This week I reached a cool new milestone with my habit tracking app HabitKit: It accumulated over 300,000 downloads on iOS and Android combined. Google Play is definitely my main acquisition channel: It generated twice as much downloads as the App Store because my apps have a better ranking there then on the App Store. Especially ranking for the keyword "habit tracker" in the US is a huge success!
Although downloads are way higher on Android than on iOS, the conversion rate to HabitKit Pro is much lower. Last month was the first month ever where the Play Store overtook the App Store in terms of total revenue. Subscription revenue is still a 50-50 split. But I'm sure this will also change soon and the gap will get bigger (unless I suddenly start to increase my ranking on the App Store again). I will try to conduct some ASO experiments to counter this development, because I would love to see both platforms equally strong. It's always great to have a diversified app portfolio on multiple platforms in case something bad happens to one app ecosystem.
HabitKit Development
Had a productive week while developing the next big update for HabitKit. Here are the most important tasks I finished this week:
I updated the look and feel of the "What's New" modal of the app. This is shown to every user who updates the app to version 1.7.0. I added a few explanatory texts and even included an image highlighting the updated widgets section. I also got great feedback on X and will try to improve it even further with future versions.
I continued improving the Android home screen widgets of the app and even added responsiveness. The users can now resize their widgets to customise their home screen widgets. It's super cool that the platform allows this and that's definitely a cool advantage over iOS.
I invited a couple of beta testers to the app and already got great feedback and a couple of bug reports. Some people experience the issue, that the widget simply doesn't update after checking off the habit. I can't reproduce it on my devices so I'll have a tough time finding the issue here. Bugs like these are the worst and I hope I will figure it out next week. I have the suspicion that it's related to accessing the SQLite database from the widget background isolate. But we will see...
Another important aspect that I need to tackle: I only made the medium-sized widget interactive. But almost everyone told me to make the small-sized widget interactive as well. The problem is that I want to keep the look and feel of both widgets consistent, so I can't really change a lot of the small widget's structure. I asked for feedback on X and got some great solution approaches which I will experiment with next week.
FontAwesome Icons
I'm using the FontAwesome icon pack and so far I've been pretty happy with it. The font_awesome_flutter package makes it super easy to work with it and it really offers a huge variety of icons. But lately, I got many requests from engaged HabitKit users asking for a couple of new icons which FontAwesome doesn't provide.
One of the most requested icons is one for "Meditation". At least 10 people already asked for this, but I can't add it because I don't want to introduce a second icon pack to keep the look of the app consistent. But hey, at least they have an icon for people who want to practice their wrestling skills 😅
That's it for this week, see you in the next one 👋