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I made a mobile app for my significant other and she won't use it

jerseyfonseca.com

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Re: I made a mobile app for my significant other and she won't use it

#41

Post by golf1052 »

askafriend wrote: post #29
wccrawford wrote: post #25

The complaints about having to have enough screenshots and information seems really ... dumb? The website has a bunch of screenshots and info, and users will not download the app without it. Google and Apple are doing you a favor by requiring that you provide enough information. I think Apple's $100/yr is crazy, but I don't think Google's $25 is bad. If you plan to make any money at all on it, that's nothing. Scrolli…

$100 a year is nothing for a developer toolkit. In fact, it's a great deal if you really think about all the infrastructure that you get for free. Let's take a look at what MSDN costs for a pro-level subscription (not even enterprise): "At the Professional subscription level, you pay a not-insignificant sum: $539 per year for an annual cloud subscription or $1,199 for the first year of a perpetual license subscriptio…

You're comparing two different things, the Apple and Android fees are to get access to publish apps to the store.

The developer toolkit which is used to build and test the apps (Android Studio or XCode) are free. The Microsoft comparison would be the $20 to publish in the Microsoft Store and Visual Studio Community which is free to build and test apps.

"MSDN" is a bundle of additional developer tools that you would use for a business (licensed Visual Studio, Azure DevOps, training, and support).

Re: I made a mobile app for my significant other and she won't use it

#42

Post by franl »

pyjug wrote: post #8

I made a "feeding tracker" app because my wife wanted to wean our infant off breast milk. There are mobile apps that do this, but the problem was that we didn't want to wake up our child due to the phone screen at night. So, I hooked up an IoT button to Lambda + Dynamo, created a UI and everything -- my wife only needed to press the button. Turns out my wife was generally too sleepy and forgot to press the button. Al…

V2 if necessary, how about a weight sensor under her feeding chair cushion? No button press necessary!

Re: I made a mobile app for my significant other and she won't use it

#43

Post by arkitaip »

speedcoder wrote: post #26
fake-name wrote: post #12

I feel like we need a add-on to the old quote 'Some people, when confronted with a problem, think "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.' 'Some people, when confronted with a interpersonal relationship problem, think "I know, I'll use software". Now they have two problems.' This is cute, but it's trying to solve a people problem with software.

My therapist told me once: "people are not programs."

Her name didn't happen to be Eliza, huh?

Re: I made a mobile app for my significant other and she won't use it

#44

Post by shric »

tenryuu wrote: post #32
great_reversal wrote: post #13

> Last weekend, my partner had her friends stay with us over the weekend. We needed to find a movie to watch. This was my chance! I was so excited! > "Let's use WeWatch!" > "No, it would take too long. Let's just watch Space Jam." I watch a lot of movies and honestly the swipe-approach would take way too long. My preferred way is to just scroll through a long list of movies (alphabetically) and pick one I want to wat…

An uncommon solution I've seen for this is to instead place 'the" after the rest of the title "Mummy, The", "Thing, The"

Kodi ignores "The" for sorting purposes but still displays it on the titles

Re: I made a mobile app for my significant other and she won't use it

#45

Post by tobr »

Why does an app like this need to have a sign-up process with email, username and password? It’s enough for me to not try the app because of the mental overhead and risks involved, but it also seems like a bunch of additional development for no (or maybe negative) benefit.

Re: I made a mobile app for my significant other and she won't use it

#46

Post by jeroenhd »

askafriend wrote: post #29
wccrawford wrote: post #25

The complaints about having to have enough screenshots and information seems really ... dumb? The website has a bunch of screenshots and info, and users will not download the app without it. Google and Apple are doing you a favor by requiring that you provide enough information. I think Apple's $100/yr is crazy, but I don't think Google's $25 is bad. If you plan to make any money at all on it, that's nothing. Scrolli…

$100 a year is nothing for a developer toolkit. In fact, it's a great deal if you really think about all the infrastructure that you get for free. Let's take a look at what MSDN costs for a pro-level subscription (not even enterprise): "At the Professional subscription level, you pay a not-insignificant sum: $539 per year for an annual cloud subscription or $1,199 for the first year of a perpetual license subscriptio…

Depends on what you want to develop; if you need the Windows driver kit then yes, those subscriptions are expensive (but likely worth it).

If you want the equivalent of app development on Windows (meaning little to no access to kernel sources and such, just a native UI), you can use the free version of Visual Studio without the MSDN license [1]. The license allows commercial development even with the free community version.

You still need to pay +/- $20 to MS to publish apps to the MS Store, but because Windows isn't a walled garden and barely any Windows users are using the store anyway, you probably don't need to bother. If you do pay, it's not a subscription either; the costs are only made during registration. Just like with Google, this keeps down (but does not prevent) the creation of spam accounts.

For most app developers, the infrastructure you get in return isn't worth the $100 / year, because most apps don't get that many downloads at all. Hosting APK or IPA files can be done for one or two dollars per month for the first few hundred or even thousand users, and by extending the store ecosystem, you're also adding value to the platform itself.

For iOS you can argue that the manual testing of the application needs to be paid somehow, but the manual testing Apple performs don't benefit you as a developer in any way; they serve benefit the end user that downloads your apps, so those costs should be recouped from the user (as part of the iPhone sales price and the mandatory 15-30% cut Apple and Google will take).

If there was a way to build and publish applications without the subscriptions, the fee might be reasonable if Apple can defend the $99 / year. With the walled garden they've set up, there's no competitors, and therefore there will never be an alternative developer toolkit like those you can see for the Android ecosystem.

[1]: https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/downloads/

Re: I made a mobile app for my significant other and she won't use it

#48

Post by abotsis »

We used a similar app for baby names- it’s a great idea for all sorts of consensus. I actually think there’s a large opportunity to apply this in all sorts of ways: baby names and movies are both great ideas, but anytime multiple people want to create intersecting sets. Another one we thought of was pictures: 5 people take 2-3 pictures of the same group photo, you have 10-15 pictures that Becky wants to post, with everyone wanting to pick the one where they “look best”, how do you decide which one to use?

Re: I made a mobile app for my significant other and she won't use it

#49

Post by Lightbody »

tanbog2 wrote: post #22

Maybe you were "solving" something that wasn't a problem. Perhaps the process of talking about what you are going to watch together is a valuable and fun part of your relationship in of itself.

Just some friendly feedback that your comment would be a lot more effective if you struck “did you ever stop to consider that”. That opening remark comes off unnecessarily aggressive / accusatory and detracts from an otherwise interesting perspective.

Re: I made a mobile app for my significant other and she won't use it

#50

Post by vuciv1 »

tobr wrote: post #45

Why does an app like this need to have a sign-up process with email, username and password? It’s enough for me to not try the app because of the mental overhead and risks involved, but it also seems like a bunch of additional development for no (or maybe negative) benefit.

Totally understandable. The sign up process is just to store your likes so that you don't need to swipe again on the same movies.

Its also so that you can lookup and add your friends.

I understand the frustration, though. I'm working on a version with webhooks where you can just join a lobby and start swiping.

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