I ignored my first app for 7 years. People kept downloading it, so I rebuilt it.

In 2019 I got laid off. While I was figuring out what to do next, I built an iOS app called Stress Less to track my own stress. It was the first app I ever shipped, and it's the reason I ended up doing this full time.

Then I moved on to other projects. Stress Less sat there untouched for seven years.

Earlier this year I looked at the numbers. About 3,400 lifetime downloads, which is small, but people were still downloading it every week. A 2019 app that very obviously looked like a 2019 app, with no updates or marketing, and no attention from me since it's initial release.

That got me thinking, nobody was choosing it because it was good. They were choosing it because they had a problem and it was there. The demand existed independent of my effort, which is not something I could say about most of what I'd built since.

So I spent a few months rebuilding it from scratch.

The other reason I came back is that the app I actually wanted to build in 2019 wasn't possible then. I wanted it to notice your stress patterns and figure out what specifically helps you. Apple's Foundation Models framework made that possible. Everything now runs locally. No accounts or server and nothing you log leaves your phone.

It relaunched this week.

A few things I've learned that might be useful to others here:

An old app still getting organic downloads is a signal worth taking seriously. It's cheap demand validation you already paid for.

Relaunching to an existing user base is very different from launching cold. I had about 1,650 people from the original app. I warmed the list with two emails before launch, which cost me some unsubscribes but left a list that opens at 26%. The launch email yesterday got 433 opens.

Rebuilding beats starting over when there's existing ranking and reviews to inherit. I shipped it as an update to the same listing rather than a new app.

Curious if anyone else here has an old project still quietly getting usage. Did you go back to it, or leave it alone?

If you want to checkout Stress Less: https://stresslessdaily.com/