Salon, and finding the right testers

At the end of last month I launched my own website. Blog, app showcase, everything in one place, on my own personal domain. That mattered to me more than I expected it to. Everything I've built is now somewhere I control, rather than scattered across other people's platforms.

I've also set up new accounts on X, Instagram and TikTok, and I've got posts scheduled across all three. Different places, different formats, same thing underneath — showing the work as I do it rather than waiting until everything's finished.

This month the focus is Salon.

What Salon actually is

Salon was my mum's idea, and it's the app I've been told has the most potential of anything I've built.

You log in, create a profile, and select the art you practise — you can pick more than one. From there Salon works through current exhibitions and gives each one a percentage match against what you actually do. Then it tells you about the exhibition, links you through to the site to buy tickets, and lets you scan your ticket in the app with a QR code.

The part I'm most pleased with is the live travel. In London you get live bus, live tube and the Elizabeth line. In East Anglia it's live bus and live train. Those are the two regions in at the moment.

The point is simple: an exhibition is only useful to an artist if they can actually get to it, and if it's relevant to their practice.

Getting it into closed testing

Salon is in pre-closed testing. This month's job is getting it through into closed testing properly, and the hard part isn't the code — it's the testers.

This is a niche app. If I pay for generic testers, most of them will open it, think "what is this?", and give me nothing useful. They aren't the audience. A tester who doesn't understand the problem can't tell me whether the solution works.

So I'm going where working artists already talk to each other. r/ArtBusiness and r/artistlounge are the two I'm starting with — people who exhibit, who plan around shows, who'll know within thirty seconds whether Salon is worth their time. That feedback is worth far more than a paid tester who's never set foot in a gallery.

There's a second route too. My mum is nearly at the end of her MA Fine Art at Norwich University of the Arts (NUA), and Salon is going into her final submission. She's got a tutor who can email the students on the course — a group of practising artists who are exactly who this app is for.

The web app question

That raises an obvious problem, and my mum asked about it directly: most of those students are on iPhone, not Android. Could I do a web app version?

No. And I've earned that answer the hard way.

If you've read my earlier posts you'll know about SniffCheck. I built it on Google AI Studio, put it on the Play Store, and it had bugs. I had to pull it and rebuild the whole thing as a native app. That was a painful lesson, and it stuck.

I won't build a web version of something I've already designed as native. If I'm knocking together a quick test that's never going near the Play Store, a PWA is fine. But not for a real app that already exists natively. You end up maintaining two things that behave differently and debugging both.

Why Android only

The honest reason Salon is Android-only right now is my kit. My own phone is an iPhone, and I have a Samsung Android device I test on.

That Android device is what makes my whole workflow possible. Using ADB — over USB or wireless debugging through developer options — I can load the app straight onto the phone and run it locally. I can poke at it, break it, and work through bugs on the real thing rather than guessing from an emulator. That loop is fast, and it's why native suits how I work.

There's no point shipping to a platform I can't properly test on.

Where that leaves August

Salon into closed testing, with testers who actually understand what it's for. That's the month.

It's my mum's idea, built by me, going into her final MA submission. I'd quite like to get it right.