Alright, first of all I know it comes as a surprise ( probably an unpleasant one ) to ones who follow the flow of the project I’m working on… it’s kind of to me as well, but that’s how things are better to go on. After all, there is always a piece of great news and …a “but”. Ok let me elaborate a little:
The great news is that our iOS application is finally ready as a beta. It means it can be tested by actual end-users; people who were not involved in any way in the process of development. The “but” part is that we decided not to proceed it further or release it until our Android version is ready as well. The reason is kind of obvious and I’m not going to dig into it.
However, today for the first time, I’m going to reveal a bit more about the project ( or at least its development phases). During the past few months, some of my friends asked me what the hell are you doing and why haven’t you guys released it already? It’s a tough question to answer, especially now, as you need to see it yourselves. However, I decided to present you this chart that displays all the phases we’ve planned so far, their purposes, durations, and our rough estimation of the final launch time:
I’ve got to admit that we made some enormous mistakes, resulted in a considerable delay in our timeline. Well, it’s the first time even for someone like me with all that programming experience, to design and develop a system in this category and with this scale (requires a dedicated post).
For instance, at the beginning of phase 4, we made a big mistake in selecting React Native (RN) as our mobile application framework. We thought we could kill two birds or probably more (Android, iOS, etc.) with one stone. Only after 3 phases we finally came to the realization of how limiting was the framework and how cumbersome would be the maintenance of such codebase. To clarify I’m not against RN at all. It’s really great, just probably not in our scenario. ( requires another dedicated post again). So we changed our entire planning and we went for developing native applications (separate apps for Android and iOS) which of course resulted in having us extend the timeline again.
Anyway, long story short, as you can see we’ve planned a total of 11 phases for android + 2 launch preparation phases. Because of our established code base, android development phases are not going to be like previous phases and tend to be shorter, hopefully, fingers crossed 🤞🏻
I’d like to thank Dr. Lee and Demitry, two wonderful teammates who never gave up on the project and our vision despite all the hardship we experienced together 💪🏻🌹🌹 🙏🏻
Alright, that’s it for now.
PS: From now on, a widget at the bottom of the home page displays our progress