This starts conversations with people by sending the starting text, it doesn’t have the full conversation.
Some people, especially those that grew up with ubiquitous phones in school, see texting frequently as how you show you care about someone. This ensures that if you haven’t sent a text or called in a while, you start something automated to jump start the conversation.
Perhaps it’s not clear enough from the story, but, for my use case, it allows me to provide my significant other with a quick “bid for affection” without breaking my focus; a notification pops up and I simply swipe it away and the automation happens. In other cases where I want more of a connection or dialog, I will configure the app to remind me at more convenient times and ask more open-ended questions.
In a nutshell, yes. Depending on how you configure it, its behavior changes and It also handles other communication methods. The story purposefully focuses on my experience with indie app development and not the details of the app itself. The app is currently in beta, so it’s limited to 47 countries/regions to better support this, but feel free to let me know what country you are in or send me a message.
I’m sorry. I specifically posted Medium’s Friend Link, which should not require a log in, but also because I like Medium’s formatting, simplicity and other things. That said, with a little more effort, I put the story at http://firstappstory.mtc.dev.
Press release? It’s just my story. It covers the complexities of indie app development as a side project, my eureka moments, repeated failures with app store policies and starting from ground zero.
Are you the author? I’m curious why someone would bother with the Play Store for a free app if it’s hard to get accepted. Distributing it via F-Droid is trivial in comparison and if the primary audience is you with other users as an added bonus, it’s a much easier process.
For the root cause of the underlying problem, I’d thoroughly recommend Signal. The desktop app makes it trivial to context switch to sending a message to family and back again in a 30-second break from working.
Yes. The app has in-app purchases and, as I understood it, this is not supported by F-Droid. As for messaging from the desktop, to be honest, for me a 30-second context switch is likely too much. Also, being prompted to send a message is helpful for me and the app also takes advantage of historic messaging and call information when making these prompts.
Google, basically, took a hatchet to apps with SMS or Call Log permissions a couple of years ago, and these were the permissions the app required. Google has, rightly so, deemed these permissions to be sensitive, so access to these permissions are limited. As for how I got this sorted, the truth is the changes I made were many and it really is difficult for me to tell you which few, or dozen, were specifically related to the rejections. Unfortunately, it’s likely a whole bunch of changes helped move the ball forward.
Am I missing something from this story?
I thought the whole point of this is that you’re busy/distracted/mentally engaged/what have you with work, and thus she isnt on your mind?
I’m also still not even sure what it’s supposed to do. What does “automate your text messages” even mean?
Does it just send random non committal messages to people? Or canned responses to messages?
For anything outside of the “I’m driving and will see this when I stop” type auto responses I don’t see how “automation” is actually useful?
This starts conversations with people by sending the starting text, it doesn’t have the full conversation.
Some people, especially those that grew up with ubiquitous phones in school, see texting frequently as how you show you care about someone. This ensures that if you haven’t sent a text or called in a while, you start something automated to jump start the conversation.
Perhaps it’s not clear enough from the story, but, for my use case, it allows me to provide my significant other with a quick “bid for affection” without breaking my focus; a notification pops up and I simply swipe it away and the automation happens. In other cases where I want more of a connection or dialog, I will configure the app to remind me at more convenient times and ask more open-ended questions.
So it is more of a texting reminder with builtin suggestions?
The link to the app does not work for me and the article does not really describe the app itself.
In a nutshell, yes. Depending on how you configure it, its behavior changes and It also handles other communication methods. The story purposefully focuses on my experience with indie app development and not the details of the app itself. The app is currently in beta, so it’s limited to 47 countries/regions to better support this, but feel free to let me know what country you are in or send me a message.
Could you please reupload this somewhere that doesn’t require logging in? Like Substack or, better yet, your own website?
I’m sorry. I specifically posted Medium’s Friend Link, which should not require a log in, but also because I like Medium’s formatting, simplicity and other things. That said, with a little more effort, I put the story at http://firstappstory.mtc.dev.
Thank you so much! You’re amazing! :)
This just reads like a press release for the app, where is the code, or the technical description of how something cool happens?
Press release? It’s just my story. It covers the complexities of indie app development as a side project, my eureka moments, repeated failures with app store policies and starting from ground zero.
Are you the author? I’m curious why someone would bother with the Play Store for a free app if it’s hard to get accepted. Distributing it via F-Droid is trivial in comparison and if the primary audience is you with other users as an added bonus, it’s a much easier process.
For the root cause of the underlying problem, I’d thoroughly recommend Signal. The desktop app makes it trivial to context switch to sending a message to family and back again in a 30-second break from working.
Yes. The app has in-app purchases and, as I understood it, this is not supported by F-Droid. As for messaging from the desktop, to be honest, for me a 30-second context switch is likely too much. Also, being prompted to send a message is helpful for me and the app also takes advantage of historic messaging and call information when making these prompts.
Why it was getting rejected so many times, what were the troublesome permissions?
Google, basically, took a hatchet to apps with SMS or Call Log permissions a couple of years ago, and these were the permissions the app required. Google has, rightly so, deemed these permissions to be sensitive, so access to these permissions are limited. As for how I got this sorted, the truth is the changes I made were many and it really is difficult for me to tell you which few, or dozen, were specifically related to the rejections. Unfortunately, it’s likely a whole bunch of changes helped move the ball forward.
Google doesn’t like it when apps access text messages IIRC