Have you ever downloaded an app from the Android Market, or App Store, and after using it for a few minutes thought “this is just awesome”? If you’re like me, the answer is yes. But was your first thought to contact the developer and tell him how happy you are? Or did you just keep using the app, happy to have something that works?
I was reading the comments on Tap That! Number the other day. Here’s the latest review by someone called Jake: READ MORE »
At long last, here is my income report for the month of July. This is a very different story to previous reports, mainly thanks to my Google+ Invites app which made a few hundred dollars in one day. I also released a major update for Tap That! Number, and published a new app (CPU Usage Live Wallpaper) with both free and paid versions. It was a pretty hectic month! Read on for more details, and an overview of the month’s earnings. READ MORE »
I came across a rather obscure bug today, while trying to submit my app Tap That! Number to the Amazon Appstore. I received a rejection notice detailing several problems with my app, including this strange one:
Application’s “Feedback” functionality “Facebook” option is not working.
At first I had no idea what this meant. My app never mentions Facebook at all. The only “Feedback” option I have is a menu item designed to send an email to the developer.
After digging around a bit, I found that the code I was using to launch an email intent was also recognising Facebook and presenting it in the list of available apps. Here’s the code I was using: READ MORE »
I woke up this morning to a perfect storm of Google+ announcements. Firstly, the big news – Google+ is now available to anyone with a Google account. No invite required. This is great news, as it lowers the barrier to entry significantly. I can now invite all my friends to join, and they can invite their friends, etc. Unfortunately it also means my Google+ Invites app (a.k.a. Social Invites Plus) is now entirely obsolete. Well, that was fun while it lasted 
But that’s not the only Google+ news. In the same blog post Google announced a bunch of new Hangout features, including mobile video & publicly broadcast streams. Also, you’ll now be able to share your screen and/or Google Docs with Hangout participants (which puts Google+ squarely in the business arena). And we finally have the ability to search Google+! This has probably been the most requested feature, and the ability to search posts as well as people makes the service far more useful.
And just in case you weren’t impressed with those features – Google published another blog post a few minutes later announcing features 101 through 107. This includes a slew of mobile features, such as +mentions, the ability to +1 comments, and change your profile picture all from the mobile app. These are more incremental updates, but it’s great to see Google actively pushing development like this, and responding to the small features that people have been asking for. I don’t know any other Google product which has had so many feature updates in such a short period of time. Hopefully they continue to keep up the good work. I believe Google+ has huge potential, and it’s by far the most promising social service from Google yet.
Something interesting to note (in case you thought this post wasn’t related to Android development 
), Google seems to be having difficulty synchronizing feature releases between their Android and iOS apps. This stands to reason – Apple requires approval for updates in the App Store, while Google would have no delays releasing an app on the Android Market. But this is a significant area of concern for many developers. The more app stores you distribute to, the harder it becomes to keep them all up to date. The code base will differ between stores; content policy differs; and even product packaging has to be done differently. It’s worth taking note – Google doesn’t have it any easier.
Add me on Google+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/115578224090485355580/
A few weeks ago I did something which, in retrospect, was probably rather stupid. But it was surprisingly successful while it lasted. As I wrote earlier, I’ve been using Google+ since the day after it was launched. I myself received an invite from a stranger who was offering invites publicly. For this reason, I’ve been keen to share invites with anyone else who’s looking for one. I put up a post on this blog offering free invites, and got a huge response from the Android community. In fact, there were so many responses that it overwhelmed my email after a few days. There’s no way I could have kept up with the demand.
Rather than stop accepting requests altogether, I wanted to make it easier to handle the load. (NB: At this stage there was no limit to the number of Google+ invites you could send.) My first thought, trying to work out a faster way to do things, was “hey, is there an Android app for this?” A quick search turned up a negative. No Android apps offering Google+ invites. So, why not make one? It seemed a pretty good idea, so I spent that afternoon writing a simple app that accepted an email address, and a description of the request. The data was sent to a PHP script on my server, so I could go through and invite the email addresses stored in a database.
Actually, it’s not that simple to write an Android app that POSTs data asynchronously to a server, checks the response, and handles errors gracefully. I re-used some classes from another unreleased project, but it was still a bigger job than I expected. But the actual coding is an issue for another day. The most interesting part came when I released the app on the Android Market. READ MORE »
Recent Comments