World Map App Version 5

News

Today I released World Map App version 5! Version 5 has a lot of new features in it and fixes no known bugs. Version 5 lets the user download new maps to their phone from a server so that they can customize the user experience based off what they want or need.  Because large images take up a lot of disk space, I didn't want to embed a lot of large images into the app and thereby make the app size around 30 MB. So instead, I let the users choose what they want and only downloaded want they need.

Server 

I'm using Windows Azure Mobile Services in the background to host my database. I downloaded the official SDK for connecting to Azure from Android and was able to connect my app to Azure after hours of work and looking at the test example. Azure provides an easy to use back-end for a mobile app.  I looked at Amazon Web Services, but it was too complicated; the Google App Engine examples were not working, so I ended up using Azure.

 

Also, I generated a small website backend to connect to the Azure server and allow me to modify the database. The website is a heavily modified version of the javascript,html example app from Azure. I learned a lot about javascript, jQuery, and html 5 while working on my website.

An important part of the table that hosts the data, is the column "in Production". If this is set to "true", then the map will appear on all mobile android devices when someone clicks the "Download Maps" button. This lets me make modifications to a row before I put it in production, or easily pull a row out of production with the click of a button.

The actual images are stored on a Google Storage (which is an unstructured blob type storage). I used Google to store the images because it was really easy for me to use there "Web Console" to choose the images I wanted to upload. In the future I plan to use Azure Blob storage, but the ease of using the "Web Console" was the reason I used Google Storage for now.

Statistics

Since version 4, World Map App has more than doubled in its user base. Like before, most users speak Russian (nearly 70%), and more than half of users are in Russia.

I translated the app into Spanish, but the app is having a hard time gaining a user base in Spanish. Hopefully with the new features, I should be able to add maps that are written in Spanish and are of Spanish speaking countries. This should help make the app useful to Spanish speakers. 

About 3/4 of users that had version 3 of World Map App installed version 4 (as of 11 days after the release of version 4). This statistic is interesting because it tells me that some people don't update their apps, so that it is important when I release a new version that it works well because who knows when it will actually get updated by some users. 

In this line graph, you can see how the number of people with version 3 installed on their device flat-lines which means they just don't update their apps (version 3 is blue and version 4 is in green).