Tag Archive for reddit

Unexpected Uses for Pocket Fan

I envisioned Pocket Fan to be a novelty app. What else would you call an app that displayed an animated fan? It certainly wasn’t supposed to be useful. My perception changed when I got this comment on the Android Market:

Can’t sleep without the sound of a fan. This is almost perfect for power outages. Just needs to stay open and not black screen after 1 minute.

When I first read that comment, I thought to myself “He can just set his screen to never time out…” and went back to work on my game. Then I saw a post on reddit entitled “I can’t sleep unless you’re near me…”. It was just a picture of a box fan, but it all clicked for me then. Pocket Fan could be used as a sound machine or noise generator.  Read more

Make a Free Version of Your Paid App

So you just finished your Android app. You spent many hours writing code and designing graphics. Maybe you spent a lot of money on a graphic designer and/or coder. Either way, your app looks beautiful and performs well. You deserve to be paid for your work. After all, you’re technically in debt if you count your own hourly rate and actually in debt if you count your graphic design budget. Here’s the story of a naïve developer (me) who thought everybody would want to buy his app. Read more