Droid of the Day is History

After 3 years of running my daily app, I have decided to move onto other projects.

 

DOTD is not DeaD!  I plan to leave it in the Play Store, as a catalog of great Apps.  I won't be doing much active development, or selecting new apps to feature.

 
DOTD_Dead_450.png

I first started this as a hobby, to have a 'real' app to show off during the Google IO conference in May of 2011.  Since starting, I have turned the hobby into a full time job, and realized many opportunities.

Having DOTD has been a wonderful experience.  It has been very educational supporting an app with a decent sized user base.  Being able to do this during the explosive growth phase of Android has been very rewarding (and challenging).

I specifically picked a concept that requires active development (and content creation).  My intention was to use the  'Agile' methodology of software creation (delivering frequent releases).  I released an update on average every 3 weeks (with a new feature or refinement in each one).  The app was constantly being upgraded.  Being able to release apps to the Play store without friction made this possible. 

The initial release had the following functionality:

  • View a free Android with a link to download it from the 'Android Market' - that's it, you couldn't view previous days, or do anything other than view today's app

The app today has the following functionality:

  • Historical app catalog (with 1200 apps as of today)
  • Holo Compliant UI
  • Tablet specific layouts and optimizations
  • Internationalization (translations in Italian, German, Dutch. Hindi, and Spanish)
  • Tons of features and options specific to creating lists of Apps based on user suggestions
  • ... - a long list of features many which I never would have envisioned in the beginning

If I had all the time in the world, there are many things I would like to do.  Monetizing is not one of those - I never really wanted the responsibility that comes with money (I can do that during my day job).  This was intended to be a hobby app, I wanted to see how far I could take it.

To conclude I will share a teaser for a future post I plan to write (discussing the evolution of DOTD, and the design of Android).  Here are some screenshots showing the evolution of the UI throughout the years.  It evolved quite a bit.

screen3.png

Thanks for the support throughout the years - it has been a fun ride.

-Mike