Initial Response Results

The BETA version of my BobbleHead Android app featuring Barack Obobble hit the Android market on Feb 14th.  Early responses were a mix of overly generous and supportive 5 star reviews, a small number of 2 & 3 star reviews basically stating ‘is what it is’ or ‘does what it says it does’. Sadly the majority of the reviews have been less than supportive 1 star reviews.

I appreciate the reviews that offer suggestions like ‘it should tilt’ or ‘should be able to drag it with your finger’. There were a couple that suggested features that I have on my road-map like be able to upload your own head’, ‘include multiple bobble heads’ and ‘add sound’ [ed. released in v 1.0.1].

The review section of the app store provides something that you don’t get with most web applications – open, honest, sometimes brutal, and very swift feedback from the real users of your product.

I remind myself that these are the opinions of my customers, not my colleagues, friends or business associates. That is an important distinction because no matter what your friends and colleagues say, the customers are the real test of success or failure. That is also why this feedback is so valuable. You don’t need to rely on abstractions like so many pageviews = success or a certain number of sales conversions is success. You get immediate response that your application meets or does not meet the expectations of your audience.

With the recent update of the application I have accomplished the learning goals of developing, publishing and updating an application on the Android Market. The customer reaction to the application has not been what I had hoped.  Stepping back I can see the validity of the responses. I remind myself that this was primarily and exploratory exercise to test the process.  I hoped that this app might have a viral appeal and rushed it to market because I wanted to ride the popularity and publicity of the election.

A couple lessons learned:

1. Be honest about how complete your app is. If it’s not hardened, keep working until it is or state it up front in the description. Missing expectations is a sure fire way to get a pile of 1 Star reviews.
2. You will get 1 star reviews no matter what you release
3. You will get 5 star review no matter what you release
4. Reviews start coming in within hours of deployment, no matter what time of day you release. ( I released around 2AM PST)
5. You may get a few email responses to the address in your developer profile
6. First app install is challenging due to all the keystore, signing etc… steps
7. Once you understand the deployment tasks, subsequent updates are easy

There are a lot more lessons learned, but I’ll save those for a future post.

- KevDev

Barack Obobble on the Android Market

I just launched BobbleHead on the Android market.  As I don’t live in the US or UK, I’ve had to settle with a free app for now.  Not that it’s actually worth paying for just yet – it’s still beta.  In the next few days I plan on adding some slick features that will make it more enjoyable to more people.  I hope everyone thinks its fun, even if it’s just a gimmick.

Barack Obobble

It’s been a fun experiment, and I’m anxious to see the downloads and read the first comments.

I’ll be sure to keep you posted on the results as time goes on.

One of the features I’m looking at is adding additional personalities.  I’d like to avoid copyright and trademark issues, but I want to add current culture icons if possible. If you have a brand or maskot you’d like promoted, let me know.  Perhaps we can work out the details to get in into a future version.

Thanks, Kevin

Finally something Android related

It’s small, but at least it’s Android related – I’ve added my Android del.icio.us bookmarks to this blog.  Check them out below.  As of right now, I have 46 Android urls and over 2700 bookmarks in all.  If you’re interested you can subscribe to my Android bookmarks RSS Feed.

I’ve already announced that I’ve created a Links page on AmateurAndroid.com that has a list of popular Android Blogs, Forums and other Android News, and Developer Resources.  The list also includes RSS feeds, and Twitter handles if you’d like to subscribe or follow anyone off the list.

If you know a good resource that isn’t on the list, leave a comment on this post, reply to @AmateurAndroid or email it to kevin [at] AmateurAndroid dot com.

Google Sites is buggy

In case you’re wondering, there’s a reason google apps isn’t a big revenue generator, and it’s not (entirely) because they’ve just recently hired a sales team.  It’s not (entirely) because the sales team does a bad of converting sales.   And it’s certainly not because they’re afraid of backlash by hiding/reducing free google apps services.  No, It’s because the bloody thing is buggy.  Who’s going to pay for a service that reformats your display every time you save a page.

I’ve got 2 Google Gadgets on the www.amateurandroid.com homepage.  I had to put both of them in a table in order to get any kind of resonable control over the display positioning.  Even though each Gadget is center aligned, each time I save, and go back to edit they pop over to the left again.  I have to click align left then align center each time – useless.

Nevermind that I had to create my own custom Google Gadgets just to display a feedburner feed (for this blog) and an AmateurAndroid twitter feed to a page.  Not that it was hard, but you can hardly expect users to be proficient with XML, JavaScript and various JavaScript APIs.  I doubt most developers I know would even know where to start developing Google Gadgets.

Even so, each time I turn around the scroll bars on the feeds disappear.  Simple, small, but extremely irritating bugs.  That’s why when it’s time to spend money, I’ll buy a contract with a hosting provider and build it myself.  There just isn’t enough there to build even a semi-credible web presence.

Instead of flaky WYSIWYG editors that are too smart for their own good – and browser support nightmares, give us standard Wiki syntax.  It’s becoming the defacto standard as more and more people are familiarizing themselves with [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntax | wiki link syntax ]].  Or if you like the WYSIWYG editors, simplify it and make it work properly like the nice wordpress editor I’m using to write this post.

I imagine that Google apps is good as a project management tool, especially for teams with geolocation challenges.  The Security role management, integration with GMail (with your own @domain.com url) and easy addition of Google Analytics make it simple to manage and track what is going on.

KevDev

How far does FREE get you?

(reposted from now-defunct amateurandroid.blogspot.com)

I’ve been trying out Google Apps (and Google Sites) to build a more full featured site for the AmateurAndroid. I haven’t been able to find a decent Google Gadget that will allow me to automatically include posts from this blog in the Site. Booo.

I created an AmateurAndroid twitter account only to find a similar lack in integration. I just want simple, ‘display feed content here‘ functionality. Perhaps with a link to the appropriate post or feed so that viewers can join the conversation.

So, I’m going to try to write a new Gadget to drop this blog into www.AmateurAndroid.com.

Wish me luck.

KevDev

Update: I built the Google Gadget without too much difficulty.  It (like everything else) is a little rough in the style department, but I’m getting the content from this blog and the @AmateurAndroid twitter feed on the homepage now.

Blogger integration with sites is non-existant – wtf?!?  WordPress is a better blog engine anyway.  A simple change on feedburner and this blog should be showing up on www.amateurandroid.com in no time.

Getting Started

I wasn’t too happy with the blog I setup for Amateur Android on blogger.  Let’s kick the tires on a free WordPress blog…