Today is the day 7th of 90 days challenge that I have started to improve my English learning, speaking and writing skills so that I can become proficient enough to deliver complex articles effortlessly within shorter timeframe.
Through this article I want to share about my journey on how and why I started developing apps for android, what are the product I build and how much in total I earned from doing this.
Why I started learning android development?
So after my 12th exam I was bit confused on which career to pursue and started my journey to explore the options available for me. I came across a random YouTube video on game development and liked the idea of developing my own game and making revenue out of it but after researching and giving it a try I abandoned it because I found it to be complex due to lots of Math, designing and animations involved in it. Although I abandoned the game development but I kept researching field similar to it and got exposed to the app development which I found to be even more interesting and much less complex than the game dev so I started gaining more information on it and liked the idea of building my own apps and making hefty revenue out of it which honestly was realistic but you know when you are naive you have no idea on how complex and hard it can be. In short the whole idea of pursuing android dev was to build something which can generate me passive income and help me attain financial freedom.
How I learned the android dev and what were the android apps that I build?
I haven’t spend a single penny learning android because I knew that I can learn all stuff for free on YouTube so I started watching android development tutorials to learn the fundamentals. I didn’t watched a lot of tutorial and started making my first app which was a Flashlight app. I copied the whole code from a YouTube tutorial without understanding how it worked but it was still a great achievement because it worked. Then without even learning further I went for the other project which was PDF reader app and trust me making this one wasn’t an easy even with the tutorial because I wanted to add some extra feature to this PDF reader which I have to do on my own through lots of googling and reading third party library documentation. It was hard due to the fact that I wasn’t well aware of many android concept but still due to my googling skills I was able to come up with the working app. It was the time I realized that I need to work more on the strengthening my basics so I learned all the core basics of the android development and moved to the development again. I cloned the WhatsApp sticker app from the GitHub which was provided by the Facebook itself in order to have our own custom WhatsApp sticker app. I modified it by changing its UI, adding my own sticker pack and lots of custom feature such as setting stickers as wallpaper or contact avatar or download them if needed. Developing this app was quite easy when it was just about adding new sticker packs but extending feature required understanding of the code base so it took some time to get familiar with it and bring about the changes required to have additional features. At this moment I thought of building something simple yet profitable so I went for wallpaper app this time and honestly this one was quite easy to develop when compared to the previous ones because of the experience I already have developing them. Now it was the time for me to develop something that is bit complex, useful and profitable too so I decided to go for something that would solve my own problem which at that time was my lack of English vocabulary. I started the development of Vocabulary builder which has 1000+ advanced vocabulary stored in its database with its meaning and two example sentences. This app of mine has great UI and rich features such as audio pronunciation of word, meaning and example sentences, option to set them as wallpaper with text color and background color of their own choice so they may revise the vocabulary whenever they unlock their phone, option to select number of vocabularies and time duration within which they want to get notified of all those vocabularies through notification services provided by the android system and features like marking vocabulary as important or favorite were also included. The last unique app that I developed recently was WhatsApp Status Saver app which I made only for the sake of profit but it didn’t end up well on the play store as it crashed a lot in beginning which caused it to not rank at some position where it can be visible to user. Although I fixed all the bugs but still it never got the reach as it should be getting because this app was one of the most complex one even more than vocabulary one as I tried my best to compete with those WhatsApp Status Saver app which has 100 million+ download. The development time it took was unexpected as I thought that it would only take a week or two but it took me a month to come up with the level of status saver that were already ruling the play store market. I tried my best to add every possible feature to enhance the user experience in order to compete with the giants which were already ranking at top so I expected it to bring some decent download but for the crash reason in its very first released version it never made to the place where it can even become visible to the user. That’s all what I have built up till now.
Why and how I am looking for my android dev job now?
For the why part it is because Google terminated my developer account due to violation its policies thrice. I have explained about those violations in my previous articles so I am not explaining it here. Google has this very strict policy of permanently banning you from deploying apps on play store if you violate their policies. For each violation they give your account a suspension strike and once you get three or more strikes they terminate your account depending on the severity but that doesn’t mean they will terminate your account after thrice or more strike. Sometimes when the violation is severe they may ban you after first strike itself but in my case they terminated my account after third strike. In short I have no options left now other than applying for jobs to have some financial stability because after you are banned from play store you don’t have much options to upload your apps as other stores are not even close to what play store can bring to your app in terms of download and profit. I have dedicated huge amount of time on this skill so I will start applying for android dev jobs through LinkedIn or if possible I will ask someone to give me referral at the company they work in. If both of the method don’t bring any result I will go for walk in interview.
Total amount I earned from my apps
My expectation was very high in the beginning but as I became familiar with the reality I realized that there is a lot of things that contributes to the app success other than its development. Even with so much of competition I was able to rank two of my app at good position where one of them ranked in top 3 which bought me 40k downloads in total and another one in top 5 which bought me 10k downloads in total for highly competitive keyword and some others in top 10 with an average of 500 download which was great achievement. And with the lots of download I was able to generate nice side income for as long as my app ranked at those position. I was fortunate enough to make 500$ in total from all the apps combined. The highest I earned in a day was 5$ but it didn’t lasted long after my app ranking got affected due to crashes and few negative reviews. Up till now the best moment for me was when I received my first 100$ paycheck. At last Alhamdulillah(All praise be to Allah) for all the earning and may Allah bless me with more through other medium.
My experience writing this article
I was able to write much more in this article than expected and coming up with the sentence was easier than the previous ones as all the points I shared were already there in my mind since a very long time. Still I have got a lot to improve like structuring the article and using more appropriate words whenever required. I am very satisfied with the results as writing this one didn’t frustrated me as much as the previous ones did.
Time it took me to write this article
It took me total of 2 hours and 45 minutes to write this article. I think for this lengthy article it’s fine to take this much of time especially as a beginner.