Album Download 1.0
After 9 months of development, Album Download 1.0 is now available in the Chrome Web Store. Last August, I was trying to figure out how to download my photos and videos from Google Photos, so I could post them easily to Facebook. I wanted the order of the photos to be preserved. One reason is Facebook will highlight the first few photos. I also did not want to deal with converting my iPhone photos or videos in Google Photos to formats that Facebook would accept. By December, I had a version working locally, and on January 6th, version 0.1 was published. 4 months and 8 releases later, 1.0 has now been published.
Album Download is built with WebAssembly and programmed using Rust. Instead of a web framework like React, which targets JavaScript, it uses Yew, which targets WebAssembly. Being able to try out this new technology was another motivation for me to build the app. The learning curve contributed to a longer development period, but I am happy about the new knowledge gained. I think it shorted the stabilization period. The errors reported by users have been easy to locate, reproduce with unit tests, and fix. Rust for WebAssembly has a bright future and the ecosystem continues to improve and stabilize. Async-await only landed on stable last November.
My girlfriend was surprised and seemed disappointed to hear that I priced the app at $2.99 per year instead of per month. This app will never be a major commercial success. 100 subscribers, less Google’s 5%, is $284 per year. If I do software consulting, I charge between $100 and $200 per hour. I have poured a lot of hours into this app and calculating my hourly rate based on app revenue is very sad. Still, I was very happy to have my first sale on January 17th. I now have had 13 total subscribers for a grand total of $36.92 per year. With the release of version 1.0, hopefully the number will increase. A 30 day trial will now be enforced. The licensing has not been enforced since the initial release in January, and I currently have about 150 weekly users. The fine print makes the number look more like current installs, rather than active users each week.
About half of the users are from the US. The app is also available in Spanish, but I have not noticed an impact. Please let me know if you wish to translate it into another language.
I would love to see the number of subscribers climb to 100 or 1000. I’m good at programming, but that is only one part of building a product. My UX and marketing skills need some improvement. I’m starting this blog and I’ve opened up several social media accounts. If you like the product and do not think I charged enough, please help me get some more subscribers through any of the following:
- share this Medium blog https://medium.com/@taggartsoftware
- review on Google Play https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/album-download/mnaphpmipihkgnfkkhdadabcfeijmhpb
- subscribe on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCveUQKPrsokazUXeZBNkSiA
(I need 100 subscribers to get a custom channel name.) - like on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/taggartsoftware
- follow on Twitter https://twitter.com/taggartsoftware
- follow on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/taggartsoftware
- mention on GitHub https://github.com/taggartsoftware
If you wish to report bugs, request new features, or new apps, please see the support page or email support@ctaggart.com. I hope you like Album Download 1.0. It has been quite the journey over the last 9 months.
