How we built Blue Colony
Or: How an Android Wear Appstore fits on a smartwatch
Last week we shipped Blue Colony to Google Play. It’s a tiny, intuitive app store for Android Wear apps, built to run on a smartwatch.
This post summarizes the experiences we had during the development process of Blue Colony; hopefully relevant to fellow Android Wear developers, or anybody silly enough to tie a mini computer to their wrist.
Why did we do this?
We love gadgets and love exploring everything new — but when my LG G Watch R finally arrived from the UK, it drove me crazy. It was virtually impossible to find smartwatch apps on Google Play.
The discovery of Wear Store for Android Wear by GoKo gave us first relief. GoKO made an awesome smartphone app to browse and find apps for the smartwatch. Wear HQ and Android Wear Center are also really helpful!
But this couldn’t be the final step in evolution: We were looking for a full smartwatch experience: A minimalistic, intuitive place to discover relevant apps for our new gadgets.
Who’s onboard?
Stefano developes Android apps since the very first Android phone was shipped to Pisa, Italy.
Philippe is new to the mobile business but sometimes has a good idea, he is eager to bring to life.
And of course special thanks to our great team of supporters in mobile development and design!
From idea to prototype in 1.5 weeks
There are tons of requirements and guidelines how to build an app for wearables — we didn’t look at them.
Instead we concentrated on the constraints brought to us by the limited real estate of a smartwatch screen and on how we figured a watch app store should feel and behave.
You’ll find a comprehensive list of design guidelines by Android Wear here ——-> https://developer.android.com/design/wear/index.html
For Blue Colony we stuck to two navigation principles:
- The basic list-structure for the overview of categories(! few and large touch targets)
2. The vertical-then-horizontal list-structure for the app-profiles in the categories (! keep cards simple)
For the actual app profiles we took a good look at a classic app profile in Google Play on the smartphone and stripped it down to the bones. We noticed that showing screenshots from actual smartwatch apps on your smartwatch triggered much more downloads then long discriptions, no one actually reads.
We used Balsamiq (http://balsamiq.com/products/mockups/) to wireframe Blue Colony and map out all necessary interactions. Balsamiq is an extremely intuitive and basic tool, which helped us cunstructing our app in no time at all. This is our mock:
For the initial launch our back end literally lived inside an excel sheet. But we want to offer every available Android smartwatch app, so we needed to move from MS Office documents to the real database world. Our dataset was built in two separate steps. In the first phase we fetched the Google Play links of every Wear app and watch face out there. In the seccond phase we crawled the Google Play profiles of these apps to extract the relevant data for the Blue Colony back end.
Here are a couple of screens (App category list; App profile, description and one screenshot of Evernote for Wear on the round screen; App profile, description and download prompt of Wear Mini Launcher on the square screen):
What the heck does Blue colony stand for?
Colony is an area occupied by settlers, symbolizing the wear apps that set up camp inside the world of mobile apps.
Blue is a color for confidence and intelligence amongst other things, also it’s a dominant color in science fiction movies and games.
Put together blue colony often stands for a colony of microorganisms used for testing in biology.
Traction Channels
There are more than 1.3 Mn. apps on Google Play. How on earth will someone find out that we exist?
- Google Plus — With Google Plus we directly approached users, who are active in the Android Wear communities. This is where we yielded our first ratings and reviews.
- Reddit.com — We showed the Android Wear community in the subreddit r/androidwear our app and got very valuable feedback. This also pushed the needle over the 150 installs-threshold.
- Google AdWords — With Google AdWords you can’t directly target owners of Android Wear devices. A search campaign is insaenely expensive for queries like “Android Wear”, “Android Wear Appstore”, or “Wear apps”. We went for display ads instead and targeted devices with Android 4.4 and higher in USA, UK, Canada, Australia and Germany. We switched to this Geo-region from global targeting, when we only yielded clicks, and installs from remote regions.
- We are experimenting with other channels, which we will update here.
Next steps
We are implementing two incremental improvements to the product.
1. Back end update
2. Wish-list feature, which lets users bookmark multiple apps they discover, to download them later.
Blue Colony
If you’re interested in Blue Colony , have feedback to the team, or have any questions , shoot us a mail at: philippe@cliqz.com or stefano@cliqz.com
https://play.google.com/store/apps/detailsid=com.bluecolony.watchappstore&hl=en
