3 Apps I Want to Make

and How I’ll Make Them Happen

Eric Kwoka
Sep 2, 2018 · 5 min read

With my recent motivated foray into Android Development, I am fully embracing the fact that what I need to remain focused and motivated is a clear and climbable goal.

Of course, that’s not an odd concept to anyone who has read more than 3 pages of a self development book. Goals should be easily defined and able to be tracked, as well as properly structured to move you from point A to point B and beyond.

So from that, this article will present 3 apps that I have as my goals, in increasing difficulty, so that I have benchmarks to asses my progress as well as a target to work towards if I get a bit lost. Additionally, I’ll talk a bit about what I think I need to understand to be able to accomplish these goals, primarily so I can look back at how naive I was.

And, sorry to disappoint, but none of these apps are remotely major game-changers. These aren’t the Ubers of [insert entrenched industry here]. They won’t be remembered in the long run, and, aside from your lonely soul stumbling upon this half baked series of Medium articles, won’t be known to much of anyone. They’re just basic projects for me, based on things I like, and that I want to do.


Simple Korean News

This has been a really basic idea that I’ve had as I’ve stumbled through learning Korean (different article on that coming soon, probably). Essentially, it’s very hard to find decent content to consume as a beginner to intermediate language learner, especially in a language like Korean. With the difficulties of learning elaborate new structures and means of arranging words towering over an already challenging vocabulary, this can easily become a language learning plateau.

Despite living in Korea for 18 months, and studying Korean most of that (and much more seriously over this last summer) native level content is still rather incomprehensible to me, and I’m sure others fall into similar traps. While I’m getting better at communicating simple ideas, there simply isn’t content available at a similar level to consume that is true CONTENT and not just arbitrary practice sentences.

So, from that void, I dreamed up a website or news feed that would contain news, primarily revolving around Korea, but with the content rewritten to be excruciatingly simple, ideally with most sentences being single clause, or using the basic multi-clausal constructions, with one or two slightly more difficult sentences tossed in.

Obviously, I don’t need an app to make this happen. I could just operate it on any existing blog platform and be done with it, but I hate consuming content like that, and combining this with android effectively fuses two of my development goals together: learning Korean, and learning Android.

This shouldn’t be all too challenging to implement on a basic scale, and has some rather clear upgrades that could be made as I learn.

To start, it could easily be a rather direct scrolling feed from a standard feed system like RSS. The app itself would just call the RSS and interpret it simply. From there, working the app to handle individual feed entries properly with a list view and articles on separate screens.

And later on, adding dictionary searches on long-tap, as well as side by side view of English and Korean, although those may be slated for a much later date. So it’s a project that can be implemented simply, with room to grow, both as my skills grow, and as any potential user base grows, however unlikely.


Basic Podcast App

Since the summer of 2015, I’ve been involved in the production of a podcast that covers Japanese Animation and related topics. By no means we do need our own app, or can I really believe that there would be much use for such an app even among our literal dozens of fans. However, I view it as another good project to move up from.

At the core, it would be very similar to the Simple Korean News app, with mostly reading feeds from various sources, but with the added use of API integration with popular services, as this could integrate as a single feed from multiple YouTube channels, the primary RSS feed, as well as Social Networking Services.

With the nature of these different aspects being inherently segmented, this also makes it a bit simple from a project standpoint of introducing one thing, and then the next, and then the next, hopefully with it all working together.

The main things that this would use that weren’t covered in the last app is handling multimedia, downloads, and third party API calls. I do know my way around using some APIs, through use of API integration into spreadsheets for various purposes, but obviously Android and Java is an entirely different beast.


Found Phone Game

With the nature of technology taking larger control over our lives, or at least our expression and connection to the world beyond ourselves, the idea of a game that is played within a phone, specifically someone else’s phone is wildly appealing to me.

One such game I know exists, and was very fun, is Simulacra by Kaigan Games. Essentially, your phone becomes the victims phone and you work with her friends and the information available to you from texts and photo albums, to work out what happened to her, with multiple branching endings.

Additionally, just last week, the movie ‘Searching’ came out, in which the main character is attempting to find his daughter, but instead of with guns and ass kicking, dives into her social media and her previously unknown internet dealings.

So the idea is rife for expansion, and being able to further tie this project in with other goals, I hope to make the game entirely in Korean, with Korean writers, actors, and the like being involved.

This is a much larger step form the last 2 apps, and requires a lot of functions that would be whole new. As the other apps primarily communicated with a set of information maintained on the internet, where content was the same for all users, this game would need to internally manage the save game and, ideally, track some player stats.

The Korean market loves its mobile phone games, and this may be too far of a departure from its bread and butter time wasters, it could also be different enough to gain attention. Combining in Korea’s current social issues, as well as urban legends, can make it more relevant to the market, and distinct from other content of a similar vein.


Anyway, that’s a basic idea of the ideas I have in store for myself to develop over the next many months (and hopefully not years) as I learn to master my new skills.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade