Friday, June 2, 2017

App is on the Play Store

Did the official release of the app Wednesday morning. By Friday I had over 10,000 installs. They did send out a bulk email to our current clients and many of them were hungry for the Android version. Various folks bought an iOS device and used that until the Android version was ready.

Gotta say it is an ego boost to hit 10,000 installs in a few days. I do realize this will taper off now but I am still supporting 10k users as the sole developer, the iOS guy pitched in on some of the code, of the app.

App is not 100% feature matched with iOS as of yet so I am working on adding the final matching features then we will work on improving the app and there are many other new features we will release in sync as time goes on.

Reviews have been pretty positive. Some are having issues with data outside the apps control. They are addressing those issues at the server level. I am using Flurry to track various things and to capture any issues found. The Play Store is also catching crashes. So far there have been about 17 unique crash events affecting just a few people. I have been able to track down and solve most of them. Some have nothing in the stack trace for me to even guess what is happening and a few were in the Flurry Library.

While I like Flurry the documentation is sad. You can't find any one place to tell you the latest version. Most of the official Flurry pages mention some flavor of 6.x but I found one place that said 7.0.0 so that was what I was using. I then decided to go to source, the jcenter repository, and found 7.1.1 was available. Since I had fixed a number of issues I had issues in this library I went ahead and did a fast followup release that I hope will knock things down close to zero other than maybe the issues that don't have a useful stack trace.

I would say our QA department did a bang up job as the issues found have been very obscure and timing based. The app seems really solid.

Excited to get more data out of Flurry as well. I have set up a couple of reports there already but I can tell the data is lagging a bit because I can see a lot more action in real-time than is getting reported in the Explorer. Once we have a good solid week of data it will be more interesting and we can monitor things over time.

So why Flurry? At my last job we started using Google Analytics but it was just not cutting it for Mobile. Reporting with Fabric / Crashlytics did not seem to cover what we needed. Firebase seemed really powerful if you were willing to pay for BigData to do your queries. Flurry seemed to kind of hit the sweet spot for free data analysis. It is pretty easy to implement and a few simple helper bits for Kotlin and I was able to get a decent set of analytics in place in about a day.

Next up on the learning side of things is constraints layouts. I can quickly layout everything I can think up with a mix of Relative, Linear, Table, and Grid layouts but Constraints is the future and the sooner I learn it the better. The conversion tools seems a bit iffy so learning from scratch is probably the way to go.

I did get bit by the Java to Kotlin conversion tool as well. I had written an image cropping custom control in Java. Since I am doing full on Kotlin now and I needed to enhance this custom contol I had Android Studio convert it to Java. It compiled but did not work correctly. It decided to typecast a multiplication for me from Float to Int but I needed the multiplication to happen fully as a Float and the final result to be an Int. It decided to convert the code to case the number I was multiplying by first. Since that number was between 0.0 and 1.0 that cast was pointless. Simple enough to fix and I had a good idea what to do since I wrote the original code.

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