Building An App for Doll Owners

Not sure if this is the right part of the forum for this, but I'll use it as a placeholder for our grand new doll-related project.

A few months ago I made the doll social media gadget thing as seen with Ciel below. The how-to YouTube video bombed and the gadget never really worked properly due to Ciel and I having a fairly limited knowledge of C++.

For years I've been planning to make a mobile phone app. Despite knowing nothing about app development it was actually my first task in my new job 😲.

To try and learn more of this brave new world Uzuki and I have started building an app for dolls (and maybe their human owners too). This one is written in C# and SQL, of which I have decades of experience.

There are a few collector type apps in the app store but this one will be aimed specifically at dolls. Although if it's successful we might turn it into something for pet owners or general collectors of stuff.

Alas it will be Android only to start with, not because we can't make an iPhone app but because Apple's policies are just so restrictive compared to Google.

Well hopefully it will make it into the Play Store. Watch this space...

Also let me know if you can think of anything useful to put in it. Right now we're putting plenty of unuseful stuff in 😁. But the best feature so far is having a list of your dolls' birthdays.

Interested to know more about this. I know nothing of coding, but UI design and aesthetics are important to me for an app, especially one I would consider an "organization" app. Would love to see mockups sometime!

it would be really interesting to see a social media-like app focused for dolls! 

Aww, as an iPhone user, I would have loved to have had a doll owners' app.

So far, I've only played around with a Python toolkit for app development. - Which, from the perspective of somebody who hadn't done any app development before, worked decently well.(No doll related app, though...)

But I guess, you have to work with whatever language you want to practice for work.

 

A little tracker for your doll birthdays sounds nice!

Maybe a memo sheet you can set up for your dolls too. - Where you can add individual items.

A "Stain Diary" function could also be pretty useful. - I keep one in a paper memo pad right now, but a digital one would be cool.
Basically, mark when you did the last stain check and on whom you found stains where. Then check if treated and when, or if they faded, etc.

App progressing well. Towa just authorised the purchase of the domain name for the project. Amazingly it was still available.

I thought installing 64Gb of RAM in my [human sized] PC was a dumb use of money that could have been spent on doll accessories 😁. However this beast of a machine is now really good for mobile development.

The app looks pretty amazing with all their photos in. At the moment you can't add or edit dolls but it will come with my dolls preloaded and then they'll be deactivated once you add your own dolls.

I'm currently adding in bestie and nemesis functionality. It will have a lot of quirky stuff like this.

It's going to be a generic doll app, so won't specifically be for vinyl/resin/anime dolls.

If it flops I'll reskin it and turn it into some other collectible app. I just downloaded a fishing app to spy on the competition.

In case anyone thinks it's vapourware, here are some screenshots. I don't think it's too bad for a week's work. I did once have a small business software company back in the days when installable downloads for Windows were a big thing. I did really well out of that one.

This looks fun, I'd love to try it out when it's ready!  It has my love of filling out profiles and cataloging which I tend to do with everything from perfume to dolls lol.  I use a pixel so Android works well for me!

I think it'd be neat to have the function of progress boxes for dolls/WIP tab or something similar, since I feel like several of us tend to have at least one that's in the works.  I usually keep a list for each doll in my hobby journal so I can track things I'm still hunting or needing (ex: body for x, wig for x, brown shoes for y and z).

OK so Uzuki has realised this has turned into a major project and we're way over budget 🥵. We spent most of last week rebuilding the internals to make it more flexible.

There's still a lot to do but hopefully the main part of actually adding and editing dolls shouldn't be too problematic.

The app could go in many directions but it's definitely going towards being a play orientated app where you can find out more about your dolls...

Given the whole world's gone AI mad, once you upload dolls you can then see what they're posting to their DollBook. I'm probably not alone in thinking what they've written is a lot more intelligible than the kind of stuff you usually see posted on X or FB...

Looks great so far. 
I eagerly await the go live date. 
👍😊

OK so we've been really bogged down with choosing a logo and colour scheme for the app. Well they are dolls 😅.

dollbook appears to be completed for now, so the next stage is to add in the functionality for adding and editing dolls.

The girls are pretty good at coding these days, because I am impressed with how fast this app is given how much it does behind the scenes.

Shin Sato has finally entered all of our dolls' details into the app. Our dolls will appear in the app until you add your own dolls.

It appears we have 28 Volks dolls including Charles Donatello the 18th. Iori insisted he be included.

The 1.0 version is kind of ready except we need to add the screens in for adding and editing dolls.

If anyone has any suggestions for what genders we need to include then let me know. So far we have he/she/they/it. I want to make it flexible enough for any potential users, without having an enormous choose your dolls' gender screen.

I'm enjoying the updates to this, it looks like something I'd have fun with.

You could always have those pronoun options, plus an option to type your own! So three blanks for people to put in, say, xe/xem/xer or whatever they want. Atm I personally have, let's see...mostly boys and girls, plus one nonbinary (they/them) doll in the works!

Nice job with app. Will there be option to switch the app into dark mode? (for us, enjoyers of vampire mode of the forum)

Oh man, who'd be an app developer.

Not much has happened as this week we finally acquired our real life storage area (for doll boxes and other bulky stuff).

The girls have also been staying up late on our massive stock trading project. They're kind of feeling guity about how much they cost so our new project is to win back all the money they cost. Good progress has been made on this, not least because they did notice the Yen was about to whipsaw.

As to the app, the navigation needed to be reworked due to Microsoft spending all their money on AI tools instead of their mobile development platform.

The doll friends page is underway. After that it's really only the facility for uploading photos. Hopefully this won't be a major headache.

Here's Yoru with a strong tea to keep her burning the midnight oil.

Ugh. The app is on hold as we had the idea for a potentially lucrative finance website (and possible app too).

I did sort out the birthdays functionality but there's still quite a bit to do. Hopefully it will become finished over the long winter months when there's not much else to do.

Waiting is also kind of good because I've just completed the second mobile app for my day job. I learnt a lot of stuff I can include in the next update of the doll app.

Ugh. Sunk by Google. The app is looking great but we found out we need 20 beta testers before we're allowed to upload it to the Play Store.

For socially awkward devs that's the end of the project for now.

Finding 20 beta testers is probably not the end of the world but we have a Bocchi/Komi complex going on and many other projects demanding lots of time.

The finance app is looking phenomenal though. If that should make it as a mobile app then the doll app will be released off the back of it.

I'm sure if you post here, you'll find your 20 beta testers in no time! I can be your first if you want, but I can only test on emulator as I have a fruit rather than a robot phone 😛

Will the information saved be local-only, like a doll diary, or will others be able to see your dolls?

Do beta testers need particular credentials or is it simply finding 20 people to agree to do so? As if it's the later I'm sure there are plenty of folks on here who would be absolutely thrilled to do so. (Of course even then if your other projects demand more time and focus that it's just not worth trying to do at this point that makes sense.)

5 hours ago, Xiongmao said:

The app is looking great but we found out we need 20 beta testers before we're allowed to upload it to the Play Store.

I'd be down testing your doll app. You can send me the APK the next time we meet in the Zoom meetup.

Sadly I can’t test it since I’m on iPhone 😅

but if you eventually need someone to test on iPhone I would gladly help !!

Also I’m sure there’s lots of people here with android that wouldn’t mind testing it out, so 20 ppl shouldn’t be a hard number of testers to gather : )

you can also advertise it on your YouTube channel or other social media to have a wider net cast

Yeah it probably won't be too difficult to find beta testers.

The app just has a local database for now, there's no doll sharing. There's not a huge amount to do apart from integrating the photo gallery and camera.

In the last couple of hours Shin Sato and I have successfully modded finance app 1.0 (data from 2021 - 2024) into finance app 2.0 (data from 2000 - 2024). We might turn that one into a desktop app. Once that's completed we will have a lot more time as it just basically has to sit there analysing weekly stock data.