Forty Windows Phone projects as "Jaykay", and the one that stuck

Last month I put up the Store blurb for Win 10 HD Wallpapers, and a week later, in my 5 reasons why Windows Phone rocks, I wrapped up my whole WP dev life in one line: I “got the opportunity to learn and develop a lot of WP app”. So guys, this is the long version of that line. :)

There’s a folder on my laptop’s desktop called Wp8 projects. It has around 40 project folders, a folder full of Store screenshots, a pile of .xap files and (yes) a JPEG of my DVLUP quiz answers. The oldest folder in there is from 8 November 2013. Add my Visual Studio projects folder and that’s pretty much everything I’ve built for Windows Phone, minus my very first apps, which are older than anything on this laptop. So here’s the tour: what I built, what I built it with, the one app that actually stuck, and what it has earned me so far.

“Jaykay”

All my apps go out under one name: Jaykay. I’ve been blogging as Jaykay since 2011, so it became my Store publisher name too. The “more apps” button in my apps just runs a Store search for “jaykay”, and most of my manifests say Author “Jaykay” and Publisher “Jaykay”. Except WiFi Booster’s, which says “Jaykat”. Typo. :P

On 6 March 2014 the India Store’s “Apps from Jaykay” page listed 14 apps, all free. Six weeks later it was down to 12. Neither list is the full count though. Going by my Dev Center certification mails, a little over twenty different apps have passed certification since April 2013, and several of them aren’t on either list.

Hanuman Chalisa, the one that came first

My first app on the Store is Hanuman Chalisa. It shows the verses as seven images on a saffron Panorama page, with a live tile that cycles through pictures of Lord Hanuman.

It passed certification on 29 April 2013, six months before the oldest folder on this laptop and just before I became a Microsoft Student Partner that May. Two more apps followed within days. A first try called “5 ways to Break up” failed certification on 30 April, and on 3 May “Break up” and “Bike Tips” both went through. None of those three first versions is on this laptop, and neither Break up nor Bike Tips was on my publisher page by March 2014.

What I do have here is the November 2013 rebuild: first on a Windows Phone 7.1 template, then native WP8. The update notes on the listing say the same thing: native WP8 support, legacy WP7.8 support, a new splash screen and the cycling live tile. It failed certification twice in the last week of November and went live on 2 December 2013.

The v1 code plays the Chalisa from an mp3. In v2.1 the player is commented out and the Play button does… nothing. The mp3 is still sitting right there in the project. And yes, people have noticed! Since last August the app’s feedback button has been mailing me, and audio is the request that keeps coming back. One person wanted a bigger font and the music, another wrote in just to say there’s no audio. Someone else wants it in English, and some mails arrive with the “Your feedback here” placeholder untouched. Haha.

The rating prompt is my favourite thing in that whole folder:

We’d love you to rate our app 5 stars to show your devotion for Lord Hanuman.

By April 2014 it had 189 ratings on the India Store. The US Store counts separately, and in January it had 30 there, averaging 4.7. Not bad for seven images, na?

The November 2013 rebuild: the splash screen, and two of the seven verse images.

Learning with Nokia’s toys

By the second half of 2013 Nokia had a LOT going on for developers building for Lumia (DVLUP was part 1 of this series). On my desktop is a folder of Nokia’s Lumia App Labs videos, #1 to #17: the Imaging SDK, HERE launchers, the Nokia Music API, NFC, large-screen layouts. And the SDKs in those videos line up suspiciously well with what I built next. ;)

The Imaging SDK gave me a run of photo apps in November 2013:

• Cartoonify Me (18 to 20 November): pick or shoot a photo, apply one cartoon filter, save it
• Cartoonify Me+: same idea, but with seven filters (Cartoon, Paint, Oily, Milky, MagicPen, Solarize, WhiteboardEnhancement) plus crop
• Pixel Studio (release build on 24 November): 23 filters, from Antique and Lomo to Sketch and Stamp. “Choose a picture… Apply a filter to it… Save and share it!”
• Sketchify Me, of which only the screenshots survive
• Oldify Me, built with a friend

Cartoonify Me passed certification on 23 November. Pixel Studio failed the same day and passed on the 27th. Cartoonify Me+ failed its first try in December. In April 2014 Pixel Studio’s row on my publisher page said “No reviews”.

Pixel Studio and Cartoonify Me+. Same skeleton, different paint.

App Studio speed-runs

That same November I found Windows Phone App Studio, Microsoft’s browser tool that generates an app from feeds and pages. I made eight apps with it in about five weeks, and every single one was built on someone else’s brand. I owned up to those in part 2.

The one App Studio app that wasn’t someone else’s brand came in February 2014: Jobs Today, which pulled job listings from the RSS feeds of six Indian job sites. It passed certification on 24 February and had 12 ratings by April 2014. Apparently freshers in India weren’t hunting for jobs on Lumias. Who knew!

The wallpaper factory

In December 2013 I built a template called “Amazing Wallpapers”. Simple local image gallery: pick a picture, set it as your lock screen, save it, share it. Then I forked it. And forked it again. And again:

• Breaking Bad wallpapers (“Breaking Wallpapers” on the Store)
• Nexus 5 HD Wallpaper
• Note 3 HD Wallpaper
• iOS 7 Wallpapers HD
• Minimalist Wallpapers HD (291 images!)
• Windows 8.1 wallpapers
• and later Stock HD Wallpapers, with the official wallpapers from the Lumia 1520, HTC One M8, Galaxy S5, Nexus 5, Xperia Z2 and iOS 7

I counted every single review, because reviews meant DVLUP points. DVLUP had challenges for apps averaging 4 stars at 25, 50, 100 and more reviews, and each one paid out XP. On 10 February 2014 I was on Twitter telling DVLUP that Note 3 HD Wallpapers was “just 3 Reviews short for 100! A lil help?”

On 6 March 2014 one of my listings was Note 3 HD Wallpaper, with 205 ratings. By 20 April 2014 the same listing was Stock HD Wallpapers, with 299 ratings. New name, same listing, and the ratings came along for the ride. Breaking Wallpapers and iOS 7 Wallpapers HD weren’t on the India publisher page by then.

Last weekend (18 and 19 April) I started a refresh of Stock HD Wallpapers: the iPhone 6, Lollipop, Mi 4, Note 4, One M9 and Galaxy S6 wallpapers, and a retarget to WP 8.1.

Stock HD Wallpapers v1.1, March 2014.

The one that stuck

The Windows 8.1 fork is the one that worked, and I built it for myself first. I just couldn’t find a single wallpaper app I liked, so I made one for my own phone and a few friends’ phones, and it kept getting better on their feedback before I put it out.

The prototype in December 2013, still called Windows 8.1 Wallpapers.

It shipped as Win 8.1 HD Wallpaper. Certification bounced it twice, in January and on 4 February 2014. It passed on the 7th, and it has been on the Store since the 8th, as one listing the whole way. On 24 February I tweeted that it was “Just 10 more reviews to go before Win 8.1 HD Wallpaper touches 250 reviews in India”. Here’s its life so far, from my project folders and the India Store pages:

Version	On the Store	What changed	Ratings (India Store)
1.2.0.1	updated 27 Feb 2014	8 channels, a “Save photo” option, and “No Ads” right there in the description	530 on 5 Mar 2014
2.0.0.1	4 May 2014	(I don’t have a copy of this build)	2,664 on 6 May 2014
3.0.0.1	12 May 2014	rewritten: a page per channel plus a viewer, 9 channels (new: Idiot Box and Comics), 218 wallpapers, a cycling live tile	3,934 on 15 Mar 2015
4.0.0.0	18 Mar 2015	renamed Win 10 HD Wallpapers, new Typography channel, 10 channels, 240 wallpapers, Vserv ads	4,373 on 15 Apr 2015

The average has stayed between 4.16 and 4.37 the whole time. The US Store keeps its own count, which was 1,016 in mid April.

Downloads don’t show up anywhere on the Store, so for this one you’ll have to take my word: this was my first app to cross 100,000 downloads, then a MILLION, and it’s at about 1.5 million now. That’s the “1.5mn” in the blurb. :D

On 15 March 2015 I built a release with the new name and a Typography channel. About 20 minutes later I ran the same build through Vserv’s AppWrapper and bumped it to 4.0.0.0, and the Store blurb went up on the 16th. The update has been live since the 18th. Since it’s the same listing, the new name kept every rating the app already had. Same trick I’d pulled with the Note 3 app a year earlier.

The blurb’s other two numbers, checked honestly:

• “250+ HD wallpapers”: the v4 project has 240. Close, but no. (480 if you count the thumbnails, which you shouldn’t.)
• “4k reviews”: this one holds up. The India Store page showed 3,934 ratings on 15 March, and 4,373 a month later.

The app itself is dead simple. Everything is bundled in the xap (36 MB now), so it works fully offline. Pick a channel, tap a wallpaper, then set it as the lock screen, save it to Photos to use as a Start background, or share it. The rate button comes with the line “Want more channels or wallpapers? Rate us 5 stars and leave your request in the review box.” The v3 listing says its two new channels, Idiot Box and Comics, were “requested by our users”.

The listing also says the wallpapers were “designed from scratch”, which is only half true. Mind you, they’re a mix: some I designed myself, and the rest I curated from the web. The same listing ends with “Disclaimer: All images are copyright to their respective owners”.

Did any of it make money?

A bit, and only lately. None of my projects has an in-app purchase, and the wallpaper app ran without ads for over a year (its early 2014 listing even said “No Ads”).

AdDuplex came first, and that isn’t really money. It’s a cross-promotion network: the ads you show in your app earn you ad space for your own app in other people’s apps. On 27 December 2013 AdDuplex mailed me that I was running out of credits, and the very next day I told DVLUP on Twitter that an AdDuplex campaign had got me 89 reviews in a day! I have a Breaking Bad banner I made for it too.

Microsoft approved my pubCenter account on 25 February 2014. The App Studio projects bundle the pubCenter ad control, and wherever it’s there, it’s commented out.

The actual money comes from Vserv, the Indian mobile ad network. Vserv has been paying me roughly every month since August 2014.

The wallpaper app only joined in March. Honestly, monetising it hadn’t really crossed my mind until recently, so I took the easy way and wrapped it with Vserv’s AppWrapper. The wrapper adds the Vserv ad SDK to an existing xap without touching the code, and it doesn’t show ads until the app has been opened a few times.

March was a good month in other ways too. On the 21st Microsoft told me I’d reached Master, the top tier of its Dev Center Benefits programme, which comes with priority publisher support, early access to pre-release tools and a million AdDuplex ad impressions, among other things. Two days later a $1,500 gift card from Microsoft showed up, and I put this on Facebook:

Happiness is a $1500 gift card from Microsoft. Seems like I can buy the whole store now.

I also put some DVLUP points into promotion. On 17 March I redeemed $100 of AdDuplex ad credit and $50 of Inneractive ad credit, and sent Inneractive a banner for the campaign.

Odds and ends

A few more from the folder, because they made me laugh:

• Barney Stinson SoundBoard: 93 clips sorted into “suit up”, “legendary”, “have you met” and friends. The buttons are generated from the folder contents. Legen… wait for it… dary!
• Rock X: bios of ten rock bands, with buttons that open Nokia MixRadio. Built with a friend.
• Delhi’s Food Court: about 30 Delhi eateries by zone, each with a “tap the map” button that opens HERE Maps. Also with a friend.
• Fast Facebook: a WebBrowser control pointed at Facebook’s touch site, plus a few app bar shortcuts. That’s it. That’s the whole app. :P
• Why Lumia 1020?: one of the first projects in the folder, a list app with entries like “41MP Pureview Camera” and “New Amber Update”.

What’s on the bench

From June to September 2014 I played with Visual Studio 2013 and Windows Phone 8.1 universal apps: page transitions, a “PixelBots” game screen, a universal app with shared code. There’s also a Unity rocket-landing game xap from September 2014.

Next up, I want to take the wallpaper app universal. In March I spent 75 DVLUP points on an application architecture consultation, and on 7 April I had the call with a Microsoft partner consultant about converting Win 10 HD Wallpapers into a universal app. The follow-up mail had links on moving from Windows Phone Silverlight to WinRT.

The Stock HD Wallpapers refresh from last weekend comes in two halves: the old app retargeted to WP 8.1, and a half-done WinRT redesign of it. Next to them are a couple of parallax and tilt-effect samples I built the same weekend.

What I told DVLUP

Last week DVLUP asked me for tips for a piece called “How to Reach 100k Downloads”, from devs who’ve done it. Here’s the short version of what I sent them:

• Build something you need. I couldn’t find one good wallpaper app, so I made one.
• Make the user experience great.
• Support every phone, including the low-memory ones. Gameloft managed it with Asphalt 8, so the rest of us have no excuse.
• Universal apps are where this is all heading.

They also asked what I’d tell my younger self if I had a DeLorean. My answer: don’t think about monetisation from the start. Make something kickass first, and build the money bits on top of it later. The wallpaper app went more than a year without a single ad, and it’s the one that got to a million.

The numbers in this post add a couple of lessons of my own. Pixel Studio has 23 filters and no reviews, while a gallery of wallpapers with a set-as-lock-screen button has more than 4,000 ratings on the India Store alone. Go figure! And a listing is worth more than the code: I’ve renamed two apps now, and both kept their ratings.

Templates and forks are fast, and that cuts both ways. One wallpaper template gave me seven apps in a few months. Part 2 is about what else I cranked out that quickly, and I’m not proud of all of it.

This is part 4 of my Windows Phone years. Part 1 is DVLUP, the Nokia and Microsoft events I got into as a student, and the Lumias. Part 2 is the apps I’d rather not have shipped. Part 3 is my Lumia 1520’s warranty saga, which ended with the phone coming back repaired in January.

Did you have a Lumia? Tell me which one in the comments. Keep hooked!