Maths Guide

Aug 2017

Motivation

Back in 2016, I was in my 1st year of College, There was an android app for the solution of maths problems for the book that was taught in the whole province, including my college. The app was very useful for all students, especially those who learn from their own.

But when we moved to the 2nd year in 2017, the app available on the play store for the 2nd year had a lot of problems. The app was not able to work without an internet connection, and the app was not updated for a long time. I try to contact the developers of the app, but they didn’t reply.

With my passion for programming, facing an actual problem, and the motivation to solve it for myself and others, I planned to make an app that could help the students. And I will learn the android development in the process.

Journey

The really enjoyed the journey of making the app, and I learned a lot of things in the process. I will try to explain the journey in the following sections.

Building the App

I started learning android development from a free course on Udemy. I learned the basics of android development and started working on the app with my limited knowledge.

In the first month I was able to make a basic app that could show the units (topics) of the book, and the units were divided into exercises.

I created a really modern UI for the app (from that time obviously) and I was really proud of it. I also added a guillotine menu for the navigation drawer, which was unique.

Gathering Data

There were a lot of websites that had the solutions of the book, but most of them were handwritten notes and were not suitable for the app. I found a website MathCity that had a lot of solutions of the book in the form of computer typed notes.

I contacted the owner of the website and asked him if I could use the solutions in my app. He agreed that I could use the solution as long as I am not using them for commercial purposes or selling them (which I was not planning to do). My purpose was to provide easy access to the solutions for the students.

Finalizing the App

After gathering all the data in the form of PDFs, I figured out the way to display the PDFs in the app, and the app was ready to help the students. I had to preprocess the PDFs to make them suitable for the app. And I was satisfied with the end result.

I shared the apk files with my friends, and they were really happy with the app. One of my friends suggested that I should publish the app on the play store so that other students could also benefit from it. Which was a great idea.

After learning about the publishing process, I took help from my friend to create the developer account on the play store, because I didn’t have a credit card at that time. And I published the app on the play store from his account somewhere in August 2017. And in a very short time, the app was downloaded by 50k+ students and the app was rated 4.5+ stars. I was really happy with the response.

A Mistake

The app was working fine for a long time, I was in my 3rd year of university when one of my teachers asked me for the Developer account, so that he could publish the app on the play store which was created by some of his students. I added him as a developer in the account, trusting him that he will not do anything wrong.

But the app that was published by him contained illegally copied content. Instead of suspending the app, the developer account was suspended by Google for violating the policies. I tried contacting Google, but they couldn’t help me. I lost the app forever.

The remains of the app are still available on the internet, but I am not sure if they are safe to use. for example, on Game Loop and steprimo are some of the websites that have the app.

Conclusion

This was my first android app, and I learned a lot of things in the process.

• I learned the basics of android development.
• I learned how frameworks work.
• I learned how to publish an app on the play store.
• I learned how to work with libraries and dependencies.
• And most importantly, I learned not to trust anyone with my developer account 😅.