I recently blogged about my Always Taeyeon app being suspended and removed from Google Play. I wanted closure because…I had begun working on it again! It was demoralizing to lose my existing user base, but this was actually an app that I used frequently on my phone (I am user zero) and so I had incentive to keep improving it.

I call this 2.0, not because it has a lot of new features; but because I rethought the app a bit. It’s actually slimmer than it was before. I wanted to focus on a stream of Taeyeon photos. In v1, I had a bunch of things like a menu that showed you where the photo was from, and plans for other parts of the app. I had started working on a “Favorites” section where you can save photos and then view them later. I also had an idea of unlockable icons. In any case, I killed all of that.

I was hesitant to do this before because I was thinking about monetizing the app if it was popular. My plan was to give you a page of favourite “slots” (i.e., 9) and then if you wanted to save more, you would have to purchase additional pages. The feature request I kept getting repeatedly (via Google Play comments and email) was to add some way to save the photos, so I know users would have used that; and the arbitrary limit of 9 might have caused people to pony up a few bucks.

For version 2.0, I decided to get rid of that and just let users save any photo to their gallery without limits. Honestly, I think that’s how users would want to use my app – browse through photos, save the ones you like best, and maybe set them as wallpaper or use them elsewhere. This makes the app super easy to use. You just swipe back and forth for new photos, and long press to save a photo. But it’s a significant enough change that I think it warrants a major version bump.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: android, appdev