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Post-hoc Analysis of InstaWifi’s Launch

July 27, 2012 9:00 am by

Launching My First Android App Ever

On July 24th, I launched InstaWifi, my first Android app into the market. InstaWifi enables you to connect and share wifi networks instantly with the people who you care about. It was my first Android app that I released in the market, and I was pretty excited to see how it would turn out. It’s quite amazing if you think about it, that a random guy (like me) behind a computer screen today in 2012, can reach out to an audience of thousands of people on the Internet to announce a new product. It’s a random thought but a powerful one — a thought that reminds us of how closely connected we are to other people in this world.

My marketing strategy was simple for InstaWifi, generate viral growth on social networks, and reach out to several news sources online to get some big pageviews so that it will trickle down to smaller blogs, news sources, and social networks. The best strategy, however, is to just make a solid polished app and one that actually solves a problem for users. Without a good implementation, it doesn’t matter how big your budget or effective your marketing strategy is.

This article will be doing a deep dive on the numbers and stats of InstaWifi’s launch for those people out there who are curious on what it’s like to launch an Android app and how successful InstaWifi was.

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Filed under: Android — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , — Jesse Chen @ 9:00 AM

About

Jesse is a software engineer at Facebook, who just graduated from UC Berkeley. Passionate about mobile technology and entrepreneurship, he started his own blog as a home for his tutorials, projects, and random thoughts. Follow him on Facebook to stay updated on his latest tutorials and projects.

Protip: Bash Autocomplete for Android ADB

February 17, 2012 3:00 pm by

Introduction

This is a super quick tip that will only take 1 minute to make your android development so much easier.  Android Debug Bridge (adb) is a command-line tool that lets you interface with an emulator or an android device.  Its great and previously I wrote about how you can debug your Android app wirelessly on your device.  What sucks though is that you can’t tab autocomplete commands (e.g. type ‘adb d’ then tab and bash will autocomplete and fill out ‘adb devices’), which means having to look up adb commands to figure out what you want and/or wasting time by typing the whole command (every ms counts!).

This protip will get you setup with bash autocomplete for ADB in less than 1 minute.  Ready?  Here we go.

Instructions

  • Download the adb bash completion file here from Roman’s repo.  Another good one is here on github by mbrubeck.
  • Store the file somewhere safe.  Anywhere you want. I chose /bin.
  • Use your favorite editor of choice (which should be vim) to edit your ~/.bashrc file.
  • Add the following lines (substitute your own path to the adb bash completion file) to the end of your ~/.bashrc file:
if [ -e /bin/adb.txt ] ; then
     source /bin/adb.txt
fi
  • Save and quit.  In your terminal, type source ~/.bashrc to reload your bash.
  • Check if it works.  Type ‘adb d’ and press tab to see if it autocompletes to ‘adb devices’.

And that’s it!  I’ve been looking for something like this for a long time.  Hope it helps you as much as it did for me. 🙂

Filed under: Android — Tags: , , , , — Jesse Chen @ 3:00 PM

About

Jesse is a software engineer at Facebook, who just graduated from UC Berkeley. Passionate about mobile technology and entrepreneurship, he started his own blog as a home for his tutorials, projects, and random thoughts. Follow him on Facebook to stay updated on his latest tutorials and projects.

Looking Back on “How to NFC on the Android Platform”

December 30, 2011 1:32 pm by

My previous post, How to NFC on the Android Platform, has seen over 9,000 page views since I published it in the summer of 2011.  When I was researching how to integrate NFC on Android, there were very few examples and tutorials on how to write Android apps that use NFC.  I thought that by writing a tutorial, it would benefit others who were in the same predicament, and it turns out that it was a much-needed resource (seeing that the only reason people visit my website now is to view the tutorial :P).

Yesterday, one inbound link (http://mocs.vtt.fi/pdf/Peer_to_Peer_communication_with_NFC_on_Android.pdf) struck my curiosity and I found that it was from the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, which, according to Wikipedia, is the largest multidisciplinary research organisation in Northern Europe. Wow, it turns out that some dude is doing research on NFC peer-to-peer communication on Android and referenced my tutorial in his slides :D.  I find it fascinating because it showed me first-hand how connected the world is and how knowledge can be retrieved so quickly regardless of location now because of the Internet.  The next generation will wonder how we even lived without the Internet (“well you see..back in the day, we used to go to this place called the library, or try to physically find someone who is knowledgeable about the topic at hand..”).

I noticed that the origin of most visits to the tutorial came mostly from Europe and parts of Asia.  That is interesting, but not surprisingly, to see that interest in NFC development for the Android platform is greater in other parts of the world than the USA.  NFC adoption in the United States is still in the early adopter phase, but I believe that it will have mass consumer adoption within the next decade, even faster if Apple integrates NFC technology in the iPhone.

Haven’t wrote a new entry at all during the fall semester, with more free time coming up next semester – I should be able to start writing more regularly.  I also might write an updated tutorial on how to NFC on Android, since with the advent of Android 4.0 (otherwise known as Ice Cream Sandwich), they actually deprecated some of the NFC API calls that existed in 2.3 and have new API calls (related to their Android Beam feature).  Also, perhaps a tutorial on how to write Android apps that takes advantages of root (superuser) permissions.  Stay tuned for more 🙂

Filed under: Android,General — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Jesse Chen @ 1:32 PM

About

Jesse is a software engineer at Facebook, who just graduated from UC Berkeley. Passionate about mobile technology and entrepreneurship, he started his own blog as a home for his tutorials, projects, and random thoughts. Follow him on Facebook to stay updated on his latest tutorials and projects.

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