Income January 2016

The first month of 2016 is gone, let’s have a look at the AppStore income.

Last year my apps made 509€ in January. This year they’ve made 191€. Slow start but the weather this month has been very poor.

Work done

I submitted new versions of the apps. There are 2 important changes in this version. First of all it is now possible to see a visual height profile of a route. It’s only a simple line with some numbers but there’s cool stuff going on behind the screens to get the altitudes, involving NASA data. There will be a future blogpost on that.

Second is that there is no longer a limit to calculate the shortest distance between 2 non-connected nodes. I implemented the Dijkstra algorithm to achieve this and there will be a future blogpost on that too.

Android

We’re still working on the Android version of the apps and we’ve entered final testing. I bought a discounted Android phone. I went for a cheaper, slower model because we already have faster devices.

The plan is to fully test the app in the coming days and then submit them to the Play Store.

The fun bit is that we built the subscription system on top of Parse and we all know where that is heading. We have a nice backend up and running so the plan is to roll our own user/subscription system. There will be a few subscription based iOS apps as well this year so well worth the effort to roll our own.

New app

I’m putting the finishing touches on a similar app that shows some of the walking networks in The Netherlands. Right now the app comes with about 8000km of walking roads which cover the south of the country. More will be added in the future.

This new app was a big test for our backend. In the new backend every app has its own network id. This id is used throughout the model. It allows us to plug in a new network with its own nodes and tracks. This network id is passed through every API call which results in one large, happy database that every app can talk to. It also allows us to pull up statistics to see how every app is doing.

I’m pleased to report that the import of this new network went well. All the apps offer a search functionality now, so with every new network I have to reverse geocode the locations of the nodes of that network, to get a readable address. This allows people to search for routes by city name or zip.

In the past I’ve used Google to do this reverse geocoding but recently I’ve switched to a service called Nominatim (search for ‘nominatim reverse geocode’ if you want to know more on that)

The problem with Google was that they only allow 2500 reverse geocoding requests per day, so reverse geocoding a new network with +8000 nodes had be spread over 3 days.

Nominatim is a bit easier in that regard. If you put some delay between your requests it’s happy to serve you more results per day.

I hope to submit the new app later this week.