Quick Habit 1.2.1: Early marketing and iOS 17.4 Bugfix

As I mentioned in my previous post, my focus was mostly on marketing. Making progress in marketing is challenging for me because my full-time job mostly involves writing code. To improve my marketing skills, I'm learning from other developers on social networks and blogs. Currently, it is the only good source where you can improve your marketing skills.

Roll out slowly

I plan to roll out the app slowly for several reasons. It might sound odd, but I do not want a large user base yet. The app has small bugs and performance issues. Moreover, while the app has core habit-tracking functionality, it lacks features like Notes and Achievements, and it's not yet available across all Apple platforms. Only iOS so far. This limits my marketing options.

Because of all this factors, I deliberately released the app with compatibility starting from iOS 17.4. This aproach gives me some time to improve my marketing and Swift development skills. The app will be improved, have all the important features, and support all the Apple platforms. Later this year, Apple plans to launch iOS 18. They'll encourage most users to update their devices from iOS 16 to iOS 17. This update will bring me many new potential users.

Early marketing

I considered using several marketing channels to attract more users. First idea was creating a page on Indie Hackers After some research I noticed that developers abandoned their accounts. Instead, I decided to write a small post on Reddit. There are at least a few good communities where you can promote your app. I chose /r/iosapps and wrote a post about the app, which led to hundreds of page views and a significant number of new installs. I'm preatty happy with the results.

iOS 17.4 Bugfix

For persistent data storage, I chose the relatively new technology, SwiftData. I like how easy you can write code for data persisting and synchronisation between devices. Accidentally, I made a bug in SwiftData migrations and this bug didn't cause any issues on iOS 17.3. I missed checking it on the iOS 17.4 beta versions, and the bug showed up when iOS 17.4 was released, which was right when I posted about my app. I had to fix it as soon as possible. I think this bug might have stopped some people from using the app. It was a valuable lesson to test apps on all new iOS versions before they come out to avoid these problems.