Lately we have been working together with Jung and Sony Ericsson to create a webapp for sharing collections of Android-apps. It’s called Mash-App and it was launched a couple of weeks ago.
It has been a quite different project, more like when we develop apps for ourselves than a typical client project. We started by refined the idea Jung had together with them, removed all the functionality that didn’t fit the initial scope. From that we developed a prototype to have something clickable to talk about, where we could actually try the interactions. We then designed the interface, finished up the development, made some adjustments and finalized the product. It has been a lot of fun and the people at Jung and Sony Ericsson have been great to work with. More of those projects, please!
This is our first project in Ruby on Rails 3 and frankly it’s been a smooth ride. We haven’t stumbled upon any major problems a part from having to patch a few third party gems. We’re hosting it on Heroku’s bamboo stack and we are really starting to love the git workflow.
One of the technical challenges was that Android Market has no official API. Einar, who works at Jung and is also Arvids brother, wrote a small java application that uses the unofficial api. It serves as a proxy between Mash-App.com and Android Market. The API app is hosted on Google App Engine and uses geokit to make sure we’re searching the correct market.
We also had the opportunity to design a mobile version of the webapp. it’s great how easy it has become for modern devices, check it out with your Xperia X10 (or iPhone for that matter).
Have a look at mash-app.com and let us know what you think!
(Feedback is greatly appreciated, either via the feedback link, twitter or plain old email.)
Tags: app, design, development, heroku, mobile, project, rails