MPAndroidChart

MPAndroidChart reached a huge milestone of 20.000 stargazers on GitHub. Honestly, this is simply amazing and something I never anticipated starting out. After the release of the first MVP it took me about 6 months to get 100 developers to "star" the project. Now seeing this level of support is simply mind blowing.

After being unsatisfied with the options Markdown provided for creating a documentation wiki on GitHub, I decided to create my own website hosting the documentation of MPAndroidChart. In addition to the official documentation now being in full control of the page, I also added (commercial) tutorial videos to the site explaining various features of the library in detail.

MPAndroidChart reached a huge milestone of 20.000 stargazers on GitHub. The release of version 3.0.0 had huge impact on the usage of the library. In addition to that, constantly trending in the most popular libraries section on GitHub also drew a lot of attention to the library.

I successfully managed to sign the first "partner" of MPAndroidChart in an advertising partnership. The goal was to keep MPAndroidChart completely unchanged and free to use for all developers while advertising other commercial products (APIs, libraries, ...) related to drawing charts.

Another huge milestone was reached. As of March 2017, MPAndroidChart had accumulated roughly 5.000.000 page views on GitHub by 500.000 unique developers / visitors. At this time I realised that MPAndroidChart could be more than "just" an open-source library and started actively looking for partners.

After a couple of months listening to developer feedback and collecting ideas and a roughly 20 week development period coding mostly weekends and nights, v3.0.0 of MPAndroidChart was released. The release contained major improvements and bugfixes plus a large set of new features widely anticipated by current users.

MPAndroidChart reached a huge milestone of 10.000 stargazers on GitHub. This was accomplished mostly by the large feature set of the library and the fact that it was working well. Additionally, I did a lot of work in the StackOverflow community helping out developers on how to use the library.

After some time considering all available options, I decided to add a simple PayPal donations button to the Readme.md file of the MPAndroidChart GitHub page. The button should give developers an option to show appreciation for creating the library or to offer support for it's future development.

The popularity MPAndroidChart was starting to gain amongst Android developers, also drew attention towards me as the creator of the library. This lead to me being hired as a freelance developer for a San Francisco based company to integrate MPAndroidChart into one of their existing products and extend the MPAndroidChart support to include some products of their portfolio. As it was quite a large contract for me as a young developer this was honestly something I got quite nervous about.

Started off by a fellow developer colleague from Israel the iOS version of MPAndroidChart, called Charts was launched. At first sceptical about bringing MPAndroidChart to iOS I agreed and the first iOS version only took about 12 weeks to code, with minor input from my side.