App done (for now)

I've ported the Piperka client app to Android and it's been available on Google Play as of May 20th. I put the badge on the site template for a while but I'm moving that to just the new user landing page and the about page a while ago. I think you know that it exists by now. I marked the app as having ads but I didn't yet actually implement those. They'll be added in a later update, perhaps.

As of now, the uptake has been quite low. I'm seeing much more activity from the Sailfish version. There's still more I could do with the app, like using notifications to alert about updates, but I'm moving on to other things for now. If and when the app would gain some degree of popularity I would return my attention to it. I suspect that I'm just old school in that I don't have much of an intuition about what makes mobile devices' users tick. I don't use them much myself and as Piperka's design is mostly guided by what I'd like to use myself so I wasn't on a familiar territory when making the app. I hope it'll find some users at least, this kind of was what took most of my development time this spring.

I'm retiring the unofficial Piperka app that's been around for a few years now. Other people are welcome to write third party apps for Piperka (or to send pull requests to mine) but I had to poke a few holes to Piperka's authentication system that I never liked to make that particular app work and now that I have mine published I'm going to require other implementations to have that same base level. If there's something that it did that you'd like the new app to do then please let me know.

I'm going to focus on crawler improvements next. Much of that will be invisible and aimed at catching or even automatically fixing issues before anyone even submits a ticket but one feature that I plan to get out of this is to show comics' update schedules. I have enough data to tell if a comic updates on, say, Sundays or on Mondays and Fridays. I'll just have to look it up and display it.