Ive recently restarted work on the StudyNWalk Flashcard app that I started a few years ago. Between that time and now parse.com became a thing, and then it didn’t. At least the ‘free’ ‘serverless’ part of it. Now Google has Firebase ‘serverless’ services and I’ve decided to take the plunge.
For the StudyNWalk app, I’m looking at allowing the users to share decks of cards with other users. After a few weeks of playing with the APIs and structures, I’m very close to releasing the first version that has sharing support.
I’ve been looking at this project from an MVP standpoint, making new features as and when they are ready. Two things that have taken a back seat in this development process are UI and marketing. Of course, it’s been a while since I last worked on this app (designed for Android 4.4 in 2013) and now the general level of app design has evolved.
I even had to port the project over from eclipse to android studio, which while at least it still uses Java, the build process has completely changed. For the better, I will definitely say. Projects can now have multiple builds with Gradle and everything is a heck of a lot faster than in the eclipse days. Still, it required a bit of re-learning and adapting to get up to speed.
I’m extremely impressed with the ConstraintLayouts the template wizards want you to use now. From my previous work on iOS there finally feels like there’s a commonality between UI design concepts between the iOS and Android.
As far as the marketing side of things, I’d like to step that up as well. I’m not sure exactly what my plan will be to attempt this, but I’ll get into student mode and find out what there is to do. Since the start of this year I have regularly attended a Japanese language exchange meetup In London. Usually it degenerates into conversation in English about completely unrelated topics, but I’m sure it would be great to actually talk about studying foreign languages once in a while and see how my app might fit into that.
I’m also hoping to record some tutorial videos and integrate them into the app. The tech side of integrating this is already done, I just need to create the content.
With any luck I’ll have this on the play store in a few days.
After the functional aspects of the app are taken care of, I’ll get into UX and marketing modes. And an iOS version too.
Of course if you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them!
#1 by Francis Lui at August 11th, 2017
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Good luck with StudyNWalk! I am also learning the marketing side of things. One book I have finished reading recently is Hacking Growth by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown. I highly recommend reading this book if you’re looking to learn more about growing a startup!