ModeBot

In this post I want to talk about the history of the birth of their own offspring applications for the Android OS.
I consciously dwell on the emotional and organizational, rather than the technical component of the process. If I feel the interest of habravchan to technical details - I will devote a separate material to this.
This post is also in no way an advertisement or PR, therefore, the post consciously does not include the links and graphic materials of the application with the included links and QR codes.

The publication is made specifically for Habr with the hope that novice developers will be useful to know what difficulties may occur on their way and understand that there is a sense in overcoming them.

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Part 1: Pregnancy

I got pregnant suddenly.

But first, the background.

Like many IT specialists and people of other creative professions, my work day is not exactly and is not always normalized. In addition to the working mood changes, there are also clients dispersed throughout Russia and some foreign countries.
Accordingly, the latest negotiations can begin after midnight, and the first client from his city can call as early as 8 in the morning.

Having a little daughter and a spouse I had to transfer my phone to vibrate mode every night so that I could hear the call myself and not wake up the family. I think any young parent felt the whole gamut of sensations when a phone call wakes up a child, laid to sleep in a hard fight.

At the same time, there were occasional “blunders”, sometimes I forgot to turn off the phone (as a result, I could continue the morning playing with my daughter), and more often I forgot to turn on the phone’s sound in the morning and missed day calls when background noise no longer allowed me to hear -ZHZH from vibro.

The first thought was to entrust someone to monitor the status of my phone. But neither the spouse, and even more so my three-year-old daughter did not feel enthusiastic or enthusiastic about this.

And then an insight came to me - this is Android, which means that this task can be entrusted to him!

Without hesitation, I climbed into the jungle of Google Play. From what I saw, I experienced a culture shock. No, it was possible to adapt several applications for my task, but this meant settling into my phone or a monster, who looked from the store very appetizingly at the phone battery (from which she, it seemed to me, had sat down a little beforehand) and with whom it was possible to arrange hour or two in the negotiation-setting. Or it was a collection of similar ugly design applications, the appearance of which instilled in me uncertainty whether I even wanted such a program.



Want.

But still not the same.

The program I wanted was supposed to instill in me the appearance that it would cope with the task. And also I just wanted to reassign the task, and not to transform it into a task of a lengthy setting and explanation of what I actually want. Well, it is time to reinvent your two-wheeled vehicle.

From this point on, we can assume that pregnancy is in full swing.

So we formalize the requirements for the future offspring:

• Laconic and clear interface (I would like to be intuitive, but this will only be determined in the process of use)
• The lack of complex scripts for the user. Ideally, the ability to perform basic operations in 3-4 clicks.
• Minimum appetite for phone resources, and in particular for the battery.

Well, how it will be, I'm already beginning to understand, it's time to think of the name of the brainchild.

Ringer mode manager, Sound automate - the first options were simply meant to scare off potential users.

Just a couple of days of deliberation and here it is! ModeBot. Briefly, capaciously, having prerequisites for Android and subjectively nice.

Inspired, I make the first sketches of the interface and go to the wonderful designer Alexey in order to ask him for icons. Alexey is a web designer, but he has long dreamed of drawing something for mobile applications. Mobile devices for him are iPhones, iPads and others. After listening to the lecture “There is no phone except for iPhone, and Ipad is a faithful companion of it”, I received a promise to get the result in a couple of days and left to go deep into development.

Part 2: Birth

Childbirth was hard.

The whole process was new. At that time, I had a lot of experience developing small and large desktop and web applications, system and accounting and application programs. But it so happened that Java and Eclipse existed separately from me up to this point.

Possessing natural perfectionism and curiosity, I very often, in search of information (and I needed a huge amount of it), seized a lot of related and not very areas related to Android, Java, optimization of algorithms, phone reviews and other things. The forehead was blue from rakes, but the enthusiasm did not fade. Each section of the code, which, due to inexperience in the language, turned out to be ugly, mercilessly corresponded to complete satisfaction.

When, finally, the “child” was born, I got the effect that all young parents experience - the result turned out to be nice, my own, but slightly ugly, completely small and helpless.

What the plans were supposed to happen in a couple of days took about a month of work in the evenings and snatches on weekends.

Well, ahead of us there was testing and development of the application to a stable state.

Part 3: Learning to walk

The baby fell.

And when he finally went, he tried to run and fell again.
And when I learned to run, I could run in the wrong direction.

But in the end, managed to achieve the goal. The program is based on a simple concept of single teams. Each team sounds like "At such a time, set such and such a regime." In contrast to many similar programs that work on the principle of setting the transition period for a phone to vibrate, the system of single commands has turned out to be more versatile and easy to use. With its help, you can combine such scenarios as "Silent mode -> Vibration mode -> Sound mode" and others. And the interface is simple and straightforward.



Task management is simplified and standardized. The area of ​​each task is divided into 3 parts. All actions are performed by brief or long pressing on these areas.

In the fascinating upbringing process, I realized that I needed some more functions that were already implemented without any special problems (thanks to the clean code architecture) - these are customizable widgets that allow you to transfer the phone into one of the modes from which then after a while it will return automatically, thanks to ModeBot.

About a month has passed since the beginning of development, and Alexey just had 2 days expired. Not having time to ironicize about this, I realized that it was not worth it.

Having suppressed a persistent dislike for Android phones, he sat down to studying the guidelines on the official Google website and eventually gave me not a concept, but a full set of graphics in various resolutions and a banner for placement on Google Play.






At that time, my baby was already firmly on its feet, quickly fulfilling the assigned tasks and at the same time did not bother and did not show itself when it was not needed.

Now the path lay only in one direction - Google play.

Part 4th: We grow and develop

The first meeting with the big world was cynical.

At first, I wanted to make the program free, but knowing from experience that enthusiasm in itself is not eternal, and with its loss it stops and the development of the program decided to add monetization. Placing advertisements in an application is contrary to the very essence of ModeBot - unnoticed and with minimal resource consumption to perform its tasks. And I buy a developer account and publish at the lowest price of $ 1.

Day, two, three, month - no downloads. Well, we conclude that recognition itself does not come.

On the site w3bsit3-dns.com as part of developer support in the morning I publish a review of the application. And almost online I follow the comments and downloads.

During the day - 50 downloads. At that time for me it was just a giant number. By the end of the day, having mapped the way to the store for champagne to celebrate this event, I see a freshly laid out apk on the forum of the same w3bsit3-dns.com.

The hike to the store is postponed.

As a result of this and the following days, the number of apk downloads on the forum was 6 times higher than the number of downloads from Google Play. Shopping stopped, despite reaching the 8th place in the TOP in the category of personalization. Later the category was changed to Tools.

Reviews in the market and on the forum almost all very high. The application met the functional expectations.

At the forum, I was assured that they placed apk, only for testing by users, since I did not create a free version of the application.

Well, it is reasonable. On the basis of the leaked version, ModeBot Free is born. The whitelist and protection is added to the main version of the program via a check on Google licensing servers and an English translation.

Publication on the thematic American forums (xda-developers.com, android.net, etc.) practically did not bring results. At the moment, foreign downloads of about 5%. The publication of Vkontakte scored likes, but not transitions, it seems that there people put them automatically.

At the moment, my Android-kid confidently goes to the "kindergarten". Improves stability, reduces resource consumption and adds new features. However, any changes are made only if they are consistent with the original principles - lightness, clarity and stability.



The number of downloads is still small, but stable, the developer account has paid off.
There are active fans of the program from different countries who give good feedback.
Currently, the program rating is 4.58. Over 80% of installations are active.

Well, we are preparing to “go to school” - after all, we have just begun our development.