The mistakes I made when I created my first android app.

So before we dive what happened in the middle of the ocean let us begin by looking into what happened at the shore so that we can have a clear path of where we are going . I grew up in a small town called Chinhoyi in Zimbabwe , so one of the main problems was that people used to go house by house knocking and asking if they was a spare room or vacant house to rent. As someone who grew up watching all these problem l decided to use my dev skills to create a mobile app where house owners , agents and landlord can list their properties on the app l developed which l called houseflip. This would make it easier for those looking for homes or rooms to rent by just browsing on the listings in the app and if they find the house they like they can just contact the homeowner ,agent or landlord via the app.

Now that we are aware of what took place at the shore , let’s dive into the middle of the ocean . So when l created houseflip there are a couple of mistakes that l made .

1. The first mistake that l made was using the wrong database for my app , you see firebase is great backend as a service , it allows rapid development for developers but you will run in to a lot of problems with firebase . For an app like houseflip l wanted to allow users to be able to search by city ,town or street but l ran into problems because queries on the cloud firestore with firebase are limited you can’t do full text search . If you want to full text search you will have to use another third part library called algolia which would get expensive if you are just a startup just starting out and without a huge budget . Firebase is very good BAAS but if you want to something with advanced queries better create your own backend with node.js , django or flask.
2. The second mistake l made was using a poor architecture for my mobile app. If you are developing android applications you should not place business logic code inside activities and fragments . When l created houseflip I did not know about this and l just wrote logic inside fragments and activities. The problem that comes with this poor architecture is that when the OS kills activities , let’s say if someone calls while using houseflip or if the user rotates the phone the data is lost which is a bad experience for user experience . Also if as your app gains more users this poor architecture does not scale . For using a good android architecture l recommend you check the official android architecture components .
3. The third mistake was that l was so obsessed with developing more features for the application rather than marketing the app itself. Imagine a this scenario you build a nice hotel and you don’t spread the word or place a banner at the gate that there is a new hotel in town do you think anyone will come ? No one will come until you advertise . The same scenario is similar to creating a mobile application and not market it . You should focus on marketing strategies to make sure that the application is known by landlords and users which is something that l did not do. l should have focused more on making sure that the app is known out there.

Thanks for reading guys , l hope you might have learned something from this short article . You can also subscribe to my youtube channel for more mobile development videos and machine learning tutorials.