My Foray into Android App Publishing

After a successful internship which converted into a permanent position in the same company. I quickly become the lead to help them develop a new product that is based on Android. My college doesn’t cover any Android topics. Fortunately, what it did was given me a solid foundation to build upon.

I was pretty new to Android back in my internship days my then only best friend is Google and a long list of Stack overflow posts that helped me out.

During those days I didn’t feel the urge to publish any apps on the PlayStore but my friends did. They got caught by the app building craze in Malaysia. He did it to see whether it is possible to generate passive income. Good news is that he achieved what he have set out to achieve.

I regretted about that decision of not joining in too. There is no better time to start than now as I have a better understanding of Android currently. In retrospect, if I did get in with building any apps early on I would have a substantial app on the Play Store which can be leverage as a portfolio and help build a steady stream of ad revenues.

Tamago Labs

Being listed on Play Store needed a developer name to associate the apps with. This would be usually a company name, group name or some funny name the developer wanted. I can’t figure out what kind of name should I give. It takes a good a few days to settle. At the end, the name ‘Tamago Labs’ was picked.

Why the name? I like eating eggs, love the Gudetama character and especially love tamagoyaki. I like to experiment so I called it a lab too.

As for branding, this would be good enough. A lots of app have weird names until it become common. Take Google for example. It was kind of weird name but it have become a verb and have an entry in the English dictionary.

I’m not comparing myself to Google but this is a clear case of how weird sounding names might become common.

Daily Stoic


I, myself, is an Agnostic. I don’t know whether there are any higher level being like what was painted from the bible. I became an Agnostic in my younger teenage year as I was on a search learn all the established religions in the world today.

I did picked up any of them. However, I did find Buddhism and Shintoism interesting.

There was no life philosophy that piqued my interest then until I stumbled upon an ancient way of life that great man like Marcus Aurelius stood by. That, my friend is Stoicism. I can relate to a lots of its writings and its teachings. It is essentially a philosophy to living a good life.

I wanted to have a simple quote app that would give me a daily dose of stoic wisdom from famous stoics across the histories. Philosopher like Zeno of Citium, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca and Epictetus.

Now, I noticed there are already 2 apps that does the same thing but what the heck. I believe I can do better one and so Daily Stoic was born.


Malaysia Calendar


Malaysia is a country blessed with multiple public holidays. Depending which state you are staying, you will even have an extra few days.

I noticed this market have plenty of competitor already in it and they were in the game way longer than me. However, I noticed that most are just simple app with image for the month. As a Malaysian, we have an affinity to the Racing Horse Calendar produced by Malayan Racing Association. It is easy to obtain and most of the time food stalls, vendors, restaurants and so forth will give them away for free.

I wanted a digital calendar with dates highlighted based on which state I’ve selected all in a single screen. So, tapping on a date will bring up the dates, the holidays, the regions that observe it, and even the converted date in Chinese Lunar and Hijri.


Food Nearby


There seems to be a common theme among colleagues or simply your significant others, discussing about what to eat during lunch or during a lazy evening. Originally, I wanted to create a list where users are able to insert their favorite place and get an answer via random selection.

I thought to myself, which would be too much of a hassle to deal with for inserting your favorite places for a meal. Just plug in Google Places API to get a selection of cafes and restaurant based on the user location within a defined radius.

This is great but I would surely want to get more vegetarian options from Google if available. I do have a vegetarian option in the app. However, in some location the radius will need to be expanded quite a bit as vegetarian or even vegan restaurant can be limited in certain area.

You would have plenty of selections if you are in a city.


Moving Forward

I will see what interesting app that might interest me or any market segment that is not served correctly. That is when I will jump in. Also, RxJava coupled with RxAndroid is really something else. I have been learning the theory behind it and am trying out on creating dummy apps to learn more. It’s a very powerful library to handle concurrency and it have a variety of operator to use.

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