The start of the new year was pretty uneventful for me. I've mostly been working on adding features to my new habit tracking app, Habit Hues. I had about 30 new subscribers on the new year and have been seeing about 50-ish daily active users in the app, which I think is pretty reasonable for a brand new app in a super crowded market category.
App Promotion
I tested out some Reddit ads by throwing a few bucks at them, and since I’ve never done it before, it was really interesting. I think it could be a valuable marketing funnel in the future.
Right now, I don’t have any conversion numbers from Reddit, and the ads were only showcasing the iOS app. Going forward, I want to investigate this more, set up the funnel properly so I can track real conversion data in App Store Connect, and run ads for both the iOS and Android apps.
I also created some custom product pages in the Apple App Store for common habit categories like quitting habits and daily routines. Honestly, I’m a bit disappointed with the options available for custom product pages, since you can really only change the images and promo text, and you’re limited to assigning them to tags that already exist on your main app listing.
Hopefully Apple eventually allows developers to add more tags to their apps, or choose unique tags specifically for custom product pages.
I also think the review process for custom product pages is pretty ridiculous. It took about two days for Apple to approve mine, which is crazy considering it’s just a store listing change, not a full app review. On the Google Play Store, store listing updates usually get approved in about 30 minutes.
New Features
I released a few bug fixes around the New Year, but I’ve mostly been working on adding local notifications and reminders to Habit Hues.
I’ve been building this from scratch, since most of the existing packages out there seem to be geared toward integrating with remote notification services. Because Habit Hues is local-first, I didn’t feel the need to add another dependency.
Going into it, I thought iOS notifications would be more complicated, especially since Apple only allows you to schedule 64 notifications. But I actually found the iOS notification system to be much simpler to work with. On Android, scheduled notifications get cleared when you restart the device, and there’s no way to clear all scheduled notifications unless you manually keep track of the notification IDs you’ve scheduled. Also the permission management is much simpler on the iOS side.
I have this feature functionally working now on my dev builds. I just need to work on cleaning up the UI and a few other small tweaks I want to make to the app. I'm hoping to have this submitted for app review by the end of this week.
After the update is out, I plan on rebuilding my developer business site because it really needs some work and would like to create some custom pages for each of my apps, as right now, Habit Hues doesn't really have a web presence at all, other than the app stores.
