ClipSync

I’ve been ignoring this project for a while. Today I decided to take a look at how my abandoned child was doing and I must admit I was a bit amazed that it is still very alive. The average user rating has increased significantly to 4.54/5 with over 250 votes. And just 5 days ago, on march 10th, the app was installed by the 10,000th person. I wish I could look up his name to give him or, less likely, her a price or something.

Because of all the nice things people keep saying and the fact that we have reached this milestone, I have decided to pick up development again very soon. For real this time. Be prepared for the amazeness called ClipSync Pro!

I was so excited when I discovered that my app was reviewed on Lifehacker. That’s pretty mainstream shit already if you ask me. But my excitement quickly faded when I looked into the user reviews for CS on Google Play. 50% of the user reviews I received that day were 1 star reviews. I guess popularity has a flip side. When an app is featured on a big websites I think people automatically expect it to be totally perfect and bug free or something.

I’m not trying to be a whiny bitch, but I really like good reviews. So if you think ClipSync is awesome, please consider to head over to Google Play and give me a five-star review. K, bye.

Oh, before I forget. I just released a small update with some bug fixes. It will also prompt you to vote for the app the first time you start it up after the update.

I have mentioned ClipSync Pro a couple of times on this site. It’s the paid version of ClipSync. So what will be so special about ClipSync Pro, you ask? To be honest, I’m not exactly sure. I have some features in my head, but I’m not really sure about the priority yet.

The first thing I would like to do, before starting development of ClipSync Pro, is to make ClipSync super stable. A couple of things that are going to be possible after the next update are:

• If you leave a WiFi network with your phone, and later you enter another (or the same) WiFi network, your phone will automatically check if it was previously connected to any computer in that network, and if so it will connect to that computer. (Unless if you have stopped ClipSync manually of course.)
• No more unexpected stops. (I know I can’t make that promise but I do promise I will try my best!)
• The start on boot feature will work 😉

Next, I think ClipSync server for Mac and Linux will be mostly bug free and they will be released.

ClipSync was released end of May 2012 and it had about 1200 user downloads by the end of June thanks to some great android blogs like Droid Life, androidpolice and the Chinese site appappapps.com. After that things came to a halt, and searching the web for things like “copy paste between android and pc” didn’t show ClipSync in the first ten Google results anymore.

I had been working on a major update during the month of June, but wasn’t quite satisfied about the way my code looked yet. I was thinking about rewriting the whole thing from scratch. But a friend told me to release it anyway. The next couple of weeks I spent some of my free time on making a new website and a promotional video and then I released the update. I expected the update to trigger some more downloads. But nothing happened. The average remained at about 5 user downloads per day.

I decided to e-mail some android covering websites to let them know about my app. To my surprise ClipSync received a 5 star expert review on androidtapp.com and two days later the app was featured on the portal of xda developers. Soon a lot of other blog sites, including redmond pie, addictivetips and a whole bunch of spanish and arab blogs followed. For 3-4 days ClipSync was a real internet sensation, with a peak of 631 device installs on the 13th of August alone.

At the moment ClipSync has been installed by almost 4,000 unique users. The last five days the number of device installs seems to have stabilized at around 90/day. I’m very happy with that number, because it looks like the 3 days of fame have had a permanent effect on the number of downloads.

I will keep working on ClipSync and post here occasionally about it’s progress. I promise I will only post when I have something important or useful to say, so please feel free to subscribe to the RSS feed.