So I have officially started building "Indie Apps Catalog" and decided to share ocassional progress update here. Feel free to follow along and don't hesitate to send me any feedback.
Since I have worked with the iTunes Lookup API in the past (this returns info about any app, song, movie..) the start was pretty quick. So far my datamodel has App, Category & Developer. And there is working import from the App Store URL.
One funny challenge was that due to the fact that the API returns similarly structured data for wildly different things (for example name of the app is under the key `trackName`) it was hard to know which platforms are supported. I am using like a four different ways to identify supported platforms 🤪
I am currently trying to build as much frontend as I can in MVP fashion to test out my model and assumption. So I can verify if my planned features work with what API provides and how I save it to database.
The homepage currently lists "Recently added" apps, categories and "Recently updated" apps. Here is a sneak peek (I have quickly went through the Indie Dev Monday and submitted some apps for testing):
Another item in my to-dos for near future is to find suitable color scheme and stuff like button styles, what to show on cards etc.
No progress with the naming, but I think it should say "store" in the name to make it super clear, that this won't (and can't) work like "alternative App Store".
