Too Much Effort to Keep It to Myself (#5)

🎯 Starting Point – Too Much Effort Not to Release It

I made this app for myself, but I poured in way too much time and effort. (My hourly rate is not cheap.)
I started feeling… wronged.

People leave their names behind when they die—
my app should leave some kind of mark too.

So I thought, Fine, I’ll put it on the store so it leaves a trace.

If my friends in the US or Hong Kong download it, they’ll at least get a laugh out of it.
So I asked ChatGPT how to get an app onto the Play Store.

🛠 The Surprisingly Fussy Prep Work

Publishing on Google Play goes like this:

It’s tedious, but I’m the type who finds tedious things fun, so I went for it.
Made the account. Paid the fee.

“If I get 5 friends to give me $8 each, I’ll break even.”

But then… to make it a paid app, I had to do identity verification,
and the vague instructions made it sound like I could change it later.

Fact: You absolutely cannot. Ever.
In a brilliant display of poor judgment, I impulsively set it as a free app.

(So much for my “collecting from friends” plan.)

📱 The Big Remodel

Now all I had to do was upload the app…
But you know that feeling when something looks fine to you, but you realize it’s objectively embarrassing?

This was made for five friends to see. Now strangers would see it too.
I had to fix it before my aesthetic taste was publicly insulted.

So I began the overhaul:

Revamped the background, button colors, and overall design
Made a logo (in PowerPoint—Photoshop/Illustrator are paid work only tools for me)
Rebuilt the scorecard
Added a statistics screen
Added Korean/English toggle
Improved UI with “Back” and “Scroll to Top”

It's getting better. right?

📋 Scorecard Makeover – Out With the Cute, In With the Modern

My old scorecard was manually aligned “by eye” (up, down, up, up, down…).
It was dear to me, but it was time to let it go.

I like cute things more than my appearance suggests,
but I knew “cute” wasn’t exactly “sleek.”
So I aimed for something modern.

While I was at it, I made it auto-align using HTML,
so no more manual nudging—and fewer errors.

The final scorecard. Not as cute, but modern

🚨 Side Note – The Cost of Going Full Improv

When you keep adding features on impulse… you suffer.
Plan everything first, and don’t touch it mid-project.

I’m an ultra-planner type,
but since I knew nothing about app dev, it turned into chaos.

And seriously—don’t ask a developer to “just add one little thing.”
You never know where it will break.

The problem is… the more you change, the more you start thinking:
Well, since we’ve gone this far…?

Golf in Korea – Fairway Journal