Allan Nascimento

Hey everyone, this is Allan, and today I want to talk about something I did since last week.

Too many newsletters

I have this problem of being subscribed to a lot of newsletters, and some of them publish really long texts. I really dislike the idea of getting a text that is pages long, not finishing it, and not knowing where to come back when I return to read. I usually don't like to read one thing until the end, always until the end. I try to read some pages every day, so with a big text I tend to read one part today and another part tomorrow.

I had this problem of getting newsletters that were good, but I did not want to begin reading, because I knew I would not have time to read the whole text. So I ended up not reading those big texts at all.

Boring Reader

My solution was to create my own system. I know there were applications that did that already, but I wanted to create my own, so I created a project called Boring Reader. The idea is to be as simple as possible and focus only on making me read more. When I read a text and stop reading, I know where to come back, because the progress is saved. That helps me a lot.

I use AI and my system to get a newsletter, videos or text from the web and transform them into EPUBs, and then I read in the EPUB format. It is the solution I found to save progress, and I find it quite a lot better to read.

The Android app

This project is months old already. What I did since last week is create the mobile version, the Android application, and now I have Boring Reader on my cell phone.

With this project, I learned how to create mobile applications. I actually don't know how to program it myself. I used AI, and what I did was basically transform the web application into a mobile application. It is native, so it is not something like a PWA, adapted to work on a cell phone. It is programmed in Kotlin, which is a mobile application language. So it works really well on the cell phone, but it is not available on the Play Store yet, because I don't know how that process works yet. But it made me want to try to publish it there.

Self-control

I also created another application, called Self-control. I was so addicted to Instagram and Twitter, or X if you prefer the new name, that while I was working I got impulses to pick up my cell phone and open Instagram, but I didn't want to see anything. It was only an automatic response to being bored.

Self-control is focused on adding friction to make bad habits less automatic. When I open something with Self-control on, it takes a five second delay to open Instagram, for example. That is the first open. On the second open it adds 5 more seconds, so the second opening has a 10 second delay. By the end of the day I had to wait 2 minutes to enter Instagram. If it was an automatic response to being bored, it forced me to realize that I don't even want to use that app right now. It is only an impulse. So I won't wait two minutes. I will do something else: try to read, try to study, or try to focus on my work again. It works really well for me.

My bank flagged it

But there was a problem. I have a Brazilian bank, because I am in Brazil right now, and the bank was not letting me use my credit card online. It thought I had a suspicious application on my cell phone, like a security check, as if my application was a malware. So I had to uninstall Self-control.

The solution is to put Self-control on the Play Store, and that is why I also want to learn how to publish apps on the Google Play Store. I want to use my own application without my bank telling me it is malware, because it was installed directly on my cell phone and not through the app store.

What comes next

That is what I wanted to share with you. It is something I did recently, and in the next few days I will try to come up with updates about this whole problem.

I don't know if I actually want to use these applications to get some money, to monetize something I created, and I don't know yet how I should do that. If you have any idea, you can leave it in the comments down below this video. That is it for today.