Show IH: How I optimized my camera app for "One-Handed use" (TimerCamera+ v1.1.10)
Hey fellow hackers! 🚀
Really proud to share that TimerCamera+ currently holds a 4.2-star rating on Google Play. It’s a huge motivation for a solo dev like me to keep pushing updates!
Just pushed v1.1.10. This update was a delicate balance between adding requested features and aggressive technical debt cleanup.
The Milestones
- Social Proof: Reaching 4.2 stars as a solo dev has been a game-changer for my confidence and the app's visibility.
- The Challenge: Most camera apps try to be everything for everyone. After analyzing user behavior, I realized my users mostly use the app one-handed while setting up group shots. So, I made the bold choice to drop landscape support entirely and lock the UI to Portrait.
- The Trade-off: Google Play warned me I'd lose support for 5 devices (TVs and Car systems), but I traded that for a 10x better experience on actual smartphones.
What I implemented:
- Burst Logic: Added a 3-shot sequence to solve the "someone blinked" problem during timed group photos.
- Focus Init Chain: Built a custom hardware init gate to ensure focus and white balance settings persist through Android's complex lifecycle changes (especially after app resume).
- No Ads (Temporary): To celebrate this milestone and gather clean, distraction-free feedback, I’ve remotely disabled all ads in this build.
The Journey
I’ve been a full-time solo indie dev for 3 months now. It’s a grind, but seeing the success rate of photos saved go up and hearing from users who gave us those 4.2 stars makes it all worth it.
Check it out here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.muxixisoft.android.timercamera
I'm happy to discuss the CameraX/Camera2 interop logic or the decision-making process if anyone is building photography tools!
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This is a great example of trading theoretical coverage for an explicit user promise.
Dropping landscape + TV/Auto support reads scary on paper, but if the core job is “one-handed group shots that don’t fail,” those platforms were never real users anyway.
I also like how each feature maps to a broken moment (blink, focus reset on resume). That’s a clean pattern more dev tools and consumer apps miss.
Have you considered surfacing the promise directly in the store copy (e.g. “designed for one-handed group photos”) and letting everything else be secondary?
I really like your suggestion about the store copy. I’ll definitely try to make that "one-handed" promise more explicit in the description.
I’m also planning more practical features to help users save time, like adding customizable timestamps in the next update. Thanks again for the encouragement!
That makes sense. Making the one-handed promise explicit should do a lot of the heavy lifting on expectations by itself.
I like the way you’re thinking about time-saving features too as long as they reinforce that core job, they’ll probably compound nicely.
Curious to see how the store copy experiment plays out.
Thanks! I’m glad you caught that. I’m actually quite data-driven, and I’ll definitely share the results here once I’ve gathered enough data to see the real impact.