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How I Built Apps With Over 2 Million Downloads — Part 1 (Choosing An Idea)

Alex Chiou
12 min readDec 5, 2019

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Hi everyone, my name’s Alex, and I have been writing Android apps and publishing them under my very aptly named RandomAppsInc Google Play handle since 2013. I have been working full-time as a software engineer since I graduated from college, so all of my apps were hacked together in my spare time as side projects. Despite that, they have accumulated over 2 million downloads and 20 thousand ratings, the vast majority of which are 5 stars.

Some of my published Android apps from my Google Play Developer Console
Some of my published Android apps from the Google Play Developer Console

Over these past 6 years and 25+ published apps, I have learned quite a lot about what it takes to build successful products. In this 4-part article series, I will break down what I’ve learned, split up by sub-topics within each part. Even though all of my apps were side projects and were Android apps specifically, I feel like a lot of what’s in these articles can be applied to product development in general. So even if you aren’t an Android developer, I recommend sticking around if you just like building stuff. To keep this information as accessible as possible, I will always start off with the more general, high-level advice and end with the Android-specific information. Anyways, the content will be split up as follows:

  1. Choosing Ideas: This covers how you answer the question, “What product should I build?”.
  2. Building The Product: Now that you have an idea, it’s time to execute on it. This part will explain how you can go from your idea to a released product that’s actually good.
  3. Growing The Product: Releasing is hard, but that’s only 1% of the journey. Now that you have a released product, you will need to foster it so it picks up and retains a happy user base. This part has advice on how to do exactly that.
  4. Android Tips and Tricks: This is where all the Android-specific advice will go. I wanted to make sure that all of this was concentrated into 1 place so all of you folks who aren’t into Android can just read the first 3 parts and stop here.

So without further ado, let’s delve into Part 1, “Choosing Ideas”.

Solve An Actual Problem

This sounds like an obvious thing to do, but I see people and entire companies get this wrong all the time. So what is a problem? A problem is

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Alex Chiou
Alex Chiou

Written by Alex Chiou

Empowering thousands of engineers @ Tech Career Growth. Ex-Robinhood, Facebook, Course Hero, PayPal. Built apps with 2.5 million+ installs for fun.

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