Let's start with a small revenue update this week. On Friday I had the first day since December where the revenue of my app business dipped below $400 of total income. That puts me in a really weird position as a "young" entrepreneur: Of course, I'm still feeling blessed because the numbers are still so high and it's an extraordinary result to have an app that's selling this good.

But it's really crazy how the human mind works and how fast it gets used to revenue numbers like these. They quickly become your "new normal" and you're somehow expecting limitless growth (or - god forbid - decline). In this situations I always have to put my mind in it's position from 6 months ago, where I wouldn't even dared to dream about revenue numbers that high.

Let's hope it's just a seasonality-thing (must be, because I didn't really drop in ranking on the App Store or Google Play) and that it will grow again in the next couple of months. The only thing I can focus on to counter this: Putting out quality content and app updates.

Android Development Update

Made a lot of progress at the start of the week while working on the native home screen widgets of my app HabitKit. As I already stated in the last couple of blog posts, this is a really tough challenge for me. I had to learn Kotlin, Jetpack Glance and the Android development tooling in general. Now I'm feeling pretty comfortable with the APIs and I'm positive that the last issues will soon be resolved.

One thing that I really like about the Android development ecosystem: LogCat is such a cool and lightweight solution to view and filter logs. It helped me a lot finding issues and bugs in the native home screen widgets. I wish there would be an easy way to log stuff from native Android code to the Flutter debug console. But I have no idea whether this is possible or not.

While working on the home screen widgets I even experienced the first situation where I had to dive into the source code of a Flutter package that I'm using (home_widget) and customize it on the Dart, Swift and Kotlin side. Switching the implementation of the background code execution from using a JobIntentService to using the WorkManager worked out well. Thanks to Anton - the package author - for all the helpful pointers.

I handed the new version to a couple of beta testers, but I'm still waiting for all their feedback to come back. The first impressions were mixed, a couple of users got a flawless experience, other people had problems. Especially the folks using custom Android launchers. I'll probably not support these in the future because there is little to none information about how to fix it.

I also tested the new widgets on my Samsung A52S (which I own exclusively for testing) and it worked great there as well.

App Update / Vacation Problem

Bad news for this blog, great news for me: I will have to pause writing this weekly log for at least three weeks. I will do a big vacation in California and hopefully have a great time and experience some relaxation. Excited to work on cool new things when I get back!

One thing that always bugs me: I think it's super hard to time updates before a big vacation where you don't want to bring a laptop. Let's say you've got a great update in the pipeline, everything is done, but you'll be on the road in two weeks. Do you still release the update? How do you handle this as a solo entrepreneur? Maybe I'm a little bit too cautious but I always aim for at lease 3 weeks of no big changes before a vacation.

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