How does being on the homepage of Google Play feel like?
Incredible happiness mixed with painful anxiety
There are more than 2.5 million apps on Google Play. Being chosen from these 2.5 million apps to be showcased on the homepage is beyond incredible.
Ever since we started making apps for Android, we had always dreamt of being featured on Google Play. Back in 2013–14, only multi-million dollar funded apps made it to that coveted spot on the homepage. We almost believed that it would be impossible to get to that spot.
We worked hard on improving the app’s overall quality & user experience. Extended Cookbook to support 23 most spoken languages in the world and started to deliver seasonal/festive content across the globe. We were early adopters of material design, pioneered ubiquitous computing in cooking, made the first cooking app on Android TV, kept reducing the size of the app, reduced crash rates to just 0.24%, brought OS level features like shortcuts, notification channels etc while they were in beta, brought Firebase’s remote configuration to bring localisation, app invites & dynamic links and tonnes of other things!
Our relentless pursuit of quality, innovation and work on bleeding edge Android technology lead us to being showcased at Google I/O – the grandest stage of all things Android.
The I/O made us believe that doing unparalleled work on Android was the way to reach the coveted spot on the homepage of Google Play.
Just like Google I/O, we went onto reach the homepage several times. Last week, one of our apps, Cookbook was chosen again to be on the coveted spot on Google Play. This is the 4th time that the apps made by Riafy has made it to the homepage on Google Play.
It started with Lune – photo frames for Father’s day, Cookbook Recipes – cook in the language of your choice, May – the fantasy photo editor, and now Cookbook again for festive recipes.
The feeling
Every time we’ve been on the homepage, the feeling has always been the same.
Incredible happiness mixed with painful anxiety.
We all do and create things to become successful. But most of us don’t prepare for success. And when it comes, our products often crumble under the incredible weight of the success we have achieved.
This is what happened when we tasted our first homepage showcase. We just couldn’t stop the servers from crashing amidst the tsunami of incoming users!
Since then, we’ve been on AWS’ scalable Architecture and have never had to worry about user loads.
But still, somewhere that anxiety is still there. We are always hoping and praying that things work perfectly. It’s such a big occasion and we don’t want to end up looking like an app riddled with crashes and bugs. That anxiety still remains to this day.
As for the happiness, it knows no bounds. It’s about believing that our dreams can come true. It gives us courage to dream bigger and aspire for much more.
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