PokerPall
Poker utility Tools
PokerPall went live on Google Play a few weeks ago. I want to write down what that actually felt like before I forget it, because nobody warned me about either half of it.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pokerpall.app
The high first. Pressing publish and seeing the listing appear was better than I expected. I kept refreshing the Play Console like it owed me money. 6 installs the first day, mostly friends, and honestly? Didn't matter. Something I built was sitting in a real app store next to real apps.
Then I hosted a poker night and made everyone use it. This is the part I'd recommend to anyone building a physical-world app: nothing — not the emulator, not test devices, not my own solo test runs — prepared the app for one evening with real players at a real table.
What broke, in order of appearance:
One player never actually made it into our game lobby and ended up in what was basically a private table of one.
Mid-game, one player got disconnected because an incoming text message knocked them out.
And right at the end, when the summary card was supposed to show the final stats, every remaining player got kicked out of the lobby before they could see them.
The interesting thing is why these survived my testing. When I test, I know exactly where to press which buttons. Real players don't. Someone requests a rebuys while the blinds are changing. Someone's phone dies mid-game. Someone closes all of their running apps mid game. The app now handles all of it, and the fixes shipped over the following week.
The unexpected upside: watching friends argue with my UI is the highest-density feedback session possible. Ten minutes of that beat a month of imagining what users want.
If you're building anything used by groups of people in the same room: ship it, then host the room. Your friends are ruthless QA and they work for beer.
PokerPall was created out of personal necessity. Every time my friends and I would play a game of poker we would run into the same problems, mainly because none of us owned a proper professional poker set.
At the start of the night it's a struggle to count out who gets how many chips. How many chips do we put aside for rebuys, do we want add-ons, what if we have a late joiner? And every night we would play, we would do so at someone else's house, with a different set. Then the middle part of the night which is trying to keep the blinds going at a semi consistent rate, tracking rebuys while we're at it, and likely missing a rebuy here or there. Fast forward to the end of the night at 3am and all you want to do is go home, rest and not deal with trying to figure out who-owes-who how much...
This is where the idea for a single poker utility app, that does all of this, originated from. It calculates who gets how many chips, it keeps track of rebuys, of the game timer and blinds, and at the end of the night produces a easy to share game summary overview. Which includes the who-pays-who overview.
After using it myself for a few games I am confident the product is in a place where it can also help others. Hence why I'm out here trying to show the product. It's still not all the way there yet, but I am determined to keep developing it.
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What stood out to me is that you didn't build a better poker timer—you built something that removes all the little interruptions that stop people from enjoying the night. Counting chips, tracking rebuys, figuring out who owes what... none of those are why people get together to play. If PokerPall consistently gets those out of the way, that's a much stronger value proposition than any individual feature.
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I appreciate it, that's exactly what I want PokerPall to do for the user. Remove all the little interruptions so they can focus on playing and having fun.
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That's exactly what I was getting at.
Your reply made me think about one implication that could end up changing how you think about PokerPall, but it's probably too much to unpack properly in a thread.
Happy to explain what I mean if it's useful. What's the best email to reach you on?
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