Celebrate Good Times, C'mon!

Yesterday was a gigantic landmark in my Android development journey so far – I passed the mark of 10,000 applications sold, in total! It is also roughly a year since I released my first application, Mate Rater ... when I released Mate Rater a year ago, I’d never have imagined that I’d be able to convince over 10,000 people to part with their cash to buy my applications!

I also passed the mark of 1,000,000 downloads in total in the past couple of months. I was pretty chuffed to reach this landmark as well, although seeing as many of my applications are free, I didn’t feel it was worth celebrating ... it isn’t exactly hard to convince someone to download a free app (although it may be hard to get them to rate it within the context of it being free ;) ).

Firstly, a massive, huge, gigantic thanks to all the people that have helped me over this first year (you know who you are) and have aided me in reaching these landmarks – all the testers, the “feedback-givers”, the translators, the “word-spreaders”, the reviewers, the bloggers, the Facebook fans, the Twitterers ... hey, even the idiots that gave my applications low ratings for stupid reasons – it drove me to make my applications better. Many of you have given your time and energy for free and have made massive contributions to the success of my applications – it’s great to see just how many people out there are willing to help; I think the Android platform has a great future ahead of it mainly because of the enthusiastic users and their desire to push things forward.

So what about the year ahead and beyond?
I am mainly going to continue concentrating on the SECuRET applications and WiFi File Explorer. I still have a VERY long list of features to implement for both these products, and those lists are being constantly added to by your great suggestions – so expect to see those applications continue to improve over the next year. The immediate focus is on translating those applications and early next year I hope to be supporting multiple languages across all of them.

I also have a new application idea which I hope to release early next year. It’s based heavily on the features you see in the SECuRET applications, but it applies them in a different way to result in a unique solution. I am quite excited by this application and I can see it being very popular amongst a certain demographic.

I’m also looking forward to developing for Google TV and porting my applications to that, as well as new ways of distributing my applications to more users.

On a more personal note, my girlfriend is expecting our first baby in March next year (hint for the new application)!! As I develop and support all my applications in my spare time (this isn’t my real job!), I get the feeling that I may find it hard to make time to be as attentive to my users as I will be to my new born ... so don’t be surprised if I take a while to reply to emails, or a certain feature doesn’t materialise in an update for a few weeks.

So thanks once again to all the fantastic people I have met over the last year. I hope you all continue to support me over the next year and help me sell those next 10,000 applications in a fraction of the time - it would be nice if this did become my real job ;)