Mash App

Together with Jung and Sony Ericsson we've created a webapp for sharing collections of Android-apps. It’s called Mash-App.

It has been a quite different project, more like when we develop apps for ourselves than a typical client project. We started by refining the idea Jung had together with them and removed all the functionality that didn’t fit the initial scope. From there the next step was to develop a clickable prototype – something to talk about where we could try out interactions. We then designed the interface, finished up the development, made some adjustments and finalized the product. It has been a lot of fun and the people at Jung and Sony Ericsson have been great to work with. More of those projects, please!

This is our first project in Ruby on Rails 3 and frankly it’s been a smooth ride. We haven’t stumbled upon any major problems a part from having to patch a few third party gems. We’re hosting it on Heroku’s bamboo stack and we are really starting to love the git workflow.

One of the technical challenges was that Android Market has no official API. Einar, who works at Jung, wrote a small java application that uses the unofficial api. It serves as a proxy between Mash-App.com and Android Market. The API app is hosted on Google App Engine and uses geokit to make sure we’re searching the correct market.

We also had the opportunity to design a mobile version of the webapp.  it’s great how easy it has become for modern devices, check it out with your Xperia X10 (or iPhone for that matter).