Voxis Launcher – Instructions and Deconstructing the Release

So Dagogo just posted this awesome tutorial for the Voxis Launcher to his ColdfusTion YouTube channel. For those of you who haven’t been following Voxis, this is the latest entrepreneurial business venture I’ve been involved in.

Among other things, ColdfusTion’s videos show off Androids with slick design, so I helped code a launcher he designed and dreamed up so that people could get their Androids looking like his. You can find the full app here if you want to try it out. Belwo is the new tutorial showing how to use it. Let’s deconstruct how the launch went and what can be taken away from it for other developers and prospective developers out there…

Report From an App Launch

So the launch of Voxis was largely pretty much a success. The last successful app I was involved in was one I built alone called Multiscreen Multitasking which I released to zero fanfare. So this is the first time that there has ever been ‘hype’ for an app I had a hand in which was pretty exciting. In the first day there were nearly a thousand downloads… which is just awesome! It demonstrates how useful it is to have a ‘platform’ of some sort, which is part of the reason I’m working hard now to build up my blog and YouTube channel (I’ll be discussing how that has gone in a future post!). For those looking for ideas for their next apps, I’d highly consider doing some kind of team-up.

The one downside of a team-up though is that Google don’t exactly make it easy with the way the Play Store/Developer Console works. You can’t just set it to pay out profits into two separate accounts, you can’t change your location once you’ve put in details… It’s generally pretty useless. Sort it out Google – there must be thousands of two and three person teams out there working on apps and it should be a lot smoother!

There were unfortunately also a few bugs that slipped through the net. This is always the case with Android releases unfortunately owing simply to the number of different devices/versions of Android. This is despite us doing extensive testing with a helpful bunch of testers prior to launch. The point to remember is that even apps from companies like Microsoft and SEGA sometimes have bugs to the point where they won’t run at all on numerous devices. Sometimes you pay for an app, then an update comes along and renders it completely useless. And these are multinational corporations – we’re just two guys! (Then you get the people complaining that they have to pay $2.99 for many months worth of work… you can’t please everyone!)

There was nothing that completely broke the app, but some people were experiencing freezing and some other things which took a little wind out of the sails and sales. The current rating is about 3.9/5 which isn’t bad! People love Dagogo’s design, it’s a very quick and space age launcher, and I still think he’s come up with one of the coolest introductions to an app ever.

Going forward we have lots of work to do, and the concept has very much proven itself meaning it’s worthy of getting time devoted to it. How I’m going to juggle this with my various other projects I’m not so sure! Stay tuned for news on ‘Debugger’ – my brain training app which I believe is pretty unique…

2 Comments

1. Aidan Cunningham says:

   October 10, 2014 at 1:03 pm

   Do you have any suggestions for glitchy widgets? My texting and twitter won’t load and the others sometimes don’t work. I tried to upload a screenshot but it wouldn’t let me

   Reply
   • thebioneer says:

     October 10, 2014 at 1:30 pm

     Hi Aidan,

     Thanks for getting in touch 🙂 A couple of devices have reported glitches with the widgets, I’m very sorry for the inconvenience. This is actually what we’re focusing on right now, so the issue should be solved in the next update or the one after. We also have page transition animations coming and some other new features! The first update should be live in the next couple of days…

     Reply