App - Daily Luck Calculator

This is a simple app that require the users to input their name and D.O.B to calculate their daily luck. This idea was come from one of the Facebook applications "Test your luck". This app have nothing special, it just come out with a number that shows your luck today. In Facebook this kind of app have a huge number of daily users. In android market there are some similar but not exactly same apps with my app. I publish it into to market just want to see how many users will actually download it and keep it in their phone.

Here are some history about few days ago:

5 days ago - i used half day to finish my first app though it was just a simple app, after that i publish it into android market

4 days ago - there are total 3 downloads - one from me and another two from my friends, which means 0 download from public. I felt quite disappointed at that moment. After make some research on alternative markets, I publish my app into SlideMe, appoke, anzhi and hiapk. The latter two markets are from China.

3 days ago - Slideme and anzhi market approved my app. At the same day, I have 250+ downloads from Slideme and 350+ download from anzhi.

today - i upload my app to amazon. The download number is still increasing for slideme and anzhi markets. My app status in hiapk still in pending.

Statistic for today:

Slideme - 317

anzhi - 468

android market - 20 downloads (13 active)

appoke - 1 (very low download rate, i will just skip this)

hiapk - pending status

As you can see from the download numbers above, android market had very low download number compare to other two markets. The main different between android market and other two market is android market do not show the latest update/latest app like the other two market do. Low exposure causes the low download rate in android market. There are some reasons for Google remove the just in category from the market. The reasons behind these was long enough to open a new post. So i will skip it for now.

Slideme is a great market for indie developers:

- quite a large number of users using slideme market

- less developers means less competitors

- approve app within one day

anzhi is another big market:

- China market are always big and chances are everywhere

- anzhi's users are mostly from China - this means the download rate in a single China beat the rate for all others countries together around the world (for my case).

If you want to make some real money, those big markets such as android market, amazon and anzhi are essential. Next, how to make your apps survive from giant companies and get your apps known by the users is depends on your marketing skills. Apparently, I am not good in this. That's why I am creating this blog to promote my own apps and also learning how to marketing.

By the way, you can find my first app in the following link:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.qapps.testyourluck&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwxLDEsImNvbS5xYXBwcy50ZXN0eW91cmx1Y2siXQ..

Any comments and suggestion are most welcomed.

About this blog and Me

In all of my posts, I will just keep everything as short as possible, probably in report and point form. The shorter the better :). In this way, I can save my time to write and at the same time, saving your time reading as well.

“Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight.” - quoted from Bill Gates.

In fact, I am just being too lazy to write a verbose post and I am not good in writing at all. Hence, I will write my blog posts just like the way I write my code.


Let's start with some of my backgrounds:

•  Currently, I am still pursuing my Computer Science degree. 
• Moderate knowledge in Java programming before I begin to learn about Android programming. (My advice is you do no need to be a Java master to learn Android, but you must at least know some Java basics and understand those important characteristics of Java/OOP such as Inheritance and Encapsulation.) 
• My school syllabus did not cover these. Therefore, I have to learn how to program Android all by myself. 
• Have learned Android about a month ago. The exact time  spent   is actually less than 2 weeks. 
• Write my first app (in half day) and publish it in android market in one week ago.

Purposes for creating this blog:

• Improve my writing skills
• Share some solutions to help those who encounter problems that I  had encountered during my apps development
• Promote my apps
• Perhaps I can make some money by adding some ads into this blog

In the next post, I will make some introduction to my first app (a really simple app to test market) and also android market analysis (unprofessional one, just to share some of my experience).