Show HN: Patterns – Habit Tracker App (apps.apple.com)
I'm a Notion-addicted person and love to build my own template to cover different aspects of my life, either work or personal stuff. Once, I wanted to build a habit tracker template, and I realized Notion was not the best solution. You can organize it in a much more efficient way just with a pen and a piece of paper. However, the best tool should live on your devices and have a correct structure. Then, I decided to try to build an app using SwiftUI and SwiftData.
The goal was to make it a very basic version in one month. But it took me two months. I tried to add only the core features for MVP and see if it works for others. On Twitter, it already received some love, and I'm very excited to share the app here to get even more feedback.
Let me know what you think
63 comments
[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 173 ms ] threadEdit: spoke too soon. It seems to hang on “Loading pricing plans…” so I can’t seem to. It’s good you offer a lifetime plan (the only way I would buy it) but subscriptionware is repulsive. Please consider just not using subscriptions.
I get where you're coming from, especially if an app has no service component, but it's inevitable if a platform has no good way to charge for upgrades. And as much as some people would like to buy a version of an app once and keep using that same version forever, platforms also make that impossible by changing the environment an app runs in in backwards-incompatible ways, so the software needs to be maintained, and that has a price.
Taking away consumer choice is never a good thing and that is exactly what subscriptions are designed to do. Not to mention that subscription pricing is always ridiculously high.
For an app to be available on the app store, even if no features are added, needs to be regularly maintained. That maintenance has a cost. If you want to have an application with no maintenance, just side load an app file and be done with it.
My point being that the recurring cost of a developer license can easily be diluted on one-time payments.
Crunchy Bagel is not a random HN dev making a random app. I highly dislike this attitude people have with expecting free work when it comes to software. If the app was sold as it was with 0 additional work of any kind, I bet you wouldn't buy it. You expect free work. But if I ask you to come clean my toilet for free, you wouldn't do it. This is why we have ads on the web nowadays.
I wouldn't answer questions or read feedback then as a dev because it's not a product really, but why not go that route?
It's also not an issue if you publish it. External users might complain, but that is their problem if you make it clear this is a personal project
Now that's a stretch.
For a design company, just getting the exposure and being talked about [1] (i.e. nothing tangible) can already be worth enough giving some work for free.
So you might work for free giving away muffins on the street if that might make people want to come to your cake shop and buy some other stuff. But it's silly to think that you should give your pastries away if you don't have other products and pastries is the only thing you do for a living.
Crunchy Bagel also have HealthFace, Hexiled, and Streaks Workout apps, all monetized. See the pattern? IMO, Streaks is just their way to show off their good design and coding practices.
[1]: https://www.triplezero.com.au/ designers of Streaks, winners of Apple Design Awards 2016.
"An app can be provided for free if the app itself is not meant to make money but as a funnel to bring more customers to other related business."
You are assuming that a random HN dev has a business at all which is not necessarily the case. App <> business
"So you might work for free giving away muffins on the street if that might make people want to come to your cake shop and buy some other stuff. But it's silly to think that you should give your pastries away if you don't have other products and pastries is the only thing you do for a living." You are just agreeing with me here. Making stuff available for others is more work and software is not different unless you just drop the zipped app file in mediafire and leave people to do with it whatever they want.
Patterns, the app discussed here, is definitely a business. They are asking for a subscription fee because presumably they want to make a living out of it. Also, it is the only product they have to offer (it doesn't look to be the case of being a free goodie intended to bring customers to other business the author might have).
Thus, my point was that it is not reasonable to compare it to a free offering like "how does the Streaks app from Crunchy Bagel manage to do without subscriptions". They are just whole different categories of products (or maybe to nitpick, the intentions and financials behind them are totally different).
However, devs must build an app with feature flags in mind from the start (or at least from the point of introducing a lifetime plan).
The majority of small developer apps are not subscriptionware. Many developers have for decades successfully run a business without recurring perpetual income from completed sales.
Resist the drip feed demand that developers be paid in perpetuity for work they did once. Not all software is SaaS.
This is far too extreme. It's not repulsive. Just don't choose it if you don't want it.
It should not be a complicated app to make and maintain. The yearly Apple developer payment sucks but that is not my problem.
Or I request author to make one
I can not imagine world where I pay this much for checkbox app.
It really is an impressive and incredibly polished service.
A gamified approach for both Android and iOS.
I like the fact that you have a lifetime plan. Given that this is a mobile app, having a lifetime plan is easier to pay-and-forget.
Hope you find success with this app.
To those complaining about subscriptions, it's the only viable way to build a business around an app now (even one small enough to justify hobby time spent on it when it's not so fun any more).
Why?
1. Customer acquisition cost is sky high, after the initial release bump, getting new users is a trudge and expensive, the amount people are willing to pay for a one off is too low to make most apps viable.
2. Software isn't one and done, even a little app like this needs annual updates to keep inline with the OS.
3. Users say they don't want new features, but they do, to do that the dev needs to be incentivised to keep working on it.
4. Subscriptions = better software ... because the dev gets to keep working on the app.
5. They allow indies in to the market, bigger companies with enterprise offerings and more routes to market can charge one and done, free, ad supported etc. Indies need regular predictable income, subscriptions provide that.
The people who say "give me a lifetime price" are really saying "give it to me free". Even those who do land up paying the inflation adjusted correct price for it based on what you paid back in the day (seriously, look at the inflation adjusted price for the one and done software from 20 years ago, it's laughably expensive compared to a few bucks a month sub) land up costing the dev money in the long run. Any established indie app developer (especially if they have server costs) who offered lifetime regrets it after a few years.
The fee also hurts. Especially if this is how you make a living. I pulled the app as the costs + income - time was not worth it (I put a big price-tag on my time)
> 4. Subscriptions = better software
this is the way to go, and one better has a darn good app because nobody will be paying you $1-$2-$5-$10 per month in perpetuity if it's not great
Cheers and happy to help!
However these apps should integrate with HealthKit.. I want to run 30km/week, it should be able to track that.
Beeminder is cool with their visualizations.
Thank you for being polite and positive. Before, I got only bad reactions from other competitors (if they were really competitors).
keep it up!
I’ve been using Chronicling, another iOS app by an indie dev, and it lets you track just about anything, but since you can’t get data out easily you end up having a silo of events about habits without any sense of why you may or may not be keeping habits.
So, I’m building my own activity tracking now with a grist database since they have a nice API and in the end you end up with SQLite files which are highly portable. I am integrating a bunch of iOS shortcuts and also using n8n to auto populate as much as possible into the tracker so that I can correlate habits with other daily activities.
This is why very often I get absolutely stunned at how much inefficient crap people put up with in their life, of course at the end of the day they have no real time/focus power to do anything worthwhile.