Weekly Review 2

This week’s highlight was definitely my Apps Gone Free sale for Bookie. The campaign ran from November 20 to November 23, and the amount of downloads and ratings I gained was astonishing! Imagine this: just three days ago, my average rating was 3.7, and now it’s over 4.2 🤩. Besides, it was a coding-free week, giving me plenty of time for personal matters and studying.

During just two days—Monday and Tuesday—I uploaded three new updates for Bookie. I was tweaking and optimizing everything I could find to ensure nothing would go wrong during the Apps Gone Free campaign. Unfortunately, due to a single small mistake I didn’t realize existed, everything backfired hard. Since October, Bookie has been powered by the Google Books API to handle requests for fetching book data. Sometimes, the feature wouldn't work, especially after high usage, but it would eventually fix itself. I thought, Well, at least it’s better than the Open Library API. Turns out, I was wrong. I hadn’t noticed the 1,000-request daily limit, which not only shuts off the API for the rest of the day but also only allows exceeding that limit once a week.

Here’s what happened: thousands of users tried to use the same feature at once, leading to total chaos. The API went down after just a few hours, stayed down for the rest of the campaign, and, in fact, is still not working as of Sunday at 7 PM.

From this single mistake, I received many emails and one-star reviews with complaints. Damn it! Looking back, I realize this was something I should have anticipated. In hindsight, I could have at least read about the limitations of any API I plan to use.

On a brighter note, the overall results were incredible! The percentage increases were insane—over 999% monthly growth. I must add, this was my second Apps Gone Free campaign. The first one was back in June, where I also saw over 9,000 downloads and nearly 9,000 lifetime purchases. However, this time, the reviews went much better, and I’m pretty satisfied with how it turned out.

Most importantly, I reached out to all dissatisfied users, explained what went wrong, and assured them that the issue should stabilize next week. I’m also hoping the Google team will soon increase my usage limit.

Plans for the next week will include focusing on Look Back and reading challenges. As the end of year looms it’s time to go back to those features and enhance them even more—as I usually do in this time of year. There’s plenty of cool stuff I’d love to bring to Bookie so stay tuned for the next week’s review.

Peace, Kuba