Building software for cattle farmers. Part 3. Active users

Introduction

• In this series I take you along, week by week as I release my app and update you on all of the challenges I have faced from the previous week.
• The app I have built is an app that allows cattle farmers to track their calves during calving season

My app on the Google play store

HERE

GitHub code

• HERE

Table of contents

1. Active Users
2. Code refactors
3. What is next?

Active Users

• It is with great pleasure that I am able to announce my application now has 3 active users(and only one is my dad)!!! So what does this mean for the future of my application? First and foremost it is really exciting and motivating to know other farmers are finding value in my app. Now on a more realistic side of things I need to start thinking about a monetization plan, data storage is only free for so long. For monetization I am thinking about a basic SAS subscription model, which sounds easy, but implementing it will probably less so.
• If anyone has any experience with implementing subscriptions on Android, please reach out to me.

Code refactors

• This past week was a big week for code refactoring. Specifically I used the Twitter Jetpack Compose Rules to refactor a large chunk of my compose code base. I even made a little blog post about it, which can be found HERE. I still have quite a lot of code to refactor but I am now able to write more flexible compose functions.

What is next?

• Looking forward into the next week I really have three main thing I need to get done to be able to consider it a successful week:

1. New features: I have one final basic feature to implement. This feature will allow farmers to track what medicine they have given their calves and when they have given it. Once this feature is implemented I will mark version 1 of my application complete

2. Code refactors: I still have a lot of compose code to refactor and all of it needs to be done.

3.Instrumented tests: Once I have the compose code nicely refactored, I should be able to write instrumented tests. I would like to aim for a 80% test coverage on my UI tests. I will definitely be making tutorials on this subject.

Conclusion

• Thank you for taking the time out of your day to read this blog post of mine. If you have any questions or concerns please comment below or reach out to me on Twitter.