Week 11: It's Live - Lumi Is on Google Play

Build in Public 鈥?Week 11 (July 1鈥?)

On July 7, I submitted Lumi for production review. Then I waited.

The next few days were a mix of nervous checking and forced patience. Every notification on my phone made me grab it, hoping it was the Google Play review result. Every time it wasn’t, I went back to refreshing the Play Console page. I knew the review could take anywhere from a few hours to a few days, but knowing that didn’t make the waiting easier.

On July 9, at 1:30 AM, I checked my email one last time before going to sleep. There it was: a message from Google Play saying my app had been approved. Not a rejection. Not a request for more information. Approved. Lumi was live on Google Play, available for anyone in the world to download.

I didn’t go back to sleep. I opened the Play Store, searched for Lumi, and there it was 鈥?my app, with my name on it, available to billions of devices. The moment I had been working toward for three months had arrived, and it felt surreal.

What Three Months Looked Like

April 13 was the day I wrote the first line of code. July 9 was the day Lumi appeared on Google Play. In between were 13 weeks of building, breaking, fixing, testing, and rebuilding. There were moments of excitement, frustration, doubt, and the occasional breakthrough that made everything feel worth it.

I learned Flutter from scratch using AI tools. I set up a global proxy server without knowing much about networking. I designed a UI without being a designer. I wrote a privacy policy, configured Firebase, managed app signing keys, and navigated the Google Play submission process 鈥?all for the first time. None of it was easy, but all of it was learnable.

Setting Up the Ecosystem

Launching the app was only part of the work. Around the same time, I set up the supporting infrastructure that a product needs: a support email address, a YouTube channel for product demos, and a personal website with a blog where I could share the story behind Lumi.

The website went live with the first blog post 鈥?the story of why I left enterprise PM to build Lumi. It felt right to have the product and the story launch together. People don’t just download an app. They download the idea behind it. Having a place where they could understand the motivation, the philosophy, and the person building it felt important.

I also created a short product demo video 鈥?my first attempt at anything video-related. It was rough, but it showed the app working, which was more important than production quality at this stage.

The Enterprise PM Who Built an App

One of the questions I kept asking myself throughout this journey was whether someone with 20 years in enterprise software, zero mobile development experience, and a reliance on AI tools could actually ship a product. The answer, as of July 9, is yes.

Not because I’m exceptional, but because the barriers to building software are lower than they’ve ever been. The tools are good enough. The platforms are accessible. The knowledge is available if you know where to look. What matters more than technical skill is persistence, clarity about what you’re building, and the willingness to learn what you don’t know.

What’s Next

Launching is not the end 鈥?it’s the beginning. The next phase is about marketing, getting users, gathering feedback, and making the product better. There are features I want to add, improvements I want to make, and eventually an iOS version to consider. The 13 weeks of build in public were just the first chapter.

But for this moment, the app is live. Three months, one person, one product. From an empty Flutter project to a global app on Google Play. That’s what Week 13 means.

Lumi is available now on Google Play. If you’ve been following this series, thank you. The journey continues.

The key milestones from April 6 to July 9