January Revenue - $33,000

Again let's start with the celebration: My app business (all apps combined) generated over $30,000 in revenue in January. I attribute most of it to New Years Resolution and my remarkable rankings on the App Store and Google Play. I'm really grateful for all the support and kind messages I received and couldn't imagine a better start to my full-time self-employment.

1,000 Ratings on the App Store

Another thing to celebrate: My app HabitKit reached over 1,000 ratings on the App Store while still maintaining an amazing average rating of 4,8. Super happy about it, thanks to everyone who took the time to leave a rating or review!

Google Play is still in the lead with 1,800 ratings though. The reason: I have way more downloads on Android than on iOS because I rank higher for relevant keywords there. Would love to have the platforms equal out at some point, but that's probably very unrealistic...

In case you're wondering what my "ask for ratings/reviews" strategy is:

• I show the native "request review" dialog right after the user logs his first completion for a habit.

• When I receive DMs or emails with feedback or feature requests, I add this small paragraph at the end of the text: PS: If you're enjoying the app, I'd be grateful if you could leave a review on the App Store. It helps others discover the app and gives it a boost!

That's all I'm doing to gather ratings/reviews. Sounds super simple, but works great so far. If you know other great approaches to increase the number of ratings, please let me know!

Transition to full-time self-employment

This week was my last day working on my "real" job as a software engineer. Had a great last day with the team in the office with the colleagues and I have the feeling that I will really miss them. I'm really thankful for the opportunity to work in a unit of super talented UX- and UI specialists and learned a lot in my time there.

The following week will be the first in which I will only work for myself and improve, enhance and extend my app business. I hope the increase in available time will lead to many cool new features, apps and - of course - blog/posts.

Home Screen Widget Progress

Besides finishing the last days of my "real" job, I also made good progress for the big HabitKit home screen widget rewrite:

• I figured out the reactivity issues (I talked about in last weeks' log) and applied a (not so elegant) fix for it. I hope it's working now, but I still need to do a lot of testing in TestFlight.

• Fought with replicating the grid logic (when and how a square is filled based on the completions and intervals/goals) in Swift(UI). Got it running fairly quickly but spent some time debugging a timezone issue. Had to do a lot of comparing between Flutters' DateTime and SwiftUIs' Date. But in the end, I figured this one out as well.

• I added the functionality for the options to highlight the current day and start the week on a Sunday. This is pretty important for many users.

I will tackle the following steps next week:

• Figure out how to adapt the widgets for different device screen sizes. The widgets should look perfect on an iPhone 15 Pro Max (large) and on a iPhone SE (small). I need to figure out how to do this with SwiftUI but I already know that GeometryReader will play a big role.

• Rewrite the small widget type with the native SwiftUI components I created. This should be fairly easy because I did all the heavy lifting for the big widget.

• Add an empty state in case the user didn't create a habit yet.

• Add the paywall for non-pro users.

• Finally start working on the Android version!

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