

Show HN: Spinach – An Android lock screen that's good for you - tasn
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tengu.spinachLockScreen

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wimagguc
How can you override the Home button? Did you manage to get this work using
the latest APIs as well, or are you using the deprecated KeyguardManager?

(When I've last checked, it looked like Android doesn't want developers to do
such things in the long run: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10349685/not-
able-disable...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10349685/not-able-disable-
home-button-on-specific-android-devices))

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tasn
Hey,

It's a combination of a few tricks for multiple devices. First and foremost,
we use an overlay alert to paint over the whole screen. We detect if that
fails to work and let you set our application as the default launcher. The
launcher is the application that is moved to foreground when you press home,
so that eliminates that. Once you unlock the phone, we disable our launcher
functionality and let the default launcher go. We've iterated over the locking
for months with over 100k users testing our locking methods for our other lock
screen application. Unfortunately, the difficulty to properly lock the screen
dragged our rating down over there
([https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tengu.musi...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tengu.musiclockscreen)),
however recently we've been getting mostly positive reviews.

Anyhow, locking mechanism aside, any suggestion for monetisation strategies?
:P

Edit: rephrase.

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wimagguc
Gotcha. I was curious if I missed a nice-and-clean unlock screen solution last
year :)

As for monetisation, I would perhaps AB test some of these:

* In-app products: buy new instruments, better sound packages etc.

* Native adverts: you might try to guess a song, and come up with a 'Sounds good? Get X from Y in iTunes', become Spotify affiliates or similar.

* You seem to have a good community with over 100K downloads and 450+ 5-stars, you might be able pull off a buy-us-a-coffee kind of donation. (Beware, GP alone doesn't support PayPal donations.)

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tasn
Unfortunately you haven't. This is an oil rig. It's dirty, stinky and
dangerous, but it works. :P

* Buy new instruments: thanks, that's in the pipeline, we'll hopefully roll these out next week or the week after.

* This is a good idea. :)

* Yup, our rating graph is quite interesting. We have a lot of people who absolutely love it, and we have had a lot of people who for whatever reason (mostly in the past) hate it.

Thanks for your thoughts.

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tasn
Hey,

OP here. We'd love to get your feedback on a few of things.

1\. Writing a lock screen on Android is hard and full of hacks, please let us
know if you've managed to spot any issues.

2\. At the moment we monetise with ads and a paying-to-remove-ads option. This
is not satisfactory, especially since I'd hate annoying users with too many
ads. Do you have any other monetisation ideas?

3\. Copy is a bit weak perhaps, suggestions are more than welcomed. :)

If you have any other suggestions, please let us know.

Thanks!

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creshal
How secure is it? Lock screens have been quite notorious for being too easy to
bypass.

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tasn
For all we know, it's solid. We've worked hard on getting to this point.

