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dotnick's comments

dotnick | 10 years ago | on: Ask HN: Any way to find why users uninstall my app?

Good point; I'll have a look at the analytics data and see but I have already been contacted by users in the past asking questions and suggesting features I already have because they got mixed up by the other apps they were testing.

dotnick | 11 years ago | on: Ask HN: How do you handle feature requests from your users?

I've been looking for a good time to ask my users for a review. I used to have one of those annoying popups but decided to move it to a point where the user had a positive interaction with the app.

For a couple of months now I've moved it to the 'Thank you' dialog after an in-app upgrade but although I do see less negative reviews, the number of reviews has gone down dramatically. (To a point where I get 1 or 2 reviews a week) It kinda makes sense because I wouldn't want to exit an app I just upgraded (before checking out the pro features) to review the app.

I will probably try out what circa does and see how that works out. Thanks for the link.

dotnick | 11 years ago | on: Ask HN: How do you handle feature requests from your users?

I added a 'Feedback' navigation menu entry in one of my Android apps that simply launches the the email client and I did see an increase in feedback from users.

If I think that the suggestion fits it with my vision of the app I add it to the backlog on Trello. When it gets implemented depends on how good I feel the feature is.

dotnick | 11 years ago | on: Ask HN: Workarounds for selling apps from unsupported countries?

The easiest thing would probably be to use a relative's or a friend's bank account that is living/studying in a supported country. You would have to create and transfer your apps to a new Google Play developer account with the same country as the bank account.

You could also try to open an offshore bank account in one of the supported countries but most banks have balance limitations (the lowest I found was 5000GBP) and/or monthly fees.

dotnick | 11 years ago | on: Ask HN: How useful are the Cisco CCNA and CCNP networking classes?

You can indeed study the course material by yourself; I did that myself and got the (CCNA) certification. If you intent to go through it for the sake of learning the just get a book, Packet Tracer or any other emulator and have fun.

If you intent to take the exam as well, you have to do it a bit structured and use multiple resources. For example, I started out with Todd Lammle's CCNA book, completed it and aced the practice questions. Luckily I also went on to use other resources, (mainly CBT nuggets) since the actual exam was considerably harder than what Lammle leads to you to believe.

dotnick | 11 years ago | on: Android without the mothership

> ... CyanogenMod is free; it is mostly a build of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) release with a bunch of added goodies. Google's proprietary user-space apps and utilities are available, but they must be downloaded and installed separately.

Interesting. Isn't this against any Google terms?

dotnick | 11 years ago | on: Ask HN: How do you find good developers on oDesk?

I have to ask; why oDesk? (or Elance or freelancer.com?)

I moonlight on Elance but I'm trying to build a solid portfolio to get away, and I think most decent remote workers do the same, mostly because projects posted on these websites are a race to the bottom.

I would say stay away; you're better of posting the position on the 'Who is hiring' thread here on HN, careers.stackoverflow etc.

If you insist on hiring developers from freelancing websites though, my personal opinion is:

1. Have a realistic budget. You get what you pay for. Yes, there are differences between countries, and not everyone needs to charge $100 an hour to make ends meet but when you're hiring a developer for $15 an hour (from anywhere in the world), you're taking a huge risk.

2. Don't bother with job posts, the signal to noise ratio is too low, especially when you specify a decent budget. Just search around for developers with solid portfolios. Don't pay too much attention to reviews, all it takes is one bad client who's not able to communicate to ruin your 5-star record.

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