My Windows Phone application has been in the marketplace for one year now and an update has just been published (v2.5). The new version was necessary as Netflix updated some API URL’s that required code changes, plus I added a new feature allowing users to sort new titles by date, title, or rating. As usual, the submission and approval process was smooth and quick (4 days). I thought it would be good to summarize how things have gone the past year.
The app has been downloaded about 1200 times- it’s free and ad supported via the Microsoft PubCenter, but I won’t be retiring on the proceeds. The grand total earned with ad impressions was under $20! But, it’s been good learning experience and I actually use the app frequently as it solves a problem I personally had.
What’s amazing is this system has run almost untouched and automatically for the past year using a WCF service on my website and Amazon EC service (a micro Windows instance free for 1 year). I shut down my EC instance as the free time was going away, but it was only being used to start the WCF service to process the Netflix RSS feed and this is easily done on my own server. The RSS feed is processed and data made available to users every few hours, and it’s been working without modification for the entire year. Nice!
Since I don’t have a Windows Phone 8 yet I won’t be converting it to the new version anytime soon…I doubt there are any new features to take advantage of and this version should run fine on V8 devices. Writing the application was a good experience and not too difficult, so overall the experience has been very pleasant. If you want to install PickFlicks, here’s the link:
Update 6/15/2014: Netflix has decided to discontinue their public API, making updates to this app impossible. This is unfortunate, I don’t think it’s good to create walled gardens and keep out third party developers. I’ve unpublished the application from the store and hope to try a new mobile project sometime soon.
PickFlicks in the Windows Phone Marketplace
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