One project and many mistakes

Hi,% username%. I want to briefly tell you about our GosNomer project, about what it is and, most importantly, about errors and discord related to it.

So, the general idea of ​​such a service is by no means new, and we have never claimed to have authored an idea, the essence of which lies in the user base compiled by the numbers of good and bad drivers. The innovations with which we decided to supplement this idea were to make its use as user-friendly as possible. Namely, not only to obscenely facilitate the interface of the site itself, but also to come to mobile devices and social networks (which, by the way, as it turned out, was not the best idea). You can see what we have as a result, so I, perhaps, will talk about problems and disappointments, in fact, they can be divided into two groups:

Approval of applications.

In addition to the site itself, it was decided to make a client for iOS, Android and Symbian (which so far will not be released in any way) and adapt the web to vkontakte.ru and my.mail.ru. We refused to develop something for classmates when we read their rules for developers, and unfortunately, not so many of our compatriots are on Facebook, and the application does not make any sense in other countries of the world.
The application approval process in general has been delayed by a month and a half. Of course, we did not expect this. The blessing for Android app appeared in the market a few minutes after making a decision about the release.
')

my.mail.ru

The quickest, which was also a surprise, was Mail, on the promised day our application turned out to be in the catalog, and even received the coveted package of free advertising for a week (it is described in detail here that api.mail.ru/apps/ads must be done for this). And apparently, the email is still located to give this ad package to most developers. So there are only positive impressions about the project team, but here’s the audience ... (more on that later)

vkontakte.ru

Here everything went not quite smoothly, the application was deployed a couple of times. The reasons for this were the use of API methods “which seem to be as it is, but that’s already not.” In principle, this was not surprising, since this social network has long been famous for its attitude towards developers, and we already know firsthand what the situation with the cancellation of the methods of returning votes from the application cost. Another rather big problem is that if your application does not pass moderation from the first call, when it is approved, it will not be at the top of the list of “new applications”, which of course will greatly reduce the audience, especially if you are investing in advertising. not foreseen. In general, within one and a half weeks, the application appeared in the catalog.

App Store

Now I have to start playing the imperial march from Star Wars. The censors of the apple store killed quite a few nerve cells. The applications were deployed a total of three times, and if the first time I fully agree with them (an extra key was declared in Info.plist), then the other two deserve a separate story. The second time the application was deployed due to the fact that we rightly decided that such a service simply needed the ability to add and view photos of violators and polite drivers, or rather their state numbers, but Apple did not agree with us and asked to remove the possibility of adding photos especially when calling by phone " bad drivers ", but the good ones are also not quite comme il faut. A little surprised and having done everything, as requested, we received a third refusal, and it consisted in the fact that the description of the application indicated the cherished “and the photo”, and in the application it was no longer there. Conclusion - plus a week and a half of inactivity for inattention. Total September 1 start of the epic, October 14 finish.

Lecture hall

I will take the liberty to rank the audience of applications for adequacy. And, unsurprisingly, users of mobile applications are much more adequate, forgive me for such stigma, than residents of social networks. To be honest, we were ready for dousing with sewage and maybe even false comments, we were ready for spam, but what we saw was beyond any explanation. The most top comments from social networks was “This is the coolest number”, “About %%% driver” and, attention, “THIS IS YOURSELF.” Spelling author. At first, they tried to clean the base of this, then they realized that it was useless and there was no other way to wait. With the emergence of users in the application from mobile platforms, it became a little easier in terms of content, but nevertheless, the usefulness of such a service is at the moment questionable.

Conclusion

Now our main task is to bring the base to the desired and useful form. But, since the project at the moment, and most likely still long enough, will be non-commercial, our path lies only through a search for like-minded people to whom this idea does not seem delusional and they are ready to help in the development of such a service. So if there are such people among the Habrovites, we will be very happy. And of course, the criticism of technical solutions will be more than ever the way.

UPD The site is close to collapse, here are links to mobile clients iPhone , Android