Droneviews
Overview
Droneviews delivers the freshest aerial wallpapers right to your Android device. With a large collection of 100+ drone shots and earth wallpapers, users can personalize their device with high quality images of our planet. All images are taken from drones and satellites, sourced from NASA, Google Earth and Unsplash.
Features
- Recents: View the newest aerial wallpapers, hot off the press
- Favorites: Heart your favorite wallpapers to add them to your own collection
- Categories: Quickly browse through different collections
- Material Design: Smooth animations and the latest design standards with the WallpaperBoard framework, created by Dani Mahardhika
- Set: Change your current wallpaper right from the app
- Save for Offline: Save any wallpaper to your device
- Cloud-based: All earth wallpapers are stored in the cloud
- Tiny App Size: Droneviews is just 3 MB
- Fast Refresh: Image caching means wallpapers load faster the more you use the app
- Photo Details: View location, photographer, photo size and color palette
Tech Stack
Figma Design Tool
Android Studio IDE
Java Programming Language
Firebase Backend-as-a-Service
Year
2017
Process
Early Iterations
Inspired by a group of earth image wallpapers I found online, I decided to curate my own collection. With the help of the WallpaperBoard framework by Dani Mahardhika, I was able to create an early iteration of the app and begin testing on my Android devices. With the use of JSON, I created a system for instantly updating the collection of wallpapers available to users. After implementing wallpaper fetching from the cloud, I tested the image caching system on multiple Android devices and emulators to ensure that images loaded quickly and efficiently.
Design Decisions
I decided against the creation of user accounts for this app— he main user goals for this type of application are to view, download and set images as the main device wallpaper. With this in mind, creating an account and storing user data is not neccesary.
To enhance the user experience, I created a categorization system within the app, enabling users to more easily find their favorite wallpapers in the collection. After initially creating a more complex backend, I streamlined the operation by putting all of the wallpapers in one JSON file with the original author, location data, source, and title for the work.
Publishing on Google Play
Once further testing was completed, I published the initial release of Droneviews to Google Play in 2017. In the following year, I released two updates focused on further simplifying the interface and speeding up image load times.
Droneviews is available for free on Google Play.