AppCenter Campaign: One Week In

Over 270 backers and 80% funded

It’s been a busy week for elementary! Just last week we launched our Indiegogo campaign for AppCenter: The Pay-What-You-Want App Store. Since then, we’ve had more than 270 like-minded backers help us get over 80% funded — in just one week! We’re forever grateful to all of you who have pledged to help us in our mission to bring an indie Open Source developer-focused app store to fruition.

That said, we’re still about 20% away from the goal, so now is a great time to help us meet it if you’ve been waiting. You can still get exclusive perks like your name immortalized in our Backers.md file (so everyone will know you supported us from the very beginning), early access to the AppCenter Dashboard, an exclusive AppCenter tee, and an exclusive AppCenter hoodie. Plus, you will help us bring payments to AppCenter, helping indie devs get paid for their hard work. ;)

Denver Sprint

Meanwhile, we’ve been hard at work planning the actual physical meetup for the AppCenter sprint in Denver. We put together an itinerary and task list with three distinct tracks for the eight attendees: Design, Web, and Desktop.

Design Track

Daniel, Katie, and I will spend a lot of time working out the UX and visual design for each piece of AppCenter. We’ll also spend time working through the designs with app developers, alpha testers, and the desktop and web folks.

We’re planning to tackle the AppCenter homepage (including listing APIs and widgets to be created), the app listing pages, app ratings and/or reviews, Dashboard analytics, and finally: branding and possibly a style guide.

Web Track

Blake and Cody will lead the web track, with collaborative work from me and Daniel.

We plan to tackle generating and exposing AppStream metadata, a screenshots server/service, APIs and a database for ratings and reviews, and dashboard analytics.

Desktop Track

Felipe and Cody will own this track, with assistance from Daniel and our other app developers, Nathan and Dane.

They will work on hooking up AppCenter to our payments UI and back-end, implementing the new homepage design, reworking app listing pages, implementing ratings/reviews, and displaying changelogs.