Ads and deploying an app end-to-end

June 11, 2024

After being at a handful of jobs now, it's rare to get opportunities to build something from scratch all the way from end to end. There is appreciation and frustration in experiencing the process beyond building a feature and deploying with a CI/CD pipeline that abstracts mostly everything away.

I had a goal in 2023 to build and deploy a game app to the app store and earn $1. The reason for a game app is because I figured that very explicit rules that I could easily implement during my limited time outside of work. It takes effort to block and make time to work on projects. I had no idea how to earn money on the app store, but I figure ads was a valid way. 1 Dollar USD is a small enough number that seemed like a achievable goal. I had deployed a app previously to the Google Play store, but there was no ads and had no downloads, even now. Why did I think it would be different this time? 🤷🏻‍♂️

I had 3 goals:

Pick an app I could easily plan and work on a few hours a night for a few weeks. I wanted to focus on building.
Try a new language and framework.
Put an ad on it.

For app idea, it turns out that there is a bit of a market for game clones, so I picked a relatively popular word game after seeing a handful of clones on the Google Play store. I'll refrain from posting what the app is or a link to the store listing, but for those who sleuth, it won't be hard to find.

For language and platform, I picked Dart and the Flutter framework. The idea of being able to deploy to both Android and iOS was appealing though I was skeptical. Still am, but I will check out Kotlin Multiplatform after hearing about it recently.

For ads, I picked Admob. I figure it wouldn't be too tough to implement.

The following items surprised me, mostly because I didn't do enough research:

How layouts worked in Flutter. Very useful to learn about constraints.
The number of forms on the Play Store in order to publish.
Making assets is a surprise even though it shouldn't be
I didn't think I would drill properties to deep children components as much as I did. There are state management libraries that I could have used, but I didn't.

Not surprising:

Android code was required. Android Studio was used for building and publishing the app
iOS app didn't run, and I didn't spend more time to make it work

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