In the interest of transparency, I’ve decided that the first update of every month should include a recap of how things went the month before. Let me know if you find this useful!
Recap: January 2021
Most of my time was spent working on the Thought Detox launch (more on this below). I’ve been telling myself that “release is imminent” for a couple of months now, but there’s always something more to do! The app is nearly complete, so I’m turning my focus now to building the landing page.
Here’s what the download numbers looked like for January:
Because neither app has been updated in a very long time, they’re both free apps.
- Revenues, January 2021: $0.00 CAD
- Expenses, January 2021: $30.00 CAD
Thought Detox Updates
Thought Detox is getting closer and closer to launch! I’ve released build 197 to TestFlight today that closes out a few bug fixes and improvements:
- The “Connect To Apple Health” button size is now consistent across all screen sizes.
- The “Text & Motion Effects” toggle has been split to control text effects and motion effects separately.
- The animations are disabled if Motion Effects are turned off in the Settings sheet.
- On first launch, the app will set Motion Effects to respect the system setting for Reduce Motion.
- Some minor layout issues have been fixed.
- Widgets now update to reflect changes in the Text Effects setting.
You can sign up for the beta on Airport.
Product Updates
The home page for Dropped Bits states that I’m “crafting tools that help you make smarter decisions about your money” — this used to be true, but now that I’m working on a self-care app, it’s not quite accurate anymore.
That has me thinking about where I want to take the business. As I mentioned above, I haven’t updated the existing apps on the App Store for at least five years; I’m not charging money for them, because I don’t think that’d be fair to my customers.
Both Per and HoneyJar have each had around 2,800 downloads. The apps still work on modern iPhones, but are they worth keeping around?
Last year I kicked off work rewriting Per from the ground up — before Apple released a major update to SwiftUI, its declarative framework for building iOS and Mac apps. I’m now deeply rethinking what Per and HoneyJar could look like as modern, cross-platform (i.e., iOS and Mac) apps. But these apps have never been especially popular (not that I’ve really marketed them), and given that the audience for them is people looking to optimize their spending, I doubt I could really charge anything.
Of the two, I do think Per has real utility, and I use it all the time when I’m at the supermarket. The rewrite is already underway, so I may as well continue that. I’m not sure exactly what the business model will be, but existing users shouldn’t have to pay to keep any current functionality.
But HoneyJar doesn’t really do more than offer a visual future-value calculator, and not a very powerful one at that, so I think it may be time to retire it.