Interesting development of the course of the last two months: Google Play overtook the App Store in terms of revenue and even expanded its' lead. After the first half of March Google Play generates 58% ($6,167) and the App Store 42% ($4,355) of my revenue. I'm really happy about the additional revenue stream, especially after I heard some horror stories about Apple not distributing the proceeds of some app developers. By supporting multiple platforms you become less dependent on one single company (like Apple or Google) and reduce the risk of your business tremendously.

Because I often get this question: 56% of my business revenue comes through one-time purchases (Lifetime licenses for HabitKit and WinDiary), the other 44% are generated through monthly and annual subscriptions (HabitKit, WinDiary, Liftbear). And another question I get many times when I talk about my Google Play revenue: The top 3 countries are the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany.

Free Stuff Mindset

Lately, I've been getting so many messages asking me about discounts and free lifetime licenses for HabitKit. I always ask myself how I should discount an app that costs $0.5 per month (if you go for the annual subscription)? After Apple's and Google's cut, sales taxes and super high income taxes (at least here in Germany), the remainder would be an incredibly small number.

By taking a look at one of the big new competitors Atoms we can see that their annual subscription costs 129.99€. To make this much money I would need 260 people subscribing to the annual plan of HabitKit. Crazy difference, but here I am getting called "Sauron" because of my "nefarious subscription model"...

I know, I should ignore it and shut up about it, but I think it's important to highlight this so that fresh app developers know that this behaviour is normal and everyone gets comments like these.

RevenueCat State of Subscription Apps

This week I had the honour to be highlighted in the RevenueCat State of Subscription Apps 2024 report as an "expert". I'm happy to see that my app developer journey resonates with so many people and it's incredible to see my name mentioned alongside awesome makers like Curtis and Emmanuel.

If you still haven't read the report, I highly encourage you to take a look at it. Lots of great insights, spicy statistics and many lessons about the subscription app business to learn from it.

HabitKit Development

Not many interesting things to write here this week: I continued to polish the new home screen widgets of HabitKit. I added interactivity to the small widgets for iOS so that people can check off even more habits from their home screen.

I'm currently struggling with the performance of the widgets, especially on Android. Whenever a user taps the widget, there is some kind of delay before the widget updates with the new state. I will definitely need to improve in this area.

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