Some history:
A couple of days ago my app finally got approved and released on app store.
Overall really happy with the release. Now I finally have something that I use every single day. Whereas previously I was using various different apps to journal, track habits, track my weight and manage tasks etc. Now I have all of that in one place.
Initially it was a website that I built for myself but I realised that something like this is better built in an app after speaking with lots of people.
I used Convex dev for my backend and that honestly made the backend part of creating this part very easy because I could just use the same structure I had for the web app. Convex was my choice because even for a website I wanted the data to always be in sync whether I access it on my phone or laptop.
The most annoying part about building an app is having to go through the review process of app store. For a website, I can just make a change and it can be live in less than a minute. But the app store review process alone took me 2 weeks to release this.
Using AI made migrating the website into an app really easy. I had some components like heat-maps and graphs which would have been really difficult to migrate over if I was doing this a couple of years back.
The idea itself actually came from reading lots of productivity books and then stumbling upon an interview from Jim Collins who talks about how he tracks his own life and makes sure it's going in a direction that he wants
FWIW: Your initial proposition, "Your days are slipping away." is a negative framing. Maybe this is a good way of appealing to people's fears, but I thought it was depressing and was not eager to read more.
An alternative could be something like "Make the most of your days".
Nice! Exactly the things i try to log in my daily note, with the addition of streak visualization, boom! How is the data stored? Didnt find anything on the site, exportable?
Hey, congrats on the launch! I think the onboarding was really interesting -- love the different illustrations. For consumer apps, everything needs to be as easy as possible, because you're competing with YT Shorts, TikTok (crack-level distractions). On iOS, I hit one roadblock where the keyboard blocked the "next" button -- small detail, but that required some thinking.
I was also keen to see how the whole system fits into my life before I paid, and since it take 66 days ;) I thought it would be nice to see if it actually worked before I decided to pay. Just a thought. I almost made it all the way through!
Curious how you used AI to migrate the website into an app. Could you share more about that process?
Great job -- shipping something is always exciting and doing so in such a short timeframe is something to be proud of.
Congrats, maghfoor. But the lack of price transparency is a real turn-off. Nothing on the website or in the App Store — you have to download the app to find out how much it will cost you.
Does anyone know what makes habit trackers such a trendy project in the last few years? In a world of possibilities, why do so many people make so many habit trackers?
If you are so innclined the app may serve, but reality is that you are who you are and any attempt to force your unconscious is going to fail. Be nice to yourself
On the pricing, it feels a bit pricy for lifetime, though something like $10 yearly would be probably better all around but does ruin the position of full purchase so
It isn’t a bad deal at $30 but it’s just enough for me to go “oh” and not really open the app/push through.
Congratulations! Beautiful design, very simple and appealing. The onboarding flow filled me with optimism, which I appreciated.
That said, I bounced off at the pricing. The $30 lifetime price isn’t something I find inherently too expensive, but I need to see if the app works for me before committing to it. It was weird that if I went forward with the free trial it would automatically put me on the exorbitant $3/week price. That option was repellent and got me worried about forgetting to either cancel or make the purchase. Compounding the issue was uncertainty about whether I even _could_ make the lifetime purchase after accepting the free trial.
Then I lost momentum and started thinking about how I was about to drop $30 on an app that’s just some HN poster’s 4-month project, and I have no clue how crippled it will be if (when) you decide to shut down the API.
If you’re confident the app itself is habit-forming, I’d recommend just letting people use it for a couple weeks and then hitting them with the paywall. And when you’re asking for that kind of money and using the word “lifetime”, I’d describe how you’re going to guarantee that to the user, even if they’re the only person who ended up buying your app.
Edit: Now I’m stuck on the payment options screen with no way to delete my account. Not happy about that.
I actually got stuck with a bug in the flow. "What drives you" I couldn't seem to move on from this step, no button visible (maybe my old device for factor (iPhone mini 12)
But I also would have bounced on the "free trial, auto payment after" I understand the thinking around them, but for me it's just not a pattern im ever going to opt into. It feel predatory, you will probably forget and then ill get some amount of "months" off you. Like gym memberships.
One thing I noticed is the app doesn’t support larger fonts very well. Kind of a deal breaker for a lot of us. For example the login screen has text that overlaps making it very difficult to read or use.
What’s the value proposition here, exactly? You could replicate this functionality 1:1 by using a very simple spreadsheet with a couple charts - it wouldn’t take more than half an hour to make, you’d retain full control over your data and you wouldn’t have to pay $3/week for a product that can disappear at any time.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 43.3 ms ] threadSome history: A couple of days ago my app finally got approved and released on app store.
Overall really happy with the release. Now I finally have something that I use every single day. Whereas previously I was using various different apps to journal, track habits, track my weight and manage tasks etc. Now I have all of that in one place.
Initially it was a website that I built for myself but I realised that something like this is better built in an app after speaking with lots of people.
I used Convex dev for my backend and that honestly made the backend part of creating this part very easy because I could just use the same structure I had for the web app. Convex was my choice because even for a website I wanted the data to always be in sync whether I access it on my phone or laptop.
The most annoying part about building an app is having to go through the review process of app store. For a website, I can just make a change and it can be live in less than a minute. But the app store review process alone took me 2 weeks to release this.
Using AI made migrating the website into an app really easy. I had some components like heat-maps and graphs which would have been really difficult to migrate over if I was doing this a couple of years back.
The idea itself actually came from reading lots of productivity books and then stumbling upon an interview from Jim Collins who talks about how he tracks his own life and makes sure it's going in a direction that he wants
An alternative could be something like "Make the most of your days".
I find the duolingo course very slow paced, gems and gamifications are just bad.
I was also keen to see how the whole system fits into my life before I paid, and since it take 66 days ;) I thought it would be nice to see if it actually worked before I decided to pay. Just a thought. I almost made it all the way through!
Curious how you used AI to migrate the website into an app. Could you share more about that process?
Great job -- shipping something is always exciting and doing so in such a short timeframe is something to be proud of.
Duolingo is just another mobile game, but pretending to be a learning app.
It isn’t a bad deal at $30 but it’s just enough for me to go “oh” and not really open the app/push through.
That said, I bounced off at the pricing. The $30 lifetime price isn’t something I find inherently too expensive, but I need to see if the app works for me before committing to it. It was weird that if I went forward with the free trial it would automatically put me on the exorbitant $3/week price. That option was repellent and got me worried about forgetting to either cancel or make the purchase. Compounding the issue was uncertainty about whether I even _could_ make the lifetime purchase after accepting the free trial.
Then I lost momentum and started thinking about how I was about to drop $30 on an app that’s just some HN poster’s 4-month project, and I have no clue how crippled it will be if (when) you decide to shut down the API.
If you’re confident the app itself is habit-forming, I’d recommend just letting people use it for a couple weeks and then hitting them with the paywall. And when you’re asking for that kind of money and using the word “lifetime”, I’d describe how you’re going to guarantee that to the user, even if they’re the only person who ended up buying your app.
Edit: Now I’m stuck on the payment options screen with no way to delete my account. Not happy about that.
But I also would have bounced on the "free trial, auto payment after" I understand the thinking around them, but for me it's just not a pattern im ever going to opt into. It feel predatory, you will probably forget and then ill get some amount of "months" off you. Like gym memberships.
Unfortunately I'm not leaving Android for iOS, so I wish you success and eventual expansion to Android.