Android development

Yesterday, we published our 12th Android app: TimerRN. This app has been a long time coming, primarily due to my getting distracted by other projects.  Hokan worked on the first version; Matt did some major re-work after I tested it and figured out what worked and didn’t in the original design.

The original idea for this product actually came from a conversation I had with Mark Burke of Voalte in July, 2010.  Voalte describes itself as providing “compelling software solutions for healthcare institutions that solve communication problems at the point-of-care.”  They concentrate on iPhone- and iPad-based solutions but Mark was kind enough to spend a bunch of time on the phone with me, talking about Android apps for nurses, and, among other nuggets, threw out a suggestion that we implement a ‘drip timer’ app.  TimerRN is a bit more general than that first idea. Nurses can set multiple timers and alarms for IV drips, medicines that have to be dispensed outside the standard schedule, getting patients ready for transport, or even to when to take their next break.

It’s been a busy month but Matt helped me make the effort to get TimerRN published.  We’ve made it as good as we can internally; it needs users working with it to get better.  And it’s great fun to have an even dozen Android apps in the Android Marketplace.

My friend Mark Thoney of Wyolution added a smile to my workweek when he emailed me a link to a USA Today story on how fleeting glory is for most phone apps.   The main point of the piece was no surprise to me.  I’ve long heard that many apps, especially games, get used only for a few hours or a few days after they are downloaded.  Frankly, as a developer, I’ve always found that one of the most discouraging of factoids.  Think of all the passion and labor that goes into even a simple app.

But one quote caught my eye.  Anindya Datta, founder of Mobilewalla, an ‘app analytics firm’ says that while “80% to 90% of apps are eventually deleted,” he considers any app that’s retained by 30% of downloaders to be “sticky.”

Guess what? By that measure, almost all of our apps are sticky!  I’d been feeling a bit down about the fact that ‘only’ half of the DOT Placards downloaders still have the app on their phone.  Guess I’m going to have to revise that emotion upward, eh?

I tossed our current download and install numbers into a spreadsheet: Read the rest of this entry »

Update:  22 Jan 2012

I’ve been using STM+ off and on over the holidays and it was always working well.  I took several big photos this morning and they appeared in my inbox very quickly.  And I never did get any support emails or negative comments in the Android Marketplace.

So whatever problem we were having for a while in December seems to have gone away.  Of course, the wise old tech support saying is:  Problems that go away by themselves come back by themselves.  So we’ll be monitoring the STM products’ performance carefully.

I use our two photo sending apps, SnapToMe and SnapToMe Plus, all the time in my own work.  I’m always scribbling something on a whiteboard and needing to save it or show it to someone.  Snap!  And just the other day, Matt and I put together a low-fidelity mockup of a new user interface with sticky notes and needed to send it to a customer for review.  Snap!

In the past week, I’ve had a couple of days where emails from SnapToMe Plus were delayed for up to 24 hours and emailing from SnapToMe simply failed outright.  We’ve narrowed this down to being pretty certainly an issue with our email hosting service and have begun researching alternatives.  But, frankly, it’s Christmas time and we’re also trying to take some dedicated time off to be with our families.

So, please, if you are experiencing problems with one of the SnapTo’s let us know at [email protected]  We’d like to take our time, understand the problem more thoroughly, and be deliberate in our choice of what service to try next.  But if the products are working badly for a lot of users, we’ll do what we can to accelerate a solution.  Meantime, keep your eye out for an update to your app and, when you see one, please accept it.

Thanks for your patience and support.

ag

Version 1.0 of our DOT Placards product was released on 3 September, 2010. Today I checked in Android Developers Console and saw it has crossed the 10,000 download threshold. Huzzah!

The Android Marketplace doesn’t publish exact download numbers for consumers to see. Rather, it reports downloads as being within ranges such as < 10, 50-100, 1,000-5,000 and so on. But the bands get bigger as the counts go up. It gets to be a bigger and bigger deal to cross each threshold.

We’ve been in 5,000-10,000 band for a long time and, for a time, were stalling out a bit on attracting new users. Then we removed the ads feature. Showing ads had never done anything for revenue, had probably annoyed some users, and required extra permissions at app install time. Taking them out was a great decision.

Many thanks to Mark, whose brainchild the product was, and to Hokan, who built it.