Small step for humanity but big step for one man as saying goes. This week I published my first Android app to Google Play Store. It's not rocket science, since I made application which opens website and then you can normally navigate as in you were on website in app. But I think it's still cool, that I don't have to go to browser on my mobile, type url and then do something but I can click on app icon and I'm there. Few things I learned/notice during this process. The website I am talking about is https://www.whatmademehappytoday.net

1. When website has responsive (and overall good) design it can be used straight in the app. I really wanted to dig more into Android and make native application which will access backend to load / save data but I don't have time for that since I have different focus. Feedback I got from few people is that it looks good. It's simple and straighforward. I like it also. And on mobile it looks good. I admit UX can be more optimized towards mobiles, so hopefuly I will have time to make some things less complicated.

2. To use website in mobile app (or generally mobiles) website needs to be optimized. To be sure what is good / bad I used PageSpeed from Google. Alternatives is https://gtmetrix.com and few other websites. These tools are analyzing website from different perspectives and showing things which (and how) it should be improved. Things I didn't care much but had to fix were: compression & caching of all static files, use of Etags, minification of javascript and css. Website is now faster but I feel that there is space for improvement. I was little dissapointed with my hosting company (Webfaction) that they have no configuration for nginx servers which are serving static files, so I need to do some hacks and spent significant time solving these problems. 

3. Publication to Google Play was straightforward, what bumped me little was that I need to create feature image, with which I didn't count. Otherwise I just wrote text and add screenshots. I'm glad that I had professional designer who created logo for app / website so I had one worry less.

I don't have some hight expectation regarding download and use, if I will have free time I could improve little bit marketing. 

I have on my list several more mobile apps, so I wonder which one is gonna be next.