My name is Alex, I'm from Ukraine, and this is the 50th Community Report. Actually, the Community is much older, but we started counting from version 2.0, and here's why. It all started long before the full-scale war in Ukraine, when I was still working as a backend developer at a creative agency and helping companies become more individualized on the global internet. I was tired of building corporate websites, crypto projects and online stores and wanted to create a mobile app for myself. Since I knew the C# programming language well, I chose the Unity framework. After publishing the app, I sent a link to it to my friends and even managed to collect 10+ installs. At this point, the promotion of my project ended, and I started looking for a service how to promote in Google Play for free. And I found it - it was the site "Enhance app".

I don't remember the name of the owner of that site anymore, but it was based on the template of an "online courses" service, and it was terrible: primitive design, minimal functionality and a bunch of bugs. I really liked his idea, but the implementation was unfortunately not very good. I wanted to help him, but all online constructors and ready-made engines have the same problems, they don't allow you to create something individual, everything has to be in a predefined framework. The idea was simple: there is a common list of all apps, and each new user adds their app to the top of the list. And for the first few days after registration you get a lot of installs, and then you drop to the bottom of the list and stop getting new installs completely. The problem was that users lost interest after a couple dozen installations, and at the time of my registration there were several thousand such apps on the list, and their owners had long since left the service due to inactivity. A few weeks later, the owner of the service published an announcement that the site would stop working like previous similar projects due to the impossibility of fair distribution of installations among users. And that's when I decided that I would write my own engine for these tasks and create my own Community - challenge accepted.

I asked my coworkers for help and we built our community very quickly. I realize now that it was terrible, yes, much better than its predecessors, but our static list with the ability to recreate after 6 hours was just as bad an idea as all the previous ones. No matter how hard we tried to implement a "fair" distribution of app installs, over the next few months our team started losing ground. We tried many different ways, and always tests showed that after a while some users got more and others got less or nothing at all. Everyone got tired and decided that the task was simply impossible and we needed to create a very complex algorithm with big data analytics and many other subsystems. Naturally, no one wanted to do it for free. Suddenly, the war in Ukraine began.

The creative agency I was working for closed down, I lost my job, and I couldn't understand why our neighbors were killing us and wanting to take our land under the pretext of "great liberation from the Americans", when we didn't have and don't have any American settlements, military bases, or anything else. After that I fell out of life for a very long time, but after some time I came to my senses and decided to create an algorithm that could manage the Community as it was originally conceived. And so, to the constant sounds of sirens and sitting in a hallway between double walls, I started writing code.

The community as you know it was launched on 7 August 2023. In the next report, I will tell you why I rewrote the algorithm code for the 3.0 service from scratch and why it is impossible to achieve a golden mean when distributing tasks among users. It will be interesting and informative, because it's better to learn from other people's mistakes than to make your own, and maybe my story will inspire you to start your own project, even if the time is not the best, as in my case. And I wish you inspiration and courage))

Always with you, your FriendlyHelp community founder