I have a mission for the next few months. Starting tomorrow, I’m going to build and publish 1 android app every 3 weeks until school reopens sometime in September.

A little bit of background info. For the past few years, I’ve spent each summer break building, doing, or learning something entirely new and as a result I’ve learnt 3 programming languages. C#, Javascript, and Kotlin. I’ve also learnt how to make web and mobile applications with frameworks/technologies like Windows Forms, ASP.NET, Xamarin, Node.JS, and Vue.JS.

What I then built

What I then built

1. Color Grabber (opens new window), a tool that allowed you to click anywhere in Windows and get the color at that point in HEX or RGB. [2016]
2. Palette Engine, a desktop app that allowed you to generate color palettes based on Analogous or Triadic schemes. (It didn’t work very well.) [2016]
3. Idea Bag (opens new window), an android app that I made because I needed ideas of simple applications to make to improve my proficiency in C#. Turns out that a lot of people are facing that problem because Idea Bag has garnered more than 124K installs to date. [2016]
4. Threadr (opens new window), an android app that allowed you to type tweets of any length which it broke into the then 140 character max tweet length and posted as a thread. [2016]
5. I got a job as an android developer at an agri-tech startup and didn’t have much time between school and work to build any side projects. [2017]

In 2018, having quit my job to focus on school, I’m continuing the serial making tradition.

How it’s going to work

I’ll spend 3 weeks brainstorming ideas and eventually choosing one, designing a user interface and experience, developing the android app, publishing to the Play Store, and posting progress write-ups.

Brainstorming ideas

Each idea will come from problems me or people close to me are facing. This is to ensure that I remain motivated enough to finish each app because each one would actually solve a real problem.

Designing a UI and UX

After I pick an idea, I’ll design a user interface for it in Adobe XD. I will ensure that the user interface looks good and makes the user experience enjoyable. Developing the app

After the UI/UX design is complete, I’ll turn it into an actual working android app written in Kotlin with Android Studio. I’ll tweet my progress during this process daily. Any thing I learn will also be published to Medium as a series called TIL (Today, I learnt).

Publishing the app

After development and testing is complete, I’ll publish the app to the Google Play Store.

Progress write-up

I’ll post progress write-ups for each app/idea detailing things like how I arrived at the idea, my design process, any thing I’ve learnt during the process, and finally a summary with the link to the app on the Play Store.

Normally, I wouldn’t document this process but I’m hoping that by doing this I’ll have an audience that will cause me to actually commit to this challenge. Also, one of my new year resolutions was to write 5 Medium articles and this is going to ensure I achieve that.

Want to follow along on my 1 app every 3 weeks journey?

Follow me on Twitter (opens new window).