Way back in 2011 (fifteen years ago!), I created an astronomy app for Android called Star Odyssey. The idea was you could go outside at night, and the app would pull up a list of all the bright stars currently above the horizon and provide some basic info about them, like how the star got its name and any interesting astronomical facts about it. You could also sort the list of stars by brightness or distance from Earth.
It also integrated with a planetarium app called SkEye (not created by me). After reading about a star in Star Odyssey, you could click a button to launch SkEye, which would point you to that star's location in the sky.
It was a lot of work to create the app, considering I had to not only build the app but also do research on 70+ of the brightest stars in the night sky. But it was the app I wanted, and nothing like it existed at the time.
I updated and maintained the app over the next several years, but the pace of change in Android was so fast back then that it became hard to stay up to date. The last update I made was in 2015.
In 2022, Google announced that Android apps would have to be updated within a rolling two year window in order to be findable in Google Play. I tried at that point to modernize the app's source code so I could release a new version. I made a lot of progress, but ultimately I got stuck and gave up. At that point, Star Odyssey became no longer available.
2026 has ushered in the widespread adoption of AI in the software development world. I'm using Claude Code at work, and it is, at times, shockingly good. So I signed up for a personal plan with Claude Code and asked it to help me update Star Odyssey to run on modern devices. And it worked! Turns out I wasn't too far off in my 2022 attempt.
After getting the app working on my phone, I used the free version of Gemini (Google's AI) to walk me through uploading a new version to Google Play. A lot had changed since 2015, especially around how developers cryptographically sign their apps to prove they're the owner.
After all of that, I have finally released a new version of Star Odyssey, the first in over 10 years! I am enormously pleased to have it working again on my phone.
If you want to try it out, you can find it here, or just search for "Star Odyssey" within Google Play on your device. Feedback is welcome!
As amateur astronomers like to say when ending a message: Clear skies!