Shush was recently featured on the Android Market. Overall the added exposure was fantastic. It took me almost two years to reach 10,000 installs but just two weeks to hit 150,000:
Shush installs were flat until March 12, 2011
I make my email address available on the Shush! Market page. That yielded about 100 emails in a mix of good, bad and ugly:
Shush also received a lot of Android market reviews. Some favourites:
"Probably the best app ever, should come standard w/ every phone!""Amazing app. Recommend it to everyone."
"This ap is just too awesome to be free! It's perfect, and so simple a cave-man..... well, u get the picture. LOL"I feel obliged to paste some constructive reviews to balance those:
Does yours turn off and on at random? Mine does. :-(Didn't play well with my EVO. Uninstalled.Some people are having genuine problems with Shush. I know there are interaction problems when some apps invisibly mute the ringer. It seems like some camera apps mute the ringer when they intend to mute only the shutter sound; I need to get in touch with the authors of those apps.
The torrent of feedback has motivated me to spend some time on some polish features. When I added status bar notifications, lots of folks complained that it was cluttering up their notification bar. No new feature goes unpunished! I made those optional and added color selection.
As is the case with software, every feature has its costs. With Shush targeting a wide variety of Android devices, this is absolutely the case. I've had many problems where graphics don't look right on some devices. For Eclair and Froyo I used a black status bar icon; this works on stock Android but disappears into the black status bar on HTC Sense. My current fire to fight is the welcome dialog no longer fits on-screen on some devices. Ugh!
I'm used to writing code for other programmers. Writing code for a less technical audience is a different game. I fear that my most celebrated feature will be that you can pick the app's color! A nice feature, but also a silly and unnecessary one.
Despite all of the extra work, having lots of users is great. Download Shush! from the Android Market.