This is the third day of writing blogs to improve my English and in the meanwhile keeping track of progress too in order to improve my writing to an extent where I can write complex articles effortlessly in much short timeframe.
In this article I am sharing my experiences that I had as an android developer while developing production ready apps in hope of achieving financial freedom someday. Honestly I was very stupid to dream like that because the reality is far away from what I thought it to be.
Why I chose android development over web development?
When I was starting the programming journey I got fascinated by the idea that I can have my own product which can help me earn in thousands if not millions. I chose not to go for web dev as I find it to be more hard than android dev because of the number of tech stacks required to have a production ready apps and also I thought that it would be more easy to upload apps on google play store than having to host the web apps on any hosting provider as I wont need to worry about scaling and security issues as the user grows. Android roadmap was pretty simple like you just need to learn java or Kotlin as an programming language and xml or jetpack compose for designing app’s user interface.
All the apps that I have developed
My first few android app was WhatsApp Sticker app that lets user save the sticker pack and use those stickers in normal WhatsApp conversation. Second one was wallpaper app which had collection of wallpapers to choose from and set them as device lock screen and home screen. Third one was English Vocabulary app that has collection of advance vocabulary to learn and enhance one’s proficiency in the language. Though this app was quite complex to develop as there were lots of useful feature I added to ensure the maximum efficiency in learning new vocabularies but it was the most valuable and useful one for me which I still use till these days. The most recent one was WhatsApp Status Saver App which let user save WhatsApp images and videos status into their device external storage so that they can view them or share them even after 24 hours when the statuses disappears.
Was any of my app got successful
Yes two of my apps were quite successful. Unfortunately both of the them were WhatsApp Sticker app only where one of them got 40k downloads and the other one got 10k+ downloads. My other apps which were wallpaper apps got 1k+ downloads too and the vocabulary one got 500+ download in total. The total revenue I got from all of them combined was 500$.
Why I got my play console account terminated
I received my first suspension strike for uploading very similar app which was basic and pro version of OCR scanner as it violates the Google’s play repetitive content policy which states that we cant have two similar apps that merely provides the same functionality. Yeah I know I didn’t mentioned about this app earlier in this article because I got it suspended too early so I thought of skipping this one from the list. The second suspension strike was on my dynamic WhatsApp sticker saver app which has a bug that was causing crashes in the production environment so it was getting rejected every time I was trying to upload its update and later on due to crossing the limit for uploading such buggy app I got a strike under Google’s spam policy. Third strike was on wallpaper app that was quite similar in terms of niche to the one I uploaded previously and this time too it was due to violation of repetitive policy. Except for the first one I don’t agree with the other two strikes I got. After the third strike my play console account was terminated and I cant have a new one as Google ban you permanently from play store once they terminate your account.
Would I choose android dev again if I have to restart my programming journey
No I would never choose android development again if I have to restart my journey. From the perspective of business its always better to have as much control as possible so you don’t have to worry about the strict policies and guidelines of the platform which may kill your business anytime as it happened to me with my android dev account. Also if I am developing for android then I am limiting myself to google play store only as their isn’t any other popular platform to distribute your android apps so once your play store account is terminated your whole business is dead.
My experience writing this article
So I tried my best to write as much as possible to share my android development journey but even with this article I wasn’t able to come up with the right sentences to properly demonstrate my experiences. I am bit confused on what are the skills I need in order to overcome these challenges and also to reduce the time it takes to write such a simple article. As of now I am reading books and consuming only contents that are in English. I will surely write an article on any tips that would help me overcome my shortcomings.
Time it took me to write this article
Although I expected to finish this article mostly by 1.5 hours but it took me approximately 3 hours to write this article. Since this article is bit longer than previous ones I am satisfied with the results as its only day 3rd and being able to write this much is great achievements for me.