Weekly Indie Log #7

Weekly Indie Log #7

Topics: Annoying Android bugs, Instagram and revenue milestones.

💡
Check out my apps: HabitKit, WinDiary and Liftbear!

This week we reached an important new milestone for my app business: I made $5k in revenue in the last 28 days. Never reached a number this high before and I'm positive that this could be the best month in the history of my entrepreneurship so far. Thanks to everyone who supported me: Without you, I wouldn't have been able to make this.

HabitKit 1.6.0

I'm still in the middle of the biggest update I've ever programmed for my habit-tracking app HabitKit. It includes the ability to track multiple completions per day and of course, the most important aspect, plenty of changes to the underlying architecture which will enable me to implement new cool features way faster than before.

This week has been pretty slow though. I was still pretty tired after my Marathon last week and had to take it slow for a while (which means sleeping and eating a lot). Nevertheless, I still got a few things done:

  • Implemented a workaround for my PowerSync implementation, which allows the app to run indefinitely in offline-only mode. I communicated this need to the PowerSync team and they made a promise to officially support this soon with an upcoming SDK update. The problem is basically the following: For every change to the database that occurs while the app is offline (which is the default for HabitKit users), a new database entry is made to a special sync table. So when the app runs indefinitely in offline mode this table gets way too big and needs to get flushed occasionally. Got this done and hope that everything works now.

  • Fixed a bug where the app wouldn't update the home screen widget at the start of a new day. This had something to do with the recent ConcistencyGraph refactoring I made to improve performance. I accidentally deleted the timer which runs every few seconds and checks whether a new day started or not.

  • Experimented with allowing the users to log an arbitrary number of completions per day (so manually editing with a number input). This could be handy for people who want to track a certain unit (for example "pages read" or "glasses of water") for a habit. The underlying database structure exists now, but I decided to postpone this feature to a later release.

Another big impediment this week: I wanted to start testing the new update on Android, but after starting the Android emulator and hitting "Debug" I got the following error message:

Pretty annoying and tough to fix. Running the app on a real device works flawlessly so it definitely has something to do with my dev setup. So the next days will probably be dominated by researching weird StackOverflow pages and GitHub issues. Wish me luck, that I can resolve this quickly.

HabitKit on Instagram

A couple of months ago I started an Instagram profile for HabitKit and I usually post a quick image of an example habit that users could track with the app on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. The impressions of these have been rising lately and I managed to reach 99 in the past 30 days. Hope that this number will rise even higher.

That's it for this week, I wish you all the best! 👋

Did you find this article valuable?

Support Sebastian Röhl by becoming a sponsor. Any amount is appreciated!