Retiring AndroidPub

Many may not know it, but I am the founder of AndroidPub, a Medium publication about Android development. (The site is still running on a subdomain of my first domain, although I registered it’s own domain a long time ago.)

I used to be an Android enthusiast, I celebrated every new release, I used to sit at my laptop at night during my school days and program apps. I have released many apps. I was a fan of Google products. But at some point I realized that it’s not so cool to have all your data misused for advertising purposes. That it is not good to rely on Google with your most private data (like emails and files). And I lost interest in developing Android apps.

Nevertheless I continued to take care of AndroidPub, accepted new authors, reviewed and published articles, etc. But that has decreased more and more and another person has taken care of most of it. I just monitored the email inbox and gave authors permission to submit their article to the Medium publication.

Now I have reached a point where I have decided that it is too much time and effort for a project that I am not interested in at all. I study, I have a girlfriend and besides that I like to blog and program. So instead of reading articles about Android development I can use the time in a much better way. And instead of letting the project get more and more neglected, I prefer to stop the project. I will keep the site as it is, not delete it or anything, but I will not accept new submissions or publish articles by authors.

I also want to give others the opportunity to perhaps build something new outside the Medium (my thoughts on Medium) platform and start a new community. If there is interest in continuing AndroidPub, it might be possible to talk about me handing over control.

I was thinking about using the audience size (52 thousand people follow on Medium, almost 2000 on Twitter) to make a second job out of it. But first of all, it was too complicated for me to do it in Germany in a correct and legal way (I would have had to arrange everything with my apprenticeship training company and have had it approved) and secondly, as I said, I somehow lack interest.

Thanks for everything I learned along the way, I had a lot of fun too! But I think it’s time for me to finish with AndroidPub.

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