The Android Market doesn't give huge amounts of information to application publishers - in fact, all it really gives us is the number of downloads of our apps, and the number of active installs. As of this week, my HK Weather Alert app has reached over 3000 downloads and 1000 installs, which I think is pretty decent. I really do wonder why people are bothering to uninstall it, to be honest, since it's pretty small and harmless, but that's up to them. Just to update on where it's up to, I've put out three releases recently, each with one change, and I've got a couple more things I'm interested in:
- New icons
- A few users complained that the old icons, which were on a transparent background, were invisible on the HTC Hero when the icon itself was black. I've updated all the icons now to have a black background (and white foreground where appropriate) which should have dealt with that problem.
- Broken alerting
- Just to explain, the app reads from a part of the Observatory website which is easy for software to read from, but not designed for that - it's an RSS feed with relatively unstructured content. That means that when they change their site, it's quite possible for them to break my app. I had to update a few weeks ago to deal with that, and I've tried to make things a bit more robust in the meantime so simple changes might not break my app as easily.
- Optional persistent notifications
- I had an email from Vincent Wong last week, asking me to make the notifications persistent, so they wouldn't go away when you click the "clear notifications" button - it's something I had been thinking about, but he prompted me to actually do it. The option is in there now, and it seems to be working well.
- More network robustness
- At the moment, if there's a network problem when the app tries to check for alerts, it'll decide that since it can't check, there can't be any alerts, and it clears any existing notifications. If it then succeeds in checking the next time, it'll flash the notifications up again (and vibrate/make a sound, if you've set those options) even though the alerts haven't changed. We all know that mobile data networks aren't 100% reliable, and that the Observatory website has a habit of falling over when things get busy, so I need to make my app deal with this better.
- Alert filters
- A lot of people really only care about a few alerts - typhoons and rainstorms, mainly - so I'm planning to add an optional alert filter which will allow you to choose which alerts you want to be notified about, and ignore the others. Coming soon!
The other thing I'm going to add - I'm going to add it here as well. Unfortunately, the Android Market is still only distributing free apps in Hong Kong, but I'm sure that plenty of my users would happily donate a few dollars to thank me for my software - right? Since Google won't let me sell the app - or more likely, have a free and 'donate' version, PayPal is the next best thing:
Any donations are very welcome, and will help me stay interested in making sure the app keeps working in the future, not to mention any other new features. Thank you for your support!