4 ms·

Show HN: Is My App Live?

5 points by andrewbarba 10y ago

andrewbarba 10y ago
After much encouragement from others submitting awesome projects, I wanted to put something together that 1. Solved a problem I have pretty frequently with app development and 2. Forced me to learn some new tools outside of my everyday work with iOS/Swift and Node.js. The original use came about after we added a native “A new version is available” prompt in our iOS/Android apps. We control when the prompt shows up from our backend but we had issues where some people on the east coast could update and others elsewhere could not. Turns out the App Store is actually pretty slow at propagating changes so the only way to really know when something is “live” is to check from across the globe. So yeah, this took about 3 days of work, with the large majority spent spinning up DigitalOcean instances and coming up with a way to reliably deploy the same code base to all of them. I ended up starting with the base Dokku app and a couple bash scripts that setup the initial dependencies of the droplet, another for LetsEncrypt certificates, and finally one that actually deploys from a git repo. The front end is built with Webpack and Vue.js and everything else is running Node.js. Total cost of the deployment with minimum resources is $94 / month. Thats 8 DO droplets (1GB RAM) and two Heroku Hobby apps. If this site actually picks up traction I would probably need to upgrade to the 1x production app on Heroku. I think the 1GB DO droplets should last a while under reasonable load. Any feedback / questions are very appreciated! You can test WhatsApp's latest release: 310633997 / 2.17.3
citrusui 10y ago
Hm... when checking the App Store for an old version of Google Photos (962194608 / 2.6.0), it says it isn't live. Is this intentional behavior or a limit of the iTunes API?
- andrewbarba 10y ago
  Nope that's just bad copy/UI on my part. Technically that version is not live, 2.9.0 is live, and you can't download 2.6.0 so I'm saying "not live". But in reality the UI should be clear that it's an old version.

5 points by andrewbarba 10y ago

After much encouragement from others submitting awesome projects, I wanted to put something together that 1. Solved a problem I have pretty frequently with app development and 2. Forced me to learn some new tools outside of my everyday work with iOS/Swift and Node.js. The original use came about after we added a native “A new version is available” prompt in our iOS/Android apps. We control when the prompt shows up from our backend but we had issues where some people on the east coast could update and others elsewhere could not. Turns out the App Store is actually pretty slow at propagating changes so the only way to really know when something is “live” is to check from across the globe. So yeah, this took about 3 days of work, with the large majority spent spinning up DigitalOcean instances and coming up with a way to reliably deploy the same code base to all of them. I ended up starting with the base Dokku app and a couple bash scripts that setup the initial dependencies of the droplet, another for LetsEncrypt certificates, and finally one that actually deploys from a git repo. The front end is built with Webpack and Vue.js and everything else is running Node.js. Total cost of the deployment with minimum resources is $94 / month. Thats 8 DO droplets (1GB RAM) and two Heroku Hobby apps. If this site actually picks up traction I would probably need to upgrade to the 1x production app on Heroku. I think the 1GB DO droplets should last a while under reasonable load. Any feedback / questions are very appreciated! You can test WhatsApp's latest release: 310633997 / 2.17.3

citrusui 10y ago

Hm... when checking the App Store for an old version of Google Photos (962194608 / 2.6.0), it says it isn't live. Is this intentional behavior or a limit of the iTunes API?

andrewbarba 10y ago
Nope that's just bad copy/UI on my part. Technically that version is not live, 2.9.0 is live, and you can't download 2.6.0 so I'm saying "not live". But in reality the UI should be clear that it's an old version.