Need help naming my Android app

Glaucus said:
Ah, I see you got it up and running. Sweet. Had me worried there for a sec. Would still like to know if the scan for servers worked out for you, and if not, any thoughts as to why not. Thanks again.
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Hi Mike,

When I couldn't get it working I tried the scan with no luck but I only tried it once. Then I spotted my mistake and it worked straight away.
 
Woohoo! I got my first rating on the market feedback, and it's a 5 star comment from some guy named Anthony! No idea who Anthony is, but he seems to really like it. Well, that made my day.

Of course I also see there are 4 crash reports, but really strange ones. Something about a NullPointerException associated with the android.view.View.onDrawScrollBars method. A method I don't call or override, so I'm kinda puzzled. Wish there was a stack trace I could follow. My theory is that it's probably 1.6 device - the version I tested the least. I guess I'll have to fire up the emulator tonight and test the crap out of it in 1.6 and see if I can cause an error. I do know that my app has some issues with 1.6 but I thought it would be stable enough to use. Maybe not. And yes, I do have one user using 1.6 so it's all plausible.

Another interesting thing is where my app has been downloaded. Of the 6 new installs in the last day, I've had installs in North America, Central America, Europe, Asia and Africa. I guess I'm a little surprised about how wide spread it is, but very cool at the same time. My plan was always to add localization for different regions, this gives me extra incentive. For sure I want to make a Greek and a German version (gotta exploit my family connections ;)), and French or Spanish translations would be cool too (and if anyone here wants to help with that, that would be awesome). Part of that plan is to also just remove words entirely and replace with icons. So that might be my next feature.
 
Today was crushing. Got my first 1 star slap in the face. :oops: Both bad ratings came from Germans. Funny that. From their comments (which only I and German speakers can see) it seems to be that they're having trouble configuring the app. My instructions are in English of course, so are all my error messages. Guess language is a barrier there. Oh well. I decided to update my help docs and put a bunch of screen shots in there hoping people will at the very least skim for the pics. I also added a Trouble shooting section that should also help. I'm tempted to take the app off the market outside of English nations, but half of my downloads are in Europe (can't tell which part though). *shrug*

But I just checked again and I see someone else gave me a 5 star rating also. That cheered me up some. No comment though, just 5 stars. So it seems those who like it, like it a lot. I can live with that. :D
 
Glaucus said:
Today was crushing. Got my first 1 star slap in the face.
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When they rate, do you get any information about the device and OS version they are running? That sort of thing could be useful.
 
FluffyMcDeath said:
When they rate, do you get any information about the device and OS version they are running? That sort of thing could be useful.
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Ya, it shows your device to the public when you leave a comment, probably so that those with a similar device might get a better feel for how it'll work on their device. Not sure how it handles users with multiple devices though. At any rate, both the negative feedbacks were from newer phones: Samsung Galaxy Nexus & Samsung Galaxy S2. At least one of them runs Android 4, but I tested it with 4.0 on my tablet and it works fine. Also, there's a bunch of users with those phones using my app, so I'm pretty sure it's not the phones or Android version here. Plus my app hasn't caused a fatal error in days, so from a stability point of view it's pretty solid. They just can't figure out how to set it up.
 
Glaucus said:
They just can't figure out how to set it up.
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To be fair, it's a lot more complicated than any other app I've set up. Add in a language barrier and that might explain it.

I thought your instructions were great but I still struggled to get it going.
I'm an eejit but I'd imagine there's many more like me. :p
 
wish i had me one of them kinda phones that can do all that... mine gets text messages... mostly... occasional phone calls.... 785-513-0014... of course i throw my number out there so i get some strange stuff too... but its largely good... is there an app for that? :rolleyes:
 
Robert said:
To be fair, it's a lot more complicated than any other app I've set up. Add in a language barrier and that might explain it.

I thought your instructions were great but I still struggled to get it going.

I'm an eejit but I'd imagine there's many more like me. :p
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Ya, I understand it's tricky to setup. Many other apps use a central server to get around all that setup. For instance, my bit torrent client has an android app you can use to check up on your torrents. Both the bit torrent client and the android app talk to a central server on the web and the server relays the data between the two. Makes setup easy as all you need to do is enter a passcode on both the client and your app and away you go. Nice and easy. Except that now there's a third party that can easily snoop on all your bit torrent activity, but who would ever want to do that right? From a developer's point of view, it also adds some cost as you'd need to setup a server and pay for the bandwidth. Perhaps you can make that money back by selling data to advertisers, who knows.

The upshot of my app is that you maintain greater control of your communications and are better guarded against snoopers. Perhaps I should make that all clearer in the docs so people are more motivated to go through the setup. ;)

Last night I was working on tightening up validation on the IP address textbox (host name). I remember you mentioning something about placing the dot in the wrong spot. My plan is to have it warn the user if the IP address is incorrect. To complicate things it also accepts host names (it attempts to resolve NetBIOS names, which is something Android doesn't do natively). Not sure if anyone actually uses that feature but I'd like to keep it, which means I have a bit of a headache...
 
Weird. Just checked my developer console and I saw my app was installed on an Android device running Android 4.2. That version has yet to be released, I don't think they've even released the developer SDK for it yet (which sometimes is released early). Wonder if someone at Google is playing with it. Hmmm.....

Actually that's possible, I did contribute to a bug report concerning listviews with checkboxes on Jelly Bean devices that Google has now marked as completed and I'd expect to see in the next release (4.2). Perhaps they used my app to test it? Kinda cool.
 
Nice. How many installations are you up to?

As an aside, it looks like I might be developing Android apps in the not too distant.
 
Developing Android apps for fun or profit? Hopefully the latter, but either way I'd be curious to see what you come up with.

According to the Google Play dev console, Ampwifi has been installed 2300 times and is actively used by about 423 people around the world. It's also available on AndroidPit and Amazon, but those figures are much smaller. So it's not ultra popular, but has a 4.2/5 rating which isn't bad. Funny thing is that I haven't really done much to it all summer and these past few weeks I've had a lot of interest and received about 5 five star ratings & comments. Apparently Ampwifi is the only Winamp remote that lets you browse the file system on the remote computer. I guess the others break down all your songs my mp3 ID tags such as genre, artist, album, etc. Ampwifi doesn't and that seems to be what some people like about it. Funny, I didn't realize that until I saw the user comments.
 
Apparently Ampwifi is the only Winamp remote that lets you browse the file system on the remote computer. I guess the others break down all your songs my mp3 ID tags such as genre, artist, album, etc. Ampwifi doesn't and that seems to be what some people like about it.
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well, of course. what people always want is complete control over their devices and software.
make that possible and you will have millions of people who love you.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blitterhead.ampwifi&hl=en

the one "negative" is that I would have to use Windows :lol:

seriously, this would be cool to play with on linux
 
cecilia said:
well, of course. what people always want is complete control over their devices and software.
make that possible and you will have millions of people who love you.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.blitterhead.ampwifi&hl=en

the one "negative" is that I would have to use Windows :lol:

seriously, this would be cool to play with on linux
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Yes it would. Maybe I should document the communications protocol so that anyone can write a client for Ampwifi on any operating system with any media player. It's kinda what I wanted to do anyway, I just don't have the time right now.

I am however still plugging away at it. Here's a screen capture of an early preview of what Ampwifi may look like with the "holo" theme.

Console_NewLook.png


I plan to add a proper action bar on top and make that tab view part of it, along with proper gesture based scrolling from one tab to the other. That would make it compliant with the latest Android style guide.
 
Glaucus said:
Developing Android apps for fun or profit? Hopefully the latter, but either way I'd be curious to see what you come up with.
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Profit, sort of; I just started a new job and my first task in an iOS app but there's apparently an Android order in the pipeline.

According to the Google Play dev console, Ampwifi has been installed 2300 times and is actively used by about 423 people around the world. It's also available on AndroidPit and Amazon, but those figures are much smaller. So it's not ultra popular, but has a 4.2/5 rating which isn't bad. Funny thing is that I haven't really done much to it all summer and these past few weeks I've had a lot of interest and received about 5 five star ratings & comments. Apparently Ampwifi is the only Winamp remote that lets you browse the file system on the remote computer. I guess the others break down all your songs my mp3 ID tags such as genre, artist, album, etc. Ampwifi doesn't and that seems to be what some people like about it. Funny, I didn't realize that until I saw the user comments.
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That's great. I liked it when I tried it out and if I used Windows I'd probably use it.
 
So I looked at my download stats the other day and I was shocked to see the app make a huge spike in overall installs. Since I launched the app in March, 2012, I had only about 500 active installs (active installs = total installs - total uninstalls). No, not the most popular app ever, but so what. But in just a few days I'm almost at 600, and it looks like it's still climbing. What's really odd is that I haven't touched it in months, nor have I ever promoted the app in any way. So I did some googling and I may have found the answer: App für Android. It got reviewed! Well, almost, more of just a quick little write-up really. But I guess someone read it and that was enough to get the ball rolling!

So there you have it, marketing is king. Maybe I should try it! :D
 
Nice one, Mike. More power to your keyboard, sir. :pint:
 
Thanks Cecilia!

Ya, I did upload it to Amazon as well. I should probably upload the most recent version, but from what I can tell not many get apps from Amazon. Amazon is far more strict and they actually test out your app before it's available for download. And it also turns out that there are some key differences on the Kindle Fire, so I was forced to add code checking to see if the device it's running on is an Amazon Kindle Fire and if so to do different things. That's the only device I actually need to worry about, the Kindle Fire HD is fine without the special treatment. Weird.
 
my ulterior motivation is to get as many people involved so one of them makes this available for Ubuntu....mmmm! :D
 
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