Music Meal

Doubling the amount of songs listened to per day through the platform in half a month makes happy and proud. On the other hand those listens are done in less than 100 users, while the chrome webstore states that there are over 4K active users.
Good thing that one of the next set up milestones is to implement better statistics handling and a simplistic back office to see how long the users are being active and using the platform.

Added a simple WordPress instance in order to publish support articles on how things are done and eventually start adding blog posts. I haven't used WP in a few years and am super glad it has become easy to use and customize. You can checkout the start of the blog/support here http://blog.musicmeal.io

Last night I finished and added a sync service to Music Meal. It is the first thing on the platform that actually requires you to register and sign in. It is still the initial version and it only takes care of syncing playlists and songs as a content. However it will soon sync your last selected playlist and song, and settings, and depending on how many users are using different devices, I'd like to add the ability to control other sign in devices in the same way Spotify does.
The major part is that I didn't post anywhere that there is a sync service now, and people already started using it. Over 10 people registered in the span of 20(ish) hours without any nudging them to do so.
You can see it in action here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dS6uBCpJMHQ

I have been spending more and more time and focus on Music Meal in the last month and it started showing consistent results. Everything was refactored and cleaned up, so I could do a small release with new functionalities or quality of life improvements every couple of days and tweet about it. After a week or so, I started getting some retweets and some ex-coworkers started having interest in it as well, which brought a bit more users.

Both the google playstore and the chrome webstore show usage statistics on how many active users you currently have, but this considers only the people that have the app/extension installed and doesn't care if they actually use it. Because of this I've added an anonymous submission everytime somebody plays something - the url of the song, the name and the platform that was played from. This allows me to not only keep track of how used Music Meal actually is on a day to day basis, but also - where do people play music from (YouTube vs Spotify vs SoundCloud for now) and what device they are mainly using (mobile vs chrome extension vs web player). The former shows me if I am doing things properly as a whole and given the there are more and more daily listens and now they are consistently above 500 a day and some times over 1K I think its going well. The latter shows me where to focus my main efforts. For instance until recently Music Meal also supported listening to direct audio urls. People could use any link to any .mp3, wav, ogg, etc. file and add it to a playlist. However this brought problems with the chrome webstore because I had to request broad host permissions for this to work. After analyzing the statistics it turned out that this was used less than hundred times in total, so I dropped this functionality, which in turn reduced the time between releasing the chrome extension and it going live from over a week to 20-30 minutes. This in turn allowed me to keep a more frequent release schedule to benefit all users

Music Meal now can be used directly in your browser without having to install anything! All of the functionalities are supported in the web player (except for sharing into in on mobile, since it isn't an application and controlling it more easily on desktop, compared to the chrome extension).
The web version came along because a few of my ex coworkers wanted to give it a spin on mobile devices, but they were all on iOS for which I don't have an official version yet. So I decided to make a web player version of it so both they and new users can try it out without having to install anything. You can test it out here -> https://musicmeal.io/player
The UI for desktop is ugly(ish) since it is primarily targeting mobile. It will be improved soon ;)

Converting the chrome extension to an Android version was surprisingly easy and took less than a day, thanks to JS. Later in that month the whole codebase was completely refactored to make it more maintainable and easier to add new functionalities.
The differences between platforms are slight, but the most important thing is, you can now use Music Meal to listen to YouTube with your mobile screen locked!