Mobile Development

At Christmas I released my Droid 2 CAD app on Android Marketplace, this has now had nearly 5000 downloads and clocked up some 16,000 user sessions. The app is not a game but a GPS point recording tool. But for someone who only dabbles in software development the opportunities the current mobile app trend offers are amazing, 5000 downloads may not be much compared to apps like angry birds but I had an idea, I coded and published it and other people actually wanted to download and try it. I released my app for free with no adverts, next time I may looking into this more but when I released it I didn't think anyone would be interested it and I would be adding to the bloat in the marketplace.


One highlight this year so far has has been having to use Google translate to be able to read the feedback for the app because people i can not even speak to liked my app enough to leave positive feedback. That is something that I thought would never happen.

I am now not sure what to try next with the release of Android Honeycomb means a whole new array of devices is just waiting to be developed on.

And it is not just limited to mobile phone development, technologies like Microsoft's XNA studio and Xbox Live Indie Games are allowing homegrown game writers to create, publish and get paid for their own games both on the XBox 360 and Windows phone 7 (Check out Team Mango at www.team-mango.com ).

If you have an idea and are interested these are good times.

(This started out as a comment on the Guardian Tech Blog )

Map screen taken from collected anonymous data using www.flurry.com