The Lazernaut Journal (2026 W08)

This Week’s Focus

During the last week I’ve been focused on 2 things:

• Rereleasing my 2020 game The Adventures of Eggbert on Google Play.
  Getting the game out on Google Play served as a good case study. Things have changed a lot since I looked into this process last.
  
• Working on Zaldoo – my upcoming app for personal and shared budgeting.
  I’m converting a comprehensive spreadsheet system I made into an app.
  I integrated a system called Clerk with my app, making it possible to create an account and sign in.

Challenges

Eggbert

When you want to release an app on Google Play you need to go through several phases. One is the closed testing phase. For this you need 12 people to opt in.

This is an incredibly frustrating process, mostly because Google has made it extremely hard for people to opt in. At least when you ask family and friends to do it.

At first I did it by mail but people were not seeing being denied access to the opt in page. Then I switched to using a Google Group to make people eligible for signing in. That also presented a bunch of problems because people couldn’t figure out how to join the group. Trying the process myself I could easily see how unintuitive it was. Lots of room for improvement here Google.

Zaldoo

I’m using Clerk to handle the signups for the app. I do that to avoid having to write a huge component like that myself. Implementing it was a bit of a challenge as I had to familiarize myself with it, but everything works now and I’m now working on setting up a database to allow users to input their own data.

What I’m Unsure About

One of the things I’ve been wrestling with is how to reach the people who’d want to use an app like this. So far the reactions from friends and family have been quite positive so that does make it seem like I’m on the right track.

I would love to know how other developers handle this.

Next Week’s Direction

Next week will be all about getting the database interaction working. This is what will actually make the app useful.