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Thomas Desmond
Sitecore Developer Advocate

My First Mobile App: Motorcycle Riding Weather

Artistic photo of a motorcycle

Motorcycle Riding Weather

Just recently I put my first app into the Android Play Store,Ā Motorcycle Riding Weather. A 2018 goal of mine was to release a mobile app, and I have achievedĀ that! It is a simple app where users manipulate settings to determine if the upcoming days will be good for riding their motorcycle.

I released the app as an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). It is barebones for right now. I plan is to continuously improve the app with more features and more riding settings to configure.

It was a fun experience putting together the MVP. I have taken some shortcuts in the code in places, and have a little bit of messy hard to extend the code. This gives me plenty of work to do in the coming months. But I released, I have something that provides value to users even in its most basic state.

Technology used

The app is 100% developed using Xamarin.Forms. I have only released the app on the Android Play Store for right now because that is the only app market I have paid to be on. Android's $25 lifetime developer access is much more affordable to me compared to iOS's $100 a year. Technically, my app works on iOS but I cannot see myself paying $100 a year right now.

Along with Xamarin.Forms I am using Prism 7 framework and .Net Standard 2.0. I had not had much experience with these latest versions. The features they provide make development more streamlined.

The Dark Sky API is what I use to all weather data. It has a free tier with plenty of API calls for my current needs. I found it to provide the right balance between up to date information and free APIĀ calls available.

Plans for improvement

Plenty of things need improving but a list that will change over time is below:

  • Add more configurable settings: Wind, Rain type, Snowfall, etc..
  • Ability to not consider certain timeframes in the riding conditions such as nighttime
  • Allow for more than just zip code to determine the location
  • Write Unit Test and UI Tests
  • Abstract out services instead of doing lots of work in view models.
  • IncorporateĀ more analytics events

Ā 

Check out Motorcycle Riding Weather in the Play Store now! I look forward to posting my progress on the app as I release updates.