Never the most fun day when apps need to be unpublished, but such is the price of progress.
FridgeFriend is unpublished from the Google Play Store from this point onwards. The GitHub repository will be archived for historical purposes, but will not receive any bugfixes or new features.
FridgeFriend was my first application that really captured modern Android development. It was the first time I used Room, the first time using Kotlin, Coroutines, Flow, a complex Dagger setup, the whole kitchen sink. As a result of this, the app is always the largest one I work on and the one that takes the most time.
It is also, painfully, the one that is least useful to me in my day to day. Managing the contents of a physical fridge is a difficult problem to solve with technology. The solution must be smart, update in real-time, and not be more of a hassle than simply remembering or checking the fridge periodically. While a program may seem like a decent solution on the surface, issues arise in practice.
Because the app was not integrated with the fridge itself, whenever items in the fridge were eaten or moved or frozen or spoiled, I needed to remember to open the app and check off boxes and swipe away cards. This task (which was inconvenient at best) quickly became a chore.
Because there was no good way to really determine the expiration date of opened packages or produce, I would constantly ignore the notifications from the app and check the fridge myself.
Since there was no way for the app to know when I was in a grocery store (thanks Android Location policy restrictions), I would frequently forget to make a shopping list, or forget to consult the list I made once I was in the store. This led to me coming home with more things than I needed, which defeated the point of the app.
Essentially, when so much of the rest of my life is smart and kept in sync, having one app that adopted a piece of my day-to-day work that was not integrated properly became a huge burden. Since the app is no longer useful to me and I have no interest to maintain things I do not use, I will have to retire FridgeFriend. Moving forward, the only supported pyamsoft Android applications are:
Home Button, TetherFi, Trickle, and (the newly updated) SplatTrak. I hope to add TickerTape, a new stock portfolio application to this list soon.
So long and thanks for all the fish, FridgeFriend.
Stay tuned!
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