It's been almost a year since I finished the development of MyAnthem and I'd like to summarize my experience so far.
The development team consisted of two people. I did the entire coding part and a friend of mine took care of graphics, general aesthetics of the app and social media presence. All in all we spent about 5-6 months building the app from scratch, without any previous experience in Android development. There's still a feature or two that I'd like to add to the app but I couldn't find the necessary motivation to start working again, even if I started coding one of the features already one or two times.
Overall things are not looking as good as I hoped. The app had little impact on the market and it generated less then 5 euros from ads. The total number of downloads shown in Google Play Developer Console is around 700, with a retention rate of around 20%. Using Google Analytics I see that the activity is rather steady, 400-500 sessions every month. In the beginning the session number/month was below 200 this but has increased steadily and for the past few months has remained to this figure.
Regarding marketing and promotion, in the beginning we focused on a strong social presence and an 50 euro ad campaign on Facebook. The app has it's own web page www.myanthemapp.com, Facebook account, Google+ account, Twitter account and YouTube channel. We even made a promotional video and published it on the YouTube channel. On Facebook we started a campaign called Anthems Around the World. The campaign consists of a series of "Did you know" cards with interesting facts about various national anthems around the world. Periodically posts were published on app's page on Facebook wishing Happy National Day to various countries arround the World that were celebrating in that day their National Day.
So far we only had one review published on Recovery-Android.com, even if promotional emails were sent to several online publications.
All in all we gained a lot of experience from working on this project, even if it didn't catch the expected attention on the Google Play Market. The entire concept had a very limited audience, because let's face it, who listens to National Anthems these days?
Looking forward to finding an idea that is worth turning into an Android Application!
Thursday, May 28, 2015
Friday, August 08, 2014
MyAnthem development - Progress report 1
It's been over two months since I began working on MyAnthem app for Android and I thought to summarize the progress.
The app has already 10 Alpha versions published on Google Play and most of the main features are already implemented. Not all versions were successful, there have been 3 or 4 who crashed. I still remember my first version which crashed, which brought me a real adrenaline rush during a Saturday morning. It turned out the bug was really easy to fix, it was a global define I forgot to update.
Being my first application on a new platform, the development time takes long. I had to start from zero with every single feature, researching, understanding, implementing and debugging it. Even the development and release work-flow I had to define and get used to it.
The biggest time consuming step in implementing a feature is not the actual coding part, but the research involved in understanding it. I usually have between 5-20 tabs open in Google Chrome every time I finish implementing a feature, not to mention the ones I closed to save RAM. Eclipse and Chrome can eat up a lot of RAM and the 8GB that I have on my laptop are not enough most of the times. Most usefull websites so far for researching were stackoverflow.com and Android developer. If the Android developer gives an overview of the feature, StackOverflow helps me find out solutions to various problems that others have faced. I've reached now 37 consecutive days when I visited StackOverflow and the way it goes, I'll probably get my first gold badge soon :)
Features available in the app:
The app has already 10 Alpha versions published on Google Play and most of the main features are already implemented. Not all versions were successful, there have been 3 or 4 who crashed. I still remember my first version which crashed, which brought me a real adrenaline rush during a Saturday morning. It turned out the bug was really easy to fix, it was a global define I forgot to update.
Being my first application on a new platform, the development time takes long. I had to start from zero with every single feature, researching, understanding, implementing and debugging it. Even the development and release work-flow I had to define and get used to it.
The biggest time consuming step in implementing a feature is not the actual coding part, but the research involved in understanding it. I usually have between 5-20 tabs open in Google Chrome every time I finish implementing a feature, not to mention the ones I closed to save RAM. Eclipse and Chrome can eat up a lot of RAM and the 8GB that I have on my laptop are not enough most of the times. Most usefull websites so far for researching were stackoverflow.com and Android developer. If the Android developer gives an overview of the feature, StackOverflow helps me find out solutions to various problems that others have faced. I've reached now 37 consecutive days when I visited StackOverflow and the way it goes, I'll probably get my first gold badge soon :)
Features available in the app:
- Activity displaying the list of countries for which the anthem is available
- Activity displaying anthem detail
- Integration and usage of SQLite database
- Instrumentation with Google Analytics
- In-App Billing
- In-App and interstitial ads
- Anthem download and possibility to interrupt the download
- Country Flag zoom
- Anthem playing
- Notifications in the status bar
- Search functionality
- Sharing
Even if I don't expect to earn much with this app, the things I learned about Java, concurrency, file parsing and Android Development are enough to keep me motivated to continue.
There are still a few features left to work on and a careful analysis and of the graphics and general UI of the app, so stay tuned for future updates.
In case anyone wants to become a Alpha tester, here is the link to MyAnthem
Tuesday, July 22, 2014
The bubble around you...
Sometimes I get these flashes of "intelligence" and in some of these situations, things turn out the way I want or say something "smart", both at work and in personal life.
I'm sure you are familiar with this type of people. Everyone has at least one or two colleagues, working in the same company or at the same department, or some friends, who seem to make things happen. Often coming with unexpected ideas or easily getting a bigger picture of things when you explain them something new.
I read once a book where the author imagine a bubble of influence around every person in the world. My bubble encapsulates, to a bigger or lesser degree, the bubbles of other people around me. I am also part of others people bubbles. When I do something, I would start a ripple through time and space, that would jiggle the bubbles of those who I am connected to, depending on the strength at which they are interconnected.
I like the image this theory generates in my head and it makes me think of how small we all are, with our struggles and emotions. Picture a camera view, zooming out on the world, and seeing people around you with their bubbles getting smaller and smaller. As I zoom out, I realize that what appeared as a big bubble around me, is not as big. Bigger bubbles from other people emerge, which makes mine look very small. And if the zooming continues both in space and in time, even bigger ones emerge, with connections to various people around the globe.
It's a scary image! The world doesn't seem so simple anymore, does it? I don't seem to have all the answers as I previously thought and my struggles appear less important and meaningless.
So why do we categorize others around us as smart, intelligent, clever?
The only answer I could come with is that our brain needs it. Our brain is by design lazy. It always looks to the least energy expensive way to interpret situations around us. It needs this easy characterization of people that you interact with, in order to know how to interact with them without spending additional energy every time rebuilding a mental profile. How many times have you stopped and analyzed a friend when you meet with him? Your brain does this with people you just meet, but once it attached mentally some categories to that person, your brain will always call to those quick references when you meet later on with the same person.
What's even worse is that these mental profiles your brain makes after the first encounter with someone are very hard to change. Why would your brain go through the the effort of analyzing again someone it already did? What benefit it has to spend that much energy?
Try to find ways to force your lazy brain to continuously analyze everything and everyone you interact with, especially the image your brain makes about yourself. Everything around us changes, the experience we build makes us constantly change, so why would the image our brain has on the world stay the same?
I'm sure you are familiar with this type of people. Everyone has at least one or two colleagues, working in the same company or at the same department, or some friends, who seem to make things happen. Often coming with unexpected ideas or easily getting a bigger picture of things when you explain them something new.
I read once a book where the author imagine a bubble of influence around every person in the world. My bubble encapsulates, to a bigger or lesser degree, the bubbles of other people around me. I am also part of others people bubbles. When I do something, I would start a ripple through time and space, that would jiggle the bubbles of those who I am connected to, depending on the strength at which they are interconnected.
I like the image this theory generates in my head and it makes me think of how small we all are, with our struggles and emotions. Picture a camera view, zooming out on the world, and seeing people around you with their bubbles getting smaller and smaller. As I zoom out, I realize that what appeared as a big bubble around me, is not as big. Bigger bubbles from other people emerge, which makes mine look very small. And if the zooming continues both in space and in time, even bigger ones emerge, with connections to various people around the globe.
It's a scary image! The world doesn't seem so simple anymore, does it? I don't seem to have all the answers as I previously thought and my struggles appear less important and meaningless.
So why do we categorize others around us as smart, intelligent, clever?
The only answer I could come with is that our brain needs it. Our brain is by design lazy. It always looks to the least energy expensive way to interpret situations around us. It needs this easy characterization of people that you interact with, in order to know how to interact with them without spending additional energy every time rebuilding a mental profile. How many times have you stopped and analyzed a friend when you meet with him? Your brain does this with people you just meet, but once it attached mentally some categories to that person, your brain will always call to those quick references when you meet later on with the same person.
What's even worse is that these mental profiles your brain makes after the first encounter with someone are very hard to change. Why would your brain go through the the effort of analyzing again someone it already did? What benefit it has to spend that much energy?
Try to find ways to force your lazy brain to continuously analyze everything and everyone you interact with, especially the image your brain makes about yourself. Everything around us changes, the experience we build makes us constantly change, so why would the image our brain has on the world stay the same?
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