In the last devlog, I wrote that October was mostly about two things. Then October kept going, and it turned out those two things were only the start. This is what happened next.
The day the site went live
Potafes Osaka was where people first said they really wanted this, and I've already told that story. The plan after that was to make the Headphone Festival on November 7th the real launch and hand out the app there.
So on October 18th, I put the site up and announced it on X. There aren't many people who care about this sort of thing, I figured, so three weeks seemed like a sensible runway to find them. Honestly, I was hoping for around 100 likes.
After posting, I went back to other work. About two hours later, I noticed my phone, a little way off, buzzing and not stopping. I picked it up to see what was going on, and the announcement had taken off. I sat there for a while, not really understanding what I was looking at. Within about nine hours, it had passed 5,000 likes.
That's around fifty times what I'd expected. What surprised me most was how many people liked the idea of using an old Android phone again, and how many found something appealing in it. I needed to step up. There was no waiting around for an event in November. It had to come out sooner, so I set about getting the app out within a week of the site.
The app goes out, and bug fixing begins
Five days later, on the evening of Friday, October 23rd, I released the first version, 0.90.1. A Friday release meant people could spend the weekend poking at it.
In those five days there was obviously no room for new features. All I did was test, over and over, for any bug bad enough to bring it down. I struggled with it as long as I could and just about made Friday night.
Once it was out, it turned out I hadn't struggled nearly enough.
An app that had behaved fairly well on my own test phones started doing things I'd never seen the moment it reached yours. When you build something yourself, you end up testing only the ways you imagine it being used, and I hadn't even noticed. I now understand why debugging is a job.
From then on, it was bug fixing every day, one after another after another. Android phones of every age and brand lay all over the desk and the floor, and I swapped between them, stamping out problems. Anything that looked serious got fixed and rushed out the next day as 0.90.2. Anything that needed major surgery went to the next big update.
10,000, then 20,000
On October 26th, three days after release, downloads from this site passed 10,000. It went so fast that all I could think was, what is going on, and where did these numbers come from? The simpler part: I got to see a lot of photos of old phones, and that made me happy.
I also got a huge number of requests. I worked through them bit by bit, and by the next release, on October 30th, the version number had jumped to 0.92.7. Lyrics, .m3u playlists, a rebuilt queue, artist pages and more went in. I also raised the targetSdk, rebuilding things so that one app runs on everything from Android 4.0 to the latest phones.
Then on November 1st, nine days after release, total downloads from this site passed 20,000.
The phones people have told us about, counting only what we can see on X, now come to over 100 models. Someone also wrote that they listen to music every day on a phone they'd stopped using. Messages like that make me glad about all those phones on the floor.
Between your requests, the fixes and the things I want to do myself, this is still only partway there. There's plenty I want to do for the Headphone Festival on November 7th, the event that was meant to be the launch, and I'd love to have something new to show there. So there's more work ahead.