Making mobile apps

Day 360 / 366

About a decade ago, mobile apps were all the rage. The phrase “There’s an app for that” was quite popular. Building apps was tough, I remember back in college it took me a week to set up the Eclipse IDE before I could even start making an Android project.

Things have gotten easy these days. With React Native and Flutter, all you need to know is JavaScript and you can start building apps in minutes. And with Expo, running an app on an iOS device is as easy as scanning a QR code. Kids these days don’t know how good they have it.

While building apps have become easier, deploying them has become tougher. Back then, you didn’t need to pay anything to put your app on the Google Play Store. There wasn’t even much of a verification process. This was one of the things that was better about doing Android development as compared to iOS development. Apple needed you to get pay 99 dollars to get a developer account, without which you couldn’t even run your app locally on a physical device. Apple had a thorough testing process that you had to pass in order to get your app live.

Now, Google follows the same process. You have to pay 25 dollars to get your account, and then you have to get your app reviewed by them before you can publish it. If you have a company account, then things are a bit easier, but with an individual developer account, you need to first get your app reviewed, and then keep it in closed testing for 14 days with at least 12 testers. Only then are you allowed to publish your app.