Shipping app updates feels great

What's up, everybody? Last week, I shipped the first update update to my new app, SubRadar. You can find it at subradar.app. Not here to promote the app. I'm here to talk about the process of the first update and how that went.

Also, how it validated my development process on this. Because the only thing that was found was two bugs found by a user, and they weren't big bugs at all, which was fantastic. In fact, one of them actually validated the design of the interface. And I'm going to talk about them here quickly. The first bug is one that validated that the interface could handle what you throw at it because I had neglected to put in place a cap for the length of a tag name or a platform name.

If you've seen the app, this will make sense. Go check out the website. Again, I'm not here to promote the app. And you could put in any amount of characters you wanted. Well, thankfully, the interface was able to handle a couple of 100 characters at least, which is crazy.

And I don't know why anyone would ever do that, but the fact that someone did it and tested it is fantastic and that it handled it. So the first thing I did was I put a cap in place that I think was 75 characters, which is way more than for a platform description or, you know, the name of a tag, something like that. Right? But those caps are in place, and it'll still handle it just like it did before. Fantastic.

Easy win. I also had the same thing with the amount entry field. Now if you have a subscription that's costing you, you know, trillions of dollars, let's talk. Right? You should probably have the pro version of my app.

But, it again, it would handle the number, but I've capped it. Again, I think I capped it at, like, 20 characters, something like that. Huge amount of money. I hope nobody has a subscription that costs that much. Right?

Streaming services might feel like they cost that much, but they actually don't. But anyway, it's handled, by capping it, but it was easily handling the numbers along with all the charts and everything else. Fantastic. Again, forward planning, taking my time, paid off, everything worked, but now I've capped them. The second bug was one that actually affected the pro users.

Now a pro user is someone who has a subscription for the app and it's $4.99 a year. It's less than one month of a of a subscription to a service somewhere. Right? So, I mean, it's huge savings if you use it and you remember to cancel one subscription. But, anyway, the only caps from using the free version is number one, you can only enter three subscriptions to track.

That was all working fine. And if you become a pro user with a subscription, you can put in an infinite amount of subscriptions. That all worked fine. Great. That is the major important part of the paywall.

The other two parts that you get for being a pro subscription user is the ability to search your subscriptions. The logic there is that I hide the search box because if you've only got three, even on the smallest device, you're going to see it, right? You're going to see all three, so you don't need to search. And because I retain all of your data in case you become a pro user and then you stop being a pro user, I don't want you you know, I didn't I don't delete your subscriptions. You retain them in your data, and so therefore, I wanted to give the ability to fill that data to exist.

But obviously, you shouldn't be able to see it or search for it because that's the incentive for being a pro user. So when I say, I retain your data, what I really mean is the app retains your data, but it's your data. I can't see it. Right? Just to be clear.

So that search box was not showing when you were a pro user. Now that's been fixed. It was a silly little thing with some navigation stuff, but now it's been fixed. Also, the last one is on that home screen, there's a button where you can sort in ascending and descending and and various other flavors for that list that you're looking at. And again, this is only available to pro users because if you've got three items, you you don't need to sort them.

Right? You can see them all there. So those were the only bugs. I was actually thrilled that it went that well. And there's only those couple of bugs.

Now, full transparency as always, nobody has yet purchased the app except, one or two people that I've given, a version of the app to, a pro version to say thank you for their help during development with testing, which I think if you're an indie app developer, that's always a good thing. Right? If you can get folks to test for you, give them something back to say thank you. Right? Just a quick thing there.

So, you know, it's going well. I think the conversion rate on the app store page is about 14.5% at the moment. That's pretty darn good, gotta say, right? So fat folks are seeing the page and, some folks are downloading it using the free version. Cool.

That that's what it's there for. Right? And so it's all going well. And, you know, of course, we all hope that you're gonna instantly get a ton of people buying the pro version and things like that. It rarely happens in the real world unless you're either lucky or you promote the heck out of it.

And I only have a certain amount of time to promote things. And on that front, I also added all of the tutorial videos for the features to the subradar.app website, which again should help folks. Just showing how each of the features work. They're all very short, very straightforward. And by extension, of course, those are on YouTube, which helps promote that.

I've got some views on there. So that's good. Know, not many, but hey, again, that's the way it goes, right? No overnight success. Nobody has a clue who I am.

That's fine. I mean, that's just the way it goes, right? I'm not some superstar dev and I don't have a million dollars to do a promotion. I just have me and my free time, which is not a lot because obviously I have a day job as well and everything else in life. In general, everything's going great.

That first update is out. That's always the important one. Right? Because there's always gonna be something when you release a one point zero app that's like, oh, dang it. So again, I'm super relieved that it was only a couple of minor things that were very quick to fix.

And went through the App Store process with Apple pretty quickly, and boom, it's out there. So that's where that's sitting right now. It's been what I consider to be a great week for that stuff. It now allows me to focus on a couple of my other projects, like one of my other apps, Job Finder Tracker. I really, want to update the interface on that.

And on a livestream, I have done a couple of experiments with a few different things to see what I like, what I don't like. And I think I know what I'm gonna do. I've now just gotta sit down and do it, and then I can ship that update as well. Also, my, Halloween, event for Endless Hurdles, my sort of endless runner game, that has gone into App Store review or will be it's been submitted, waiting for review with Apple. I'm about to do the Android Builder version this weekend while I'm recording this podcast, and then that'll go in as well.

So that's taken care of. So everything's shaping up nicely. Everything's on track and on plan and feeling very good about all this. Yeah, a couple of the updates have taken longer than I wanted, but hey, that's the way it goes, right? You know, you gotta gotta earn a living as well at the same time.

Unfortunately, I don't earn a living from my apps, that's just the way it is. And that's it, folks. That's what I've got here. So, you know, again, it's been a great week. Wanted to share this update with you, but also to inspire those of you who are hesitant about shipping your apps.

I'm gonna say if you think it's mostly done, right, because they're never completely done. Let's be honest with ourselves. If you think it's mostly done and you've covered all the bases as far as bugs and features and everything else, ship it because you will be surprised how well it can be received. And remember, the only person right now that knows about all of the good things and all of the bad things in your app is you and maybe your testers or your development team. It's not until you put it out in a public space and have real users using it that you get to discover what's right or wrong.

And that is super important, valuable information that you need to get the good and the bad way. Right? Yeah. No one likes to see, you know, put something out and it doesn't work and it sucks. But you're not gonna know that unless you ship it.

And if you live in fear of shipping it, well, then that's great. You may have a fantastic app that's great for you and there's nothing wrong with that. But if your goal from day one was to put it out there for people, you have yet to meet that goal. So really think about shipping and living through that initial pain because people are gonna find things that no matter how much you test or you think you've got a feature right, they will be the ones to tell you whether you're right or wrong or find things that you didn't know about, the sooner you can fix them, make them happy, and you'll feel happy about it in the process. That's it folks.

That's what I got for you in this one. If you want to come on the show and talk about, you know, your experiences with these things, I'd love to talk with you about it. Right? You are it's an open invite for indie devs and that kind of thing to come and talk about this. But with that, I will speak to you in the next episode.