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Show HN: Patterns – Habit Tracker App

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Re: Show HN: Patterns – Habit Tracker App

#31

Post by master-lincoln »

bossyTeacher wrote: post #7
pantulis wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are the regular maintenance costs that are specific to a mobile application? And more importanty, how does the Streaks app from Crunchy Bagel manage to do without subscriptions? My point being that the recurring cost of a developer license can easily be diluted on one-time payments.

Dependency updates, security updates, bug fixes. Yes, if your userbase is in the hundreds of thousands, the one time payments will cover a developer's lifetime of maintenance work. But if you are a random HN dev with a 20-user app, then the 100 dollars, you will not cover a 10 year period of maintenance work, unless your app has zero dependencies and doesn't use any web apis. Crunchy Bagel is not a random HN dev maki…

But the dev here claimed they created this tool for themselves. If that is the case, why not let everyone else use it for free too if you maintain it for yourself anyway.

I wouldn't answer questions or read feedback then as a dev because it's not a product really, but why not go that route?

Re: Show HN: Patterns – Habit Tracker App

#32

Post by anonymouse008 »

helpfulmountain wrote: post #29

Hard to understand why something this simple would need iOS 17? Seems potentially worth it to digging into ehy you can't do a slight refactor to support ios 15,16

Probably SwiftUI dependencies - onChange was changed in 17 which breaks and complicates a lot of code

Re: Show HN: Patterns – Habit Tracker App

#33

Post by j1elo »

pantulis wrote: post #6
bossyTeacher wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Expecting not to have a subscription for a mobile app in 2023 is not realistic. For an app to be available on the app store, even if no features are added, needs to be regularly maintained. That maintenance has a cost. If you want to have an application with no maintenance, just side load an app file and be done with it.

What are the regular maintenance costs that are specific to a mobile application? And more importanty, how does the Streaks app from Crunchy Bagel manage to do without subscriptions? My point being that the recurring cost of a developer license can easily be diluted on one-time payments.

Try to look a bit further than the simplest things. An app can be provided for free if the app itself is not meant to make money but as a funnel to bring more customers to other related business.

For a design company, just getting the exposure and being talked about [1] (i.e. nothing tangible) can already be worth enough giving some work for free.

So you might work for free giving away muffins on the street if that might make people want to come to your cake shop and buy some other stuff. But it's silly to think that you should give your pastries away if you don't have other products and pastries is the only thing you do for a living.

Crunchy Bagel also have HealthFace, Hexiled, and Streaks Workout apps, all monetized. See the pattern? IMO, Streaks is just their way to show off their good design and coding practices.

[1]: https://www.triplezero.com.au/ designers of Streaks, winners of Apple Design Awards 2016.

Re: Show HN: Patterns – Habit Tracker App

#34

Post by simonbarker87 »

helpfulmountain wrote: post #29

Hard to understand why something this simple would need iOS 17? Seems potentially worth it to digging into ehy you can't do a slight refactor to support ios 15,16

Interactive widgets is iOS 17 only. Also, since it's a new app (and I think) a new-ish developer, I doubt they want the hassle of supporting old OSes for a key app feature.

Re: Show HN: Patterns – Habit Tracker App

#35

Post by degisner »

astromd wrote: post #26

The problem with most habit tracking apps is that they don’t put your habits in context with the rest of the day. For example, let’s say you miss a day reading, and that becomes a pattern. Current apps may not surface the fact that you’ve taken on too many evening commitments because they can’t show you your calendar. I’ve been using Chronicling, another iOS app by an indie dev, and it lets you track just about anyth…

This is the reason why there are so many different habit app approaches. My understanding of habits was to see it kind of from the bird's eye view. I want to grow it and cover more cases like repetitive habits, reading data from the Health app, etc.

Re: Show HN: Patterns – Habit Tracker App

#36

Post by danproductman »

helpfulmountain wrote: post #29

Hard to understand why something this simple would need iOS 17? Seems potentially worth it to digging into ehy you can't do a slight refactor to support ios 15,16

In the the post he mentioned building the app with SwiftData. SwiftData came with the iOS 17 release.

Re: Show HN: Patterns – Habit Tracker App

#37

Post by Void_ »

mezod wrote: post #22

The app looks good so far! As the indie developer behind https://everyday.app I'm happy to see more indies joining the market :) You have a lot of work to do ahead!! heheh Cheers and happy to help!

I used this one for a while: https://polarhabits.com

However these apps should integrate with HealthKit.. I want to run 30km/week, it should be able to track that.

Beeminder is cool with their visualizations.

Re: Show HN: Patterns – Habit Tracker App

#38

Post by degisner »

HenryBemis wrote: post #24
simonbarker87 wrote: post #14

Lovely looking app, well done. I hope you're able to build enough of a business around this to keep the updates and improvements flowing. To those complaining about subscriptions, it's the only viable way to build a business around an app now (even one small enough to justify hobby time spent on it when it's not so fun any more). Why? 1. Customer acquisition cost is sky high, after the initial release bump, getting n…

I had made one app for iOS back in 2017. What people don't get is that even if the changes on the iOS are minimally impacting YOUR app, you still need to be reviewing the iOS changes, testing, updating it constantly (every couple of months you need to make sure it's up to par). Also the time from clients' questions, getting feedback and making improvements, etc. The fee also hurts. Especially if this is how you make…

I've tried all the best from all the sides: - Free users have almost everything to get started without annoying ads or randomly appearing paywalls; - Paid users have all the pricing plan types that work for them: monthly, annual, and lifetime.
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