shipaton & the issue with shipping a ton.

i had taken a good break from writing & now i’ll be posting more frequently.

many of my friends know i’ve been participating in shipaton, but now i’ll cover most of the bg stuff you won’t see on camera, nor on the podcast.

what should you expect from this blog:
struggles during shipaton, especially with the app stores. might be a rant.

alright, i teamed up with a working professional, we’ve been grinding day n night on those apps but there’s unspoken struggles. first is user acquistion, another is app store publishing.

now to acquire users, your app needs to be live on play store/ app store. publishing these apps, is super super hectic. for play store it takes you 25$ - a lifetime subscription, and for app store 100$ a year, that’s not the woah part. the woah part is that it takes 12 testers for 14 days, (play store) who should provide feedback, and we should use that feedback to make the app better (which is a very good thing, i really love that while developing my own software, i can reflect on my architecture choices and have some interaction w the users.) but after that you gotta make your app better and justify it. i had heard many people speak bad of the app store publishing & their weird requirements for publishing the app, but play store is just way worse. this is not a app store vs play store who sucks the life outta developer competition blog but man im tired.

my teammate and i have decent amount of meets, usually on weekends. sometimes the calls stretch to a few hours. and i hate to admit but the recent discussion is being monotonous around the play store publishing. google should seriously consider how these apps are published. there are apps on the play store which surrogate advertise as “video call” but we know what in them. some apps have loops to watch pirated content but they aren’t stress tested enough.

this testing thing results in birthing jugaads like testers community. all this would dilute the quality of the apps published.

a human review and a safety check is more than enough to determine whether the app gets to stay.

i hope they make it easier for developers to publish the apps, while maintaining a stricter check, & also remove such “video call” apps, they’re cheap & scummy.

making apps is easier than ever, shipping has always been difficult, but we ball :)

not everyone has 12 friends man. i do but they lazy af.

ok & to be safe:
this is my own personal opinion. does not & will not represent my current/future employer’s views.

thanks for reading!