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Simply Paper

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AndroidMobileJavaDesignEarly Work

The Android app that started my career.

Simply Paper is the first product I ever shipped publicly. I built it while at university, published it to Google Play, and ended up with a wallpaper app that reached 30,000+ downloads, a 4.5-star average rating, and 600+ original wallpapers I’d designed myself. More importantly, it’s the project that convinced a local company to hire me as an Android developer — the starting point of my software engineering career.

View on Google Play →

Overview

Simply Paper was a native Android app that curated a growing catalog of self-designed wallpapers. I owned everything end-to-end: the app code, the wallpaper art, the Google Play listing, the updates, and the community replies. There was no team — just one student teaching himself Android development by shipping real builds to real users.

Problem

In 2015, Android wallpaper apps were either cluttered with ads, low-resolution, or reposted images without a coherent style. I wanted to build something tighter:

  • A clean, fast app focused on my own designs (no image scraping).
  • A predictable browsing and set-wallpaper flow.
  • High-resolution outputs that actually looked good on modern Android devices of the era.

Goals

  • Ship a native Android app to the Play Store that passed review on the first try.
  • Learn Android development (Java, Activity / Fragment lifecycle, resource handling, storage) by building something real.
  • Publish and maintain a catalog of original wallpapers I’d designed — not a scraper.
  • Get the app discovered organically on the Play Store.

Solution

Native Android, built in Java

I built Simply Paper with Java + the Android SDK in Android Studio — the standard native stack at the time. That meant learning the full Android lifecycle: activities, fragments, adapters, resource scaling across densities, and the set-wallpaper intent pipeline.

Design-led, solo-curated catalog

Every wallpaper in the app was something I’d designed. By the time the project wound down I’d published 600+ originals across a handful of themes. Hosting and gallery versions of that catalog still live on Flickr.

Ship, listen, iterate

I used the Play Store as a live feedback channel. Reviews flagged UX rough edges, the catalog grew in response, and the 4.5-star average came out of actually responding to the people who were using the app.

Outcomes

  • 30,000+ lifetime downloads on Google Play.
  • 4.5 / 5 average user rating.
  • 600+ original wallpapers designed and shipped inside the app.
  • First Android developer job — a local company hired me off the back of Simply Paper, which directly launched my software career.
  • Foundational experience in the full ship-a-product loop: design, build, publish, respond, iterate.

Current status

Simply Paper is still live on the Google Play Store and can be installed today, but it’s no longer actively maintained — no new wallpapers, no feature updates. The wallpaper gallery also lives on Flickr as a complete archive of the catalog.

Final takeaway

Simply Paper isn’t a polished modern case study — it’s an honest origin story. One student, one stack, one catalog, and a real product shipped to real users. The numbers (30k+ downloads, 4.5 stars, 600+ wallpapers) are meaningful precisely because they were the proof-of-work that opened the first door. Everything else I’ve built since sits on top of what this project taught me about finishing things and putting them in front of people.