When I was learning mobile development, I wanted to create something I could publish to the Play store and would be meaningful to me for daily use. Being a surfer, I came up with an idea of creating a tide app that I could use daily and Snap Tide was born.
I wanted to create an app with a different look so I checked out a few of the many tide apps on the store and took a different approach to showing the tide.
Most apps represent the tides as a kind of sine curve which takes a bit of time to figure out, so I created a high, low representation where you can see the current tide state straight away.
I also added a few more features like current weather, moon and a week's worth of tide times.
Once this was done the app was published to the store and then the feature requests came in. Some updates included beach webcams and ability to check tides and webcams anywhere in the world.
The app was developed using Corona SDK and the tide data supplied by WorldTides.info which has a subscription based api. The tide data is paid for by the admob ads in the app.
Some problems I have encountered is that for some areas the tide supplied may not be 100% accurate and also daylight savings times have been a bit of a problem on some devices.
So far I have had over 10000 downloads and a rating of 4.42/5.