12 Testers, 14 Days, and No Android Phone: Part 2 of Building UMAY

Google Play has a rule for new developer accounts: before you can release your app, 12 testers have to use it for 14 days in a row.

I had a few problems. I didn’t know 12 strangers. I don’t own an Android phone. And I had no job and not much money.

That last part is the one nobody talks about. While I was building UMAY, I was also trying to stay afloat. Every month the cash was tight. I sent messages to recruiters, founders, CTOs. Most of them never answered. A few said no politely. Some just went quiet. After a while you stop checking your inbox, and then you check it again five minutes later.

My old MacBook Air didn’t make it easier. It kept running out of memory and storage. Some nights a build would fail halfway and I would sit there, staring at the screen, wondering whether I should clean the disk or just go to sleep. I cleaned the disk. I always cleaned the disk.

So I did what I had been doing since day one: I asked. Reddit didn’t work for me again. I wrote to people on LinkedIn, in Turkish tech forums, anywhere I could find someone willing to try a stranger’s app. Slowly the number went up, until one day I had my 12.

The feedback was the best part. Real people on real Android phones found things I could never have found. The back button closed the app instead of going back. The keyboard covered the chat box. A button in English opened a 404 page. I fixed them one by one and sent a new update. Every message from a tester felt like a small gift. In a month when so many doors stayed closed, these people opened one.

On October 23, UMAY went live on Google Play. It is on both stores now.

This is where I changed my approach. I stopped guessing and started measuring. Every channel gets its own link: WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Instagram, the website. When someone downloads UMAY, I can see where they came from.

Last week I posted my first short video on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube Shorts. Today it’s on LinkedIn. The voice in the video is AI-generated, the rest is mine. I don’t know yet which channel will work. I have a guess, but I’ve been wrong before.

So far: 24 downloads on the App Store and 26 installs on Google Play. The Play Store page was shown about 1,250 times, and 17 devices opened the app at least once. Small numbers. I’m not going to pretend they’re bigger.

I’m still looking for work, and money is still tight. But I have something running in two stores that I built alone, and that is more than I had a few months ago.

In Part 3 I’ll share what the numbers say, channel by channel, even if they’re not pretty.

UMAY is free on both stores, 81 provinces, 14 languages. If you have a minute, try it and tell me what’s missing. I read every message.

If you are building something alone, what has been the hardest part for you, and what kept you going?

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/tr/app/id6818468184?pt=129547475&ct=medium&mt=8

Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.umay.app&referrer=utm_source%3Dmedium

Web: https://umayharita.com/en

Ten days after I lost my job, I launched an app. I wasn’t ready for it. I was still in shock, and honestly I didn’t know what else to do.

I’m a full-stack developer from İzmir. When I lost my job, I spent weeks in a daze. I looked for work for a long time, and I worked on a few volunteer projects for free, just so I wouldn’t stop building. Then I found a job. And then I was let go from that one too.

Getting knocked down twice teaches you something. You can sit there asking “why me?”, or you can get up. I decided to get up. I didn’t have a plan, but I had an old MacBook and an idea I had been thinking about for a while: a map of Turkey’s historic sites, in many languages, in one place.

Ten days later UMAY was live. I built the website in three days.

What nobody tells you is that the launch is the easy part. During the day I was still looking for work. I sent messages to new people every day: recruiters, founders, CTOs. Most of them never replied. At night, until 2 or 3 in the morning, I worked on UMAY: market research, competitors, numbers. I named the project, designed the logo, built the App Store page, wrote my own ad film script and edited the video myself. When you are alone, you are the developer, the designer, the marketer and the salesperson on the same day.

I tried posting about it on Reddit. The posts were removed.

In the first days on the App Store, UMAY had 146 impressions and 13 downloads. Those numbers are small, I know. But each one is a real person who chose to try something I made.

There is a thing I keep thinking about from the first Rocky movie. He doesn’t win the fight. He loses on points. What makes the movie work is that he stays on his feet for the whole fight. I haven’t won anything yet either. But I’m still standing.

UMAY is free on the App Store, with 246 historic sites across all 81 provinces of Turkey, and the Android version is coming. Try it here: App Store · Web

In Part 2 I’ll write about the Android release, Google Play’s 12-tester rule and the road to my first 100 downloads.

If you are building something alone right now, what is the hardest part for you?

UMAY Map App - App Store

https://umayharita.com/?utm_source=medium&utm_medium=article&utm_campaign=umay

One.

I’m not angry writing this. I’m just very tired. And that is exactly why I’m writing it.

Three years

I graduated in 2023 with a degree in Information Technology. I knew finding a job wouldn’t be easy, but I never thought it would take this long. I believed a helping hand would reach out from somewhere, that someone would give me a chance. It never did.

For three years I looked at job listings almost every day, applied, updated my CV. Most of the time I didn’t even get a reply. During that time I kept building my own projects: a football tactics platform, a multi-tenant appointment system, an AI-powered form tool. All of them are live. But in an employer’s eyes, “a live project” is not the same thing as “work experience”. I learned that the hard way.

When you’re unemployed, you compare yourself to others. People your age, from the same university, have found jobs and moved forward. You’re stuck on the listings page. After a while you start calling yourself stupid, useless, worthless. Even if nobody says it to your face, you say it to yourself. The ones who understand unemployment best are the ones who have lived it.

Twenty-six days

Eventually, through someone I knew, I found a job. After three years, for the first time: a salary, insurance, a team. I was so happy. But it ended before a month was over. Twenty-six days. Three years of waiting gave me twenty-six days, and then I was back at zero.

After that I pushed even harder. In about four months I sent around 100 applications. Zero interviews. On top of that I sent hundreds of messages to recruiters, HR people, CTOs, founders. I went through small startups’ websites one by one, found what was missing, made demo videos and pitched my help. One of them finally became my first freelance job. I wrote to a ministry, and I met with the ministry. I applied to TÜBİTAK for support for my venture. I posted on LinkedIn nonstop, trying to be seen.

It still hasn’t happened.

UMAY

Throughout all this I had one idea that never left my mind: putting Türkiye’s historical places across all 81 provinces, its castles, mosques, churches and local food, on a single map. I called it UMAY Map.

I built it on an old MacBook. It was slow, its storage was tiny, and everything took longer than it should. During the day I applied for jobs, and at night I worked on UMAY. I researched for hours: store rules, release requirements, which keywords show up in search, how to shoot a video. There were nights I stayed in front of the screen until almost morning.

To release on Google Play, 12 people needed to keep the app on their phones for 14 days. I didn’t have an Android phone. To find testers, I made a call on LinkedIn and wrote one by one to testing groups on Reddit. Some people helped, some never replied. Every day I checked the number until it reached 12.

Today UMAY is live on both the App Store and Google Play. I built the website, the mobile app, the store pages, the ad film and the social media accounts, all by myself. That’s normally a team’s work. I did it.

On my own

The hardest part wasn’t the exhaustion. It was the loneliness. I didn’t get the interest I hoped for from my family or from my friends. Some friends I’ve known for years didn’t even take a moment to look at the app. Maybe not out of ill will, but it still hurt. You want the people closest to you to say, “Show me, how did it turn out?” When that doesn’t come, expecting it from a stranger gets even harder.

Still, I kept going.

Asking for help

Asking for help is hard, especially for someone who has been quiet for a long time. But I’ve learned one thing: no one knows where you’re stuck unless you tell them.

So I’m saying it openly. If you’ve read this far and want to support me, three things are enough:

1. Download UMAY, take a look, and if you like it, leave a small review or rating. A single review in the store ranking is worth more to me than an ad budget.
2. Send it to a friend, a travel group, a teacher you know. One share can equal a week of my effort.
3. If your team is looking for a web or mobile developer, or you know someone who is, write to me. I build full products end to end with Next.js and TypeScript. I’ve been doing it for three years, it just hasn’t shown up on anyone’s payroll yet.

The end

I’m not writing this to ask for pity. I’m writing it to tell someone on the same road: you’re not alone. If your applications go unanswered, if you can’t see the return on your effort, if you compare yourself to others and feel small, that is not proof of your worth. You’re just in a hard season.

Tomorrow morning I’ll be at my screen again. If you’re trying things too, write in the comments. Let’s write to each other.

Download UMAY Map (free):

UMAY Map App - App Store

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.umay.app&referrer=utm_source%3Dmedium%26utm_medium%3Dsocial%26utm_campaign%3Dumay

Türkiye'nin Tarihi ve Turistik Yapılar Haritası

Turkey has castles, mosques, churches and ancient cities in almost every province, but finding them is harder than it should be. Information is scattered across Wikipedia pages, ministry sites and travel blogs, mostly in one language, and rarely on a single map.

So I built UMAY: a free map of Turkey’s historic sites, in 14 languages. The name comes from Umay, the mother goddess in Turkic mythology, a figure of protection. It felt right for an app about sharing cultural heritage.

What UMAY is today

• 246 historic sites across all 81 provinces: castles, mosques, churches, ancient cities and more
• 14 languages
• Source-based descriptions for each site
• A “Castle Passport” to collect the places you visit
• An AI chat to ask questions about places
• Available on the web and on iOS, with Android coming soon

How I built it

I’m a full-stack developer from İzmir, and I built UMAY completely alone, on an old MacBook. The stack is Next.js and TypeScript, with Capacitor wrapping the same code into native iOS and Android apps. I collected the sites province by province, enriched each description with reliable sources, and translated everything into 14 languages.

What went wrong

Hosting limits. I started on Vercel’s free plan and hit its usage quota, so I moved the whole site to Cloudflare Pages, which I had never used before.

Google Play’s testing rule. New personal developer accounts need 12 testers opted in for 14 days before they can publish. My own phone is an iPhone, so I had no Android device to test on, and finding testers became its own project.

SEO feedback. An SEO professional left detailed feedback on UMAY in a LinkedIn comment. It was useful, and I restructured parts of the site because of it.

The honest numbers

In its first days on the App Store, UMAY had 146 impressions, 70 product page views and 13 first-time downloads. About one in five people who open the page install the app, so the page works. The problem is that almost nobody finds it yet. That is the next thing I am working on, and I am learning marketing as I go.

What I learned

1. Ship a small version first. A live app teaches more than a perfect one on your laptop.
2. Ask for feedback early, even when it stings.
3. Every platform has rules you only discover at the end. Read them before you build.
4. Building alone is not the hard part. Getting people to find it is.

UMAY is free: App Store · Web

Which historic site do you think should be on the map next?

• UMAY Map App - App Store
• Türkiye'nin Tarihi ve Turistik Yapılar Haritası