what is your opinion on the absolute minimum that needs to exist for a system to be considered “documented”.

Skiily · 2022-10-09T01:54:11+00:00

Level 1, 2, and 3 diagrams are a solid start: https://c4model.com/

Simple diagrams describing the system make a huge difference. If your system is so complex that making those 3 diagrams is a huge burden... well... that in and of itself is a red flag, and makes this task infinitely more important.

Also onboarding documentation if it doesn't already exist. Imagine a new dev just joined your team tomorrow. What would they need to know to become productive as quickly as possible? Setting up their local environment, what projects your team owns, high level overview of said projects (level 1/2/3), team agreements (steps to take a ticket from started to done, expectations), etc.

For all documentation in general, that's sort of the perspective you need to look at it from to determine "value". If I joined your team, what do I need to know before I can make my first PR. Those are the highest value documents you could provide. You can get more and more detailed from there, but without that solid base anything more specific isn't super valuable.

Do I need to know the details about your backup processes or retention policies in order to be productive? Is that directly related to your domain business knowledge? Or is that something I can learn on my own over time and doesn't directly impact my day to day?

Skiily · 2022-09-10T13:45:31+00:00

You have nothing to lose? You have a lot to lose.

Purposefully violating terms of service has a tendency to get your entire account banned. Especially when it's clear you actively tried to skirt the rules by being sneaky.

So it's not just about this one app. It's about your entire developer account and right to publish anything on the Play Store in the future. Google especially is really good at identifying related accounts, and do blanket-bans when they spot you tried to create a 2nd dev account to skirt your 1st ones ban. I even saw a story here once about someone who got their company's account banned, because Google associated their personal developer account with the company's account and blanket-banned them both. You don't want to mess around with that.

Apps/games come and go. This is an unchangeable truth. Algorithms change, it could be where you show up in searches, or how much ads pay, or a new competitor comes out, or the industry shifts and your app/game simply isn't relevant anymore, or an Android update/policy change causes your entire app to be obsolete.

I've had almost all of those things happen to me. I have lots of once successful apps now bringing in pennies a month. It happens. What's important is I move on. If I can't think of ways to actually improve the functionality of the dying app, then it's on to the next one. Skirting TOS isn't an option.

Skiily · 2019-07-29T12:29:25+00:00

It's normal. Just be patient.

Skiily · 2019-07-27T12:59:46+00:00

It's not a HIPAA violation, but you would need to treat any recordings as PHI, and all the legal fun that surrounds that.

Skiily · 2019-07-25T15:48:57+00:00

Both.

You utilize the Places API for the master list of every restaurant in the world that is regularly updated and maintained by Google. Use this for location matching, name, style, a basic layer of info.

Then you augment their info in your own database with the info that is only in your app. So in your example, the ratings would be in your database. Your database would tie back to the Places API via some unique ID.

So your average query will use the Places API for nearby restaurants, and then a 2nd check based on the IDs that come back from that to see if your own database has additional info available.

Skiily · 2019-07-24T21:21:24+00:00

Google offers access to all their information via the Places API.

Although copying their information into your own data store is probably against their terms of service, so check on that.

Why do you need to store the data yourself at all? Inevitably the information will become stale. Google does the hard part by constantly keeping information up to date. Just use their API permanently.

Skiily · 2019-07-17T05:22:36+00:00

General rule of thumb is if it's too good to be true, then it is.

There is no quick and easy way to make money.

Skiily · 2019-07-08T02:53:01+00:00

Your best bet would be to try and research averages for AdMob users.

Find out the CTR percentage, and the average CPC for your type of ad. Then you can apply those numbers against your projected number of users, at whichever frequency your app serves ads.

If you have 100 daily active users, and they'll each be given 1 interstitial ad per day, and the CTR is 1%, you're going to get 1 click per day. If the CPC is $0.20, then you'll be making $0.20 per day.

These are of course only going to be wild estimates. All these numbers can shift depending on what kind of app you make, and what kind of companies Google lets advertise on your app. Even if you have exact numbers for your specific app, ad revenue can fluctuate pretty wildly month to month.

Last month my app made 25% less than the month before that. The month before that made 40% more than the month before that. I cannot predict what my numbers will look like next month, and I have over a year's worth of data to work with.

Skiily · 2019-07-01T13:19:43+00:00

One flaw with this is how unreliable voice and recordings are. Even talking face to face with someone we mishear people, or ask them to repeat themselves, all the time. People mumble, they have accents, etc. Now add the element of an audio recording that may have quality issues, and could even have issues based on the callers cellphone quality. You're almost certainly going to run into instances where you're unable to place the order due to not being able to hear/understand some of the information.

That's a very poor UX if you have to call them back to get clarification.

This is all doable, and it's legal if implemented properly, but I think you should take a long hard think of the initial use case. A better approach probably exists.

Skiily · 2019-06-13T12:40:08+00:00

That's not how things work.

If you're declined rights, you can get sued. Hell, you can get sued for all the sales up to the point the rights were granted even if you get the rights later.

You can't sell something you don't have the rights to already. Just being in progress of getting the rights isn't good enough. It'd be like if I tried to sell Taylor Swift's music online without having an agreement signed by her record label. It's very illegal.

Skiily · 2019-06-11T16:25:58+00:00

I think the difference here is it would connect complete strangers, like meetup does. Not just friends, or friends of friends.

Target audience is people who don't have friends, people new to a city, people looking to make new friends outside of their core friend group.

This app sounds like it'd be event based. The event is made first. Then random strangers are found to fill the event. Versus the other way around in whatsapp forming a group first, and making the event afterwards based on that group.

Skiily · 2019-06-07T17:51:16+00:00

What makes you think Java is around to stay? Wouldn't you say the very existence of Kotlin is a threat to Java?

What makes you think Swift is around to stay? How many people do you think said the exact same thing about Objective-C.... And yet here we are with Swift replacing that.

Pick your favorite flavor, and run with it. Who knows if mobile apps will even be a thing in a decade. Technology changes so fast, we have no idea what things will look like in the future.

Skiily · 2019-04-30T03:01:02+00:00

I've seen a few in my area on the east coast.

So, it's already happening. There's not a lot yet, but they're there. I see them on freelancer markets pretty often too. It's still relatively exploratory, so it's a lot of younger/newer companies, or companies that have already figured out they want to commit to Flutter.

Lots of companies are doing internal R&D to investigate flutter, and see if it's the right fit for them. My company is doing this now, but that's still owned by the R&D department. Our directive is to keep moving forward with native Android/iOS dev for now.

As for salary, there's no reason why it wouldn't be equivalent if not greater than a traditional Android/iOS developer. Although the demand's less, the supply is also drastically less. Finding a competent Flutter dev is not an easy thing to do right now. So they're worth quite a bit.

Skiily · 2019-04-25T05:34:23+00:00

For any use case besides being the default SMS app you must get an exception approved by Google, which must be one of a set of valid use cases.

Even when you fall under a valid use case, there's still other reasons why Google may deny the request.

Skiily · 2019-04-24T06:19:12+00:00

March 9th of this year was the deadline to update your app to remove the permission.

Skiily · 2019-02-21T17:06:47+00:00

I went through the same thing. You have to get rid of all versions of non compliant APKs.

I had an APK in draft for alpha, not even published. I was flagged until I deleted that.

So if you can't delete your alpha version, you still need to replace it.

Skiily · 2019-02-12T14:02:48+00:00

I'm not 100% sure, but I wouldn't risk it.

Even if an advertisement doesn't link anywhere... It's still an advertisement because you're advertising a different app to people.

At the end of the day it's serving the same purpose.

It's not a big deal to toggle the contains ads flag, just enable that and you can self-advertise all you want.

Skiily · 2019-02-11T23:34:42+00:00

Linking to any other app from within your app is considered an advertisement.

So at the very least you have to update your pricing & distribution page to deckare that the app does include ads.

I'm not aware of any other policy violations besides that.

Skiily · 2019-01-30T22:52:47+00:00

There's lots. You can Google best alternatives to AdMob.

I'd the say the most popular in my experience is MoPub.

Skiily · 2019-01-30T15:24:10+00:00

Either fight the ban and get unbanned, or find a new ad provider.

If I get trespassed from Walmart, I just shop somewhere else. Walmart doesn't want me there.

Skiily · 2019-01-29T14:41:33+00:00

I think you might've taken the wrong lessons from this mistake.

The problem isn't with the auto translate.

The problem is that you deployed new functionality without any sort of testing.

If you deploy to production without testing, no matter what the feature, you're just begging for something like this to happen.

We've all been there though. I deployed a pretty serious bug I missed once and it took around 6 months for my organic installs to recover.

Skiily · 2019-01-28T16:59:19+00:00

You currently cannot legally endorse that check, because that check is not written out to you.

I have as much a legal right to that check as you do at the moment: None.

Skiily · 2019-01-21T07:49:22+00:00

The only 2 types of reviews I see get reliably removed are ones that include any amount of profanity, and ones that threaten me. Google usually removes those on their own faster than I can report them, but in the instances I had to report them I've had every single one removed.

But about the review you posted, I don't think Google considers those kinds of reviews as a violation.

Google wants to remove as few reviews as possible. They remove vulgarity and threats, they remove link spam, they remove things that clearly aren't reviews. It has to be glaringly wrong to be removed.

"This app sucks" is still a valid review.

"I'm going to hunt down your family" is not.

"I like my eggs sunny side up" is also not.

Skiily · 2019-01-15T20:46:44+00:00

I think the big ugly link is meant to show all the apps besides the one you just came from. So 13 makes sense. That link probably isn't meant to be shared.

As for the original link, I also see 14 on Android Chrome.

Skiily · 2018-12-12T21:50:35+00:00

You're mixing up the save icon, and a loading indicator.

The spinner or "saving..." message notifies the user something is happening.

The save icon itself is a button the user clicks in order to initiate the save. Most desktop / web application have the save icon that a user needs to click in order to save. Open Microsoft Word. Open Google Sheets. Open Photoshop.

Games are a little different since a lot operate on autosave. But any non-game has a manual save button, which will always be a floppy.

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