This weekend (15-16 September) the Dutch edition of “V Hack Android” event was held at Bouncespace in Amsterdam.

This event in particular was organized by the Dutch Android User Group, which made a great job at everything over the weekend, and co-organized by Appsterdam which helped with the location. Being an active member of both communities I was pretty much forced to attend it

The Team: Apps’R’Us

Each team was composed by 3 members. My partners for the weekend were Ronald van der Lingen, who I knew from the time I freelanced at Layar and is a very enthusiastic Android developer and Ron Jones, who I knew from some Appsterdam meetups and is a designer with lots of interest in mobile apps.

Since all the names start with R, the name of the team became Apps’R’Us, which turned out to be quite popular name when I searched it on the Internet after the Hackathon.

The Project: Appy Birthday

At the hackathon we were presented 4 topics (Birthday, NFC, Health and European Culture) and we were given time to brainstorm about it and pitch on Friday.

We tried to think of an idea that combined NFC and birthdays, but we could not come up with anything interesting. Then we went for Culture + Birthday and we were almost decided to make an app that showcases famous people that have a birthday today and what have they done, but then decided to change it completely.

The final idea is an App that shows you people that have installed the app that has the birthday today, and you can say “Appy Birthday” to them. The other person will receive a push notification and will be able to see all the people that send a birthday wish to them.

We really liked the idea of an act of kindness to random people that have Android phones as you do. We thought it fit the theme of the Android birthday and it was fun.

The Hackaton

I really liked that we cut it down to a Minimum Viable Product and that we could finish the basic functionality over the weekend. Appy Birthday is even published on Google Play, although it is a bit rough around the edges.

It was very nice to work with my teammates, both are people I knew but never had the chance to work closely with them.

Lots of work, but also fun and inspiring… and lots of unhealthy food over the weekend.

The Result

We ended up in second place, although the idea was fun and well executed, there was no way you could make a business plan out of it.

The winning project was “Food!” from Team Wasabi. It is an app where you can put your food preferences (what you like to eat and what you can’t eat) and when you are going to have a group meal you do a sync of all the people involved via NFC and get a common list of ingredients to decide over the menu.

Their demo was really awesome. Although I like our project and I am very happy with it, the way they implemented the idea was really cool and fun and they deserved the victory.

Well done Team Wasabi! Make us proud in London!

Thanks DutchAUG for making this possible!

The photos used on this entry and more photos of Geeks eating unhealthy food and working non-stop can be found at the official page of the event in Google Plus.

The problem with visibility

Visibility is really a big issue on the mobile app industry, specially on Android. In other words: There is a lack of proper discovery mechanisms to find new apps.

As a developer you can minimize the impact of this by targeting a niche and then promote your app “outside” the app store. That works. But if you want to create something for the mass market -as a game- this issue is really important.

As a user you can rely on the featured section of Google Play, which, many times, will not be interesting for you. Alternatively you can browse all the 7 tabs of Google Play trying to find something interesting. Not very appealing, right? You can also follow some specialized blogs, which takes lots of time.

So, the lack of visibility on Android is a big issue, and that is what AppAffinity tries to address. Many people are working on solving this. Why is our solution better?

What is exactly AppAffinity?

AppAffinity is an app that recommends other apps.

Not just “any” apps. We believe Personalized Recommendations are the solution.

The apps you keep installed are the ones you really like and use, and we use them to generate a list of recommended apps. A personalized list for you.

We did not want to create yet another app store. We wanted to create a tool to help you discover new exciting apps. Think of AppAffinity as the “Recommended for you” tab you always missed on Google Play.

We believe that less is more, so AppAffinity does ONE thing: Show you a list of new apps recommended for you. And we focus on do it in a delightful and efficient way.

Excited about AppAffinity? Register for the beta on this page.

AppAffinity is a collaboration project of PlattySoft and LoopBit.

The session of yesterday co-organized by Appsterdam.rs and the Dutch Android User Group was a great success. We had over 20 people showing there, many of them told me that it was interesting and fun, and they also learned new stuff, so mission accomplished!

During the Hackaton we had quite some game ideas that were developed to a certain extent (we only had 5 hours). These projects even did a demo at the end:

• A fast paced 2D scrolling combining tilting controls and jumping. We had a demo with the basic gameplay.
• A Space flight simulator in 3D using the free NASA 3D models. We saw it working with touch, control it with the sensors was the next step.
• 3D pong, it was almost working, all the scenery was there and displayed and the ball was moving.
• 2D Real time strategy. They had the tiled map working and all the game logic implemented (but not displayed). They promised to finish it by next week.
• 2D Billiard with fling controls. Almost completed, you had to hit the other 2 balls with yours, they you get the point.

Over the past months I have given some talks. The last ones have been at Microsoft TechDays and Delf University. Very different environment and public.

On February 15th there were the Microsoft TechDays. There  I presented “The importance of Visibility” during the GeekNight. I am going to update that talk soon with the latest results from SpaceCat (and the levels of being featured) and probably change the title to “Fly or Die: App Visibility”

And on March 20th I have spoken at Delft University as part of the App Symposium presenting “The Road to Publishing”, trying to motivate students to build their own product.

And of course, this Saturday there is the Tools for developing Android Games.

Photo by Erik Romijn

Over the past weekend the online shop of SpaceCat stopped working.

That was the result of some unfortunate decisions and the fortunate situation of being featured. Anyway, that should have never happened, but I re-learned a few lessons.

Problem #1: The shop is our own implementation

I always defend to not reinvent the wheel, but in this case we did. Should we had used a 3rd system such TapJoy or ScoreLoop -which are already integrated-, this should have never happened, partly because their code is more tested, partly because it relies on their servers.

Why did we did it?

Because we wanted to have a shop that was not bounded to just Android Market to be able to distribute the game over other channels such as Amazon AppStore. We integrated PayPal for that. And we had to implement tracking of purchases per user, which is done for you when you use Android Market IAB .

ScoreLoop did not support it. We could have done it with TapJoy, but the initial release did not include that library, since this was originaly designed for Chalk Ball.

In summary, that was the result of legacy decisions that could have been changed later on but we did not want to throw out work away.

Was it worth it?

Hell no! Paypal is a nightmare from the accounting point of view (not entering other discussions about PayPal here) and at the end we did not delivered SpaceCat through other channels, so 100% not worth it.

Problem #2: The shop was hosted on a shared server

Yes, we just put it in on a server we used for hosting other websites. At the time it looked like a good idea and it was not like we were making too many requests. After all, users don’t open the shop that often, they do play, and that does not require the server.

Why did we did it?

Because we did not have a dedicated server out there and setting it up for this sounded like an overkill.

Was it worth it?

Yes, until the moment SpaceCat was featured. We did spare the cost of a dedicated server for 6 months, while the game was not popular enough.

We should have prepared the migration at the very moment SpaceCat was featured, but honestly I did not see this comming.

Problem #3: The URL of the API was hardcoded

Yes it was. What else do you want me to say?

It required an update of the game to get it fixed. Should this happened to an iOS game we could have been unable to fix it for days.

Why did we did it?

Good question. Because I did not think of it at the moment. No excuse.

Was it worth it?

No, it could have been a much worst scenario. I am glad it just required to do an update and that the continuous integration system was properly setup so we could do it quickly.

What happened exactly?

Once SpaceCat got featured, we started having around 50,000 new users a day, 50% of them opened the shop. So after a week, that database had grown from 50,000 to 300,000 rows.

In addition to that, we started having more than 4 requests per second hitting that table. While this should not be that bad, it was too much for a shared server and the account was suspended.

The fix

The solution was to set up a dedicated hosting so we can have total control and maybe install other tools that are not mySQL in the future if it is required.

Once the host was delivered (and the company did a very good job by completing it in less than 5 hours) installing the code of the shop and migrate the data was done in less than an hour.

Then, we had to reconfigure SpaceCat and publish an update on Android Market. I’m glad to have jenkins in place.

All in all the system was down only for 12 hours, which is not that bad.

Even more

In addition to that, once the dedicated server was up, I noticed that the table was being slow even if the server was not heavily loaded. I looked again at everything and I noticed that it was missing one index.

How did that happen? I don’t know, I was sure to have it in place. Probably because we lacked a proper deploy method and that index was only on the dev environment. Probably because of the lack of stress tests; until 300.000 entries & 4 request per second the table was not performing that bad and we never noticed it. This is, again, a problem of implementing your own solution.

Now the system is good and working, but it has given me too many headaches over the past days so, again, if you are going to create an app that uses a service and it has the potential to be used by many people, use a 3rd party solution if it is available.

This lack of good apps for this game may be astonishing at first. Magic is a popular game and Android is a popular platform. You should expect a few good mtg apps. WotC (Wizards of the coast, the makers of the game) is going to release an official app soon, but that has not been the case for the past years, so why there are no good free mtg apps?

Well, the fact is that there were good Android mtg apps, not to long ago M:tG Tracker was a free app and you could upgrade to the paid version. The app was as good as to get 3rd place on the Best Reference category of Best App Ever 

And that was not the only one. There were a few more, like MtG Tutor with a lot of features including a very good advanced search or MtG Depot with a very nice interface. Also, on the paid side there was Deck Forge, which had a lot of features and, I’ll admit it, took the lead of innovation in many aspects before I did.

But all those apps are no longer there, and the reason is that WotC have sent copyright infringement notices to google, asking  to remove them. Why now? The only reason I can think of is that they are going to release their own app and they want to wipe out competition.

Why making a better product if you can have “the only alternative”?

Let me clarify that.

Don’t take me wrong, there were material from WotC and is their right to claim the suspension of apps, but up to now this apps were made with good will, and were adding value to their product. Also, there was never the intention to talk, none of the developers of those apps were warned or given a chance to remove the copyrighted material from their apps.

Also, I’ve seen the screenshots and the app looks promising, so I don’t think they are going to do a bad product. But why should you risk your market share anyway? Maybe for the sake of more than 200.000 people that were using apps that are no longer available while the official alternative has not been released yet.

Make no mistake, WotC is not releasing the official app to help players, it is going to do it to make money. That is the only conclusion I can reach from their actions.

At this point: Why is M:tG Tracker (formerly pro version) still available?

When I got the free version suspended, I went through the app and I removed all the copyrighted material, the fonts, the mana icons, the tap icons, etc. with the hope that it will prevent that one from being suspended… it has worked so far.

I am trying to clarify what exactly can be put and what can not, and also asking for the procedure of licensing the material so I don’t have to worry about it in the future. While this is not settled, I can not afford to continue with the features I had in mind, risking that all that work may be trashed at anytime.

Thanks to all the users that have been supporting me and the other developers. If someone asks you “Why are no good mtg free apps for Android?” you can now tell them why.