Chen, Brian McClendon, Jeremie Berrebi and Xavier Niel of Kima Ventures, Warren Hellman, Ben Narasin of TriplePoint Ventures, Pietro Dova, Sean Glass, Chris Redlitz and Peter Boboff of Transmedia Capital.

The AppMakr tool, which was launched in 2009, is free to use, though it does have a paid version. Under the old paid model, making an app was free, but in order to push the app live, you would have to spend $199. If you wanted to download the app to your own machine, it would cost you $499. Some of the features built into the tool include: Push-Notifications, Native Photo Galleries, Location-Aware GeoRSS, Social Network Sharing and Mobile Ad Network Integration.

Unlike Game Salad, however, in order to publish an app made by the AppMakr tool, you will need to have an Apple Developer account. These accounts cost $99. AppMakr users have already submitted 3,000 applications to the app store, which is roughly 1% of the total apps on the App Store. Apple is currently counting the apps at over 250,000, according to the apps site.  Of course, the number of apps is dwarfed by the amount of downloads the app store has gone through, with three billion in total, as of January.

If you want to be sure if your app is up to snuff, you should run it through the App Quality Index, which will assess how likely your app is to get into the store at all. 

AppMakr, whose current user base includes PBS, Newsweek, Harvard Business Review, US Congress, MacLife, Accenture, provides analytics reporting on apps, as long as you made with the tool. That way, you can see how many downloads you are getting. This is a good thing , if you want to monitor and adjust future apps accordingly.

The company is currently hiring iOS, Android & HTML5 Mobile Web Developers for both their San Francisco based headquarters, and the Washington, DC based offices. AppMakr is  part of a larger company called PointAbout. Point about is a consulting firm that builds custom iPhone apps for major brands.