Application Idea

After the decision floating of the EGP in 2016 and noticing Egyptians asking about currency rates in banks, I started to develop an app to help people to see all bank’s currency rates in one place and named this app Banknote. I released the first version of the Banknote 3 days after the EGP floating decision. Banknote was the first Android application I released in the google play store and was my first experience using what I have learned in Android app development in Udacity.

Android Application

I developed the Banknote application using Java in the first version and used the volley library to fetch data from API also I used the Universal Image loader library to load images into the app. At the first release, the app only loaded currency rates from API and did not cache data on the device. then I started adding features to the app like caching currency rates data locally using the Sqlite database and adding Firebase APIs to improve my application experience. trough 2 years I have updated the application 26 times from bug fixes to adding features last application release was on 4/4/2018 with API level 26 and version name 3.0.0#1.

App Backend

The Banknote application backend was developed using the Codiginter framework. the idea of the backend was to get the HTML code of currency rates pages from official banks’ websites and make some operations to convert the HTML to an array. it was a perfect experience for me that I was playing with DOM objects but I got a headache from it because banks often change page hierarchy 😃. also, some banks like HSBC bank had a private panel to serve currency rates so I couldn’t provide currency rates from banks like HSBC. My decision was I must provide data from official channels but it affected application persistence at the store because I didn’t provide all bank’s rates.

Irony 😂 when I used my backend as a social media specialist challenging one of my friends told me that I should hire a social media specialist to post new currency rates. but with few lines of code and connection with Facebook and Twitter APIs made the backend posted an image with new currency rates every 3 hours in both Facebook and Twitter accounts.

In the last year of the app, I changed the backend framework from CodeIgniter to Laravel to get a new experience with the new PHP framework and I was using the Guzzle library.

Difficulties and Lessons

• Being the only one who develop the app and made all decisions was very bad while there were about 56 apps with the same idea in the play store and there were teams working on these apps. this put me a little behind others like an app named ” بكام في البنك ” even if I was competing with this team at the start with a number of active users.
• I have treated Banknote app like my child so when I got a potential investor I refused to let him in because I can’t sell my son 🤣 and didn’t know about business plans, I was only thinking as a developer and trying to fix app bugs. so next time I will be open to chances like this or make someone else do the business work.
• I thought an idea like the Banknote app will be a booming idea and will make me one of the entrepreneurs like an app named “By2ollak” but the idea and code are not enough it needs marking and a business plan and investing some money in the operations.
• Some other app developers or their friends were giving my app bad reviews so I have learned I should have a marking team to help my app to grow, Although these actions made me feel upset, but made me happy because this made me feel like a strong competitor for teams working on apps and determine to improve my application and quality of service my app serves.

Shutdown decision

After over 4 years of serving application users. there where an official application from the Information General Association doing the same job as the Banknote app. Also, I found that I was spending operating expenses like hosting without any revenue, and app code maintenance will cost efforts more than app gain so I decided to shut down the application in 2020

Conclusion

Overall the Banknote application was an excellent experience for me to see how the market works. I had bad moments like when I get bad reviews but I had also bright moments when I see an increase in active users or when someone gives my app a good rating on the Google play store.