Prologue
Hi, guys, I've thought for a long time about what to write here and don't slip into old gibberish: "if I were young I would advise." And today we will try to roll in the mobile app business. Why? Because it's a vast market, modern mobile frameworks provide a smooth experience for everyone who knows CSS and HTML at least. So, I think it could be useful and exciting for a wide range of readers.
Not a big secret that many of us looking for an additional profit aside regular work or in a case of freelance. Especially if we're talking about a passive income. It's an enchanting idea that you've got things done one time and earn profits without your participation.
Before I already explained my first experience with modern mobile's frameworks and if you read it I've chosen Google Flutter but that's not a point for our experiment, you can choose whatever you like.
Let's go
Ok, we have tools, and now it's time to think about the topic of our future application. At first, I took a look at my own phone, but I didn't find anything except Slack, Uber, Spotify, and Flashlight. I checked Google Play on flashlight's competition and to be honest, whole flashlight's market already divided between flashlights' tycoons, so, I was afraid to enter in the high concurrency area. But I didn't give up and open one of my wife's phone. And here I would like to notice everything much better. Seems like the wife of mine working on google as a dev op and dump whole Google Market on her phones. So, Google if you messed up your backups you can contact me I'll share Caren's phone with you. Yeah, and it was a point, I have begun to check women's applications, and I found that even very weird apps have impressive amounts of downloads.
The idea did not try to invent something from scratch but adapt some existing application for mobile. And I dug up one in my Bitbucket account. For years of work it collects many of different software, sometimes I even can't remember when and how I wrote it. My discovery was an old application that I wrote about twelve years ago, and it's a numerology horoscope. Bingo. Initially, it has been written as web service on Python and ancient web framework called Pylons. But all core calculus have been placed in one Python's class according to best practices and SOLID principles. The entire application represents by business logic part what calculates horoscope from a birthdate and one JSON file which map given numbers on predefined sentence, and it's how we do the full forecast.
Make sail!
At the begging, I decided to follow Lean startup recommendations and start from the very basic prototype which I could develop further, and I don't want to spend a lot of money but only the required amount.
From a programmatic point of view, I should only rewrite Python's code on Dart language and add some mobile screens to get a finished application. As for Dart's part, I've finished it in two days including the initial training in Dart because I've worked for the first time with it. Mobile application part represents by three screens with Flutter's layouts, that took about an additional two days (of course I did everything aside from my regular job).
And if with the software part is more or less clear I would like to tell you about parts aside programming. About the things that you have to do in order to publish your app in Google Store. The first thing I stuck with was icons. You must provide a set of icons in different sizes for every resolution and for Google Play itself. Thanks to Flutter you need only one big icon and everything else Flutter will do for you and pack in the bundle as well. I'm a technical person as and many of us and the first attempt was to find ready to use icon on assets stocks but unfortunately, free versions were with watermarks or low resolution, and I didn't want to pay anything for graphic. So, I found vector editor it's called Sketch, and I got it for free on my past job. If you don't have any editors you could try Inkscape it's free or trial version of Adobe Illustrator. I wouldn't like to go into the process of creating icons. But what I realized from the guides of design - your icon should be bold and straightforward. Put some unique character at the center, drop shadows and push gradient at the back as big guys are doing and I think that's enough for our little startup.
When we have our graphical assets. That's time to decide how we would like to monetize our application. Basically, there are three options you may sell your app, show ads or sell something inside an application. Not sure what someone wants to pay for the simple app. So, I've chose put a big banner between the main screen and forecast's screen. Flutter provide a massive list of plugins for complete integration with Google services and Admob, not an exception. Here is only one thing what I want to remark what Flutter itself and additional packages still under the heavy development and sometimes documentation in official packages repository could be outdated, it's better to follow instructions directly from GitHub.
So, we have a banner to annoy our users, what else? Now we need four Google accounts. Common Google account which could be your Gmail, Play market, Admob and Adsense. Actually, there is only one issue that Google play account has 25$ fee per registration (not sure if it's different for various regions) but good news what all other accounts absolutely free and easy to get.
And we're going to publish our first app. And I stuck on this step again. Aside from promo texts Google also requires a feature banner and at least three screenshots of your application. Ok, let's back to our vector editors and will try to sketch something acceptable. As some additional steps before you've published your app is a content rating quiz, countries for publishing and so on. But everything is clear, and I don't think what some could stick with them.
Summary
In conclusion I would like to sum up financial results. So, we've paid 25$ for Google Play account, and that's it. Actually, you can ask your friends maybe someone has Play account and ready to publish your application.
Traditionally, there should be screens from Adsense and Analytics but I just published it, and everything shows zero so far. Also, I didn't do any promotions and even don't know how don't forget we're trying to earn from our app from scratch and in next posts I'll show you what I did and what I got as a result. But if you have any suggestions feel free to stay them in the comments and I promise I'll try them if it's possible.
Thank you and stay tuned.
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