Let's start this week with the celebration of a new milestone: I'm proud to announce that my app business reached 3.000 active paying subscribers. When I first launched my app, the initial stretch to reach 1,000 active subscriptions was the longest, taking about 15 months. This phase was filled with intense development, user feedback, and countless iterations. But after I released my second app HabitKit, things started to pick up and the revenue growth has been insane.

I know that I probably can't keep this rate of growth up because a lot of users will churn at the start of next year (that's just how it goes). But I'm really happy with the place I'm at now.

Year-In-Review Feature

As we wind down the year, I've got something pretty cool brewing for all the HabitKit enthusiasts out there. Got inspired by Spotify's annual recap called "Wrapped" and plan to implement something similar for HabitKit: I'm currently piecing together a "Year-In-Review" feature and it's really cool to build a completely new feature (that feels separated from the rest of the app) again.

Think of it as your annual report card, but way cooler and more colorful. It's all about giving you a sense of all the habits you've developed, the consistency you've maintained, and even those little failures along the way - because they're all part of the journey. I'm excited to release this feature next week and can't wait to see the first people sharing their consistency cards. Stay tuned, keep tracking, and bring your best consistency to these final weeks to fill the last remaining gaps.

App Store Ranking

Another glorious act by Apple: Applying major changes to the App Store Search algorithm and completely reordering my rankings. I’ve been monitoring the latest rankings for HabitKit with Appfigures and had to watch it going down for multiple relevant keywords in many countries. It's a little bit worrying to lean so much on just one platform and it's once again a great warning regarding platform risk. Thank god I still have Google Play as a backup for the Android version!

I can't really do anything about that because no one knows what exactly changed and why this is happening, but it sucks to have your hands behind your back like this. I already heard from a couple of other indie devs that the changes actually had a positive effect on their ranking and I'm super happy for them. Definitely a great chance for everyone to make a living on the App Store.

Funny Reviews

This week I've got one of the most ridiculous reviews on Google Play. In the past, I got bad reviews because of bugs, crashes, the paywall or "just because", but never because I didn't support one specific language. But here it is, achievement unlocked, 1-star rating because I didn't add a Polish translation. What makes people think that independent app developers like me have the resources to support all the languages in the world? Google Play users can be brutal sometimes!

That's it for this week, see you in the next one!