A Global Entrance

When I hit the big green "Publish" button that made android2cloud available to the world at large, I was nervous. I was nervous because it would be my entrance into the world of mobile applications, and I knew my name would either be associated with "amateur" or nothing at all.

I spent the rest of that night ferreting out bugs that didn't exist in my tests. God bless patient testers (I'm looking at you, Patrick Kettner).

Little did I realise, however, that this would be a global entrance into the Market. I understood that people all over the world could use my application... I just didn't think they would. In the weeks since, I have been shown how wrong I was.

First, a disclaimer. All these numbers are coming off the project page. This is based on the assumption that people going to the project page are people who are actually using the project. In the next release, I'll be tracking statistics for the actual application, so my numbers will be much more specific and accurate.

Since its release, android2cloud has seen visits from over 700 people, in 313 cities, across 42 countries. The country driving the most traffic is Japan. It has served over 1,000 links, and has 209 users. (Those last two came right from the database, so I know they're accurate.)

A large part of this popularity can be accounted for, I'm sure, by the coverage the application has received. Juggly.cn, a Chinese (I believe) blog, covered the app twice, here and here. Moongift.jp, a Japanese (I believe) blog, covered the app here. After these three articles were written, the visits to the projects page and the app usage both skyrocketed. As I write this, the server is serving 6 requests every second, and has served 250 thousand requests in the last 12 hours. As I upgrade the software and App Engine gets its Channels API, I expect the requests to plummet. Still, App Engine has handled this huge amount of traffic without even blinking. The free quotas absolutely covered all the traffic, and I've not seen any unscheduled downtime.

All in all, android2cloud was a huge success. I've been contacted twice about translation and localisation efforts, and the wonderful people at Yensid have contacted me about writing Android apps. I've brainstormed two new applications, and will be launching them in the future. An update is planned for android2cloud, and is mostly completed. I expect to release it in the next few days.

Thanks, everyone, for your support. Especially the people that are donating; you really are too generous. I'm doing my best to repay you for your kindness, and hope you like the features that are coming. If you have ideas I haven't implemented, please contact me on the Google group, or file an issue on the issue tracker. I love hearing from users; you always have better ideas than I do.