App Pause: Mindful Screen Time

3 months ago, I posted my 3 months progress report here. I am back with a 6-month update. The second quarter was much better than the first, though I am still facing high Day-0 churn (~60% uninstall rate).

The Numbers (Month 3 vs Month 6)

Downloads: 500 -> 2210 (+342%)
MAU: 180 -> 487 (+170%)
DAU: 40 -> 140 (+250%)
Revenue: 0 -> $111 (> +999%)

What Went Well

• Focused More on Dev: In Month 3, I realized organic ASO was vastly outperforming my manual social media efforts. So instead of spending time on social media promotion, I decided to try and reduce my high Day-0 uninstallation rate. This worked out just fine since my daily download has now tripled from 10/day to 30/day (unfortunately, I didn’t manage to drive down the uninstall rate).

• Discord Server: I noticed some of the apps nowadays provide support on Discord. This felt much superior than email to me. Chatting is faster + if the community is large enough, sometimes users can just help each other. Obviously everyone doesn’t have discord, so I still provide email support. The Discord server is just an alternative feedback platform. It has grown to 12 users now and frankly, I am very happy with the engagement of the community. I am getting bug reports and user feedback more frequently now.

• PlayConsole Review Time: I don’t know what happened, but Play Console now takes around 30 minutes to approve my releases. It used to take 24 hours before. Thanks to the fast review, I can now easily push hot-fix for critical bugs.

• Helpful Users: I am happy to say that I have some power users of the app who don’t hesitate to contact me whenever they see any bugs. Really grateful to them since they manage to catch critical bugs. For example, after just 14 hours of a release, a user reported that my “Stop Service” no longer worked. I fixed it quickly. That day, I had the highest amount of uninstall (36) and if the user didn’t report the issue, it would have taken me multiple days to notice the problem.

• Revenue Validation: I know that my app is useful, but is it useful enough for people to pay? Ultimately, that’s the end goal for me: to make enough money so that I can say goodbye to my 9-5 job. My app is far from complete, so I decided to start with a tip jar first.

  • I integrated with RevenueCat and created a “Support Me” screen. Users could buy me coffee/lunch/dinner with various prices. I had 4 users who bought me coffee/lunch. This was a huge milestone. My app finally made some revenue.

  • After a month, I finally added a premium feature: Multiple Profile support. I rebranded “Support Me” screen to “Pause+” and started a subscription model. I know that some people hate subscription so I also kept a “Lifetime Purchase” option.

    • Anyone who bought me cofffee/lunch/dinner, were upgraded to the “Lifetime” plan.

  • Happy to say that I now have: 2 monthly, 1 annual and 6 lifetime subscribers.

  • I made a total of $111 so far.

• High Feature Velocity: I managed to add quite a few features to my app:

  • Major Features: Import/Export, Scheduling, Accessibility Service, Multiple Profile

  • More features: Delay Pause Screen, Multiple Substitute Apps, Quick Switch, Ask Every Time, Breathing Exercise, Auto Close Pause Screen, App Usage Limits

What didn’t go well

• Device Fragmentation: I underestimated how differently OEMs handle background services.

  • I wasted weeks trying to debug user reports blindly because I didn’t have the hardware. I eventually had to buy a second-hand Samsung device just to reproduce and fix a specific UsageStats lag bug.

  • I don’t log to logcat in production, so it was hard to debug user issues. I solved this by implementing a local file-logging mechanism. Now, when users send feedback, they can tick a checkbox to “Attach Debug Log”. This context was the only way I managed to solve complex background service crashes.

  • I implemented few more ideas to make the UsageStats based monitoring service work, but in the end, it didn’t work consistently on certain devices. I added “Accessibility Service” support as an optional alternative. This reduced uninstall rate a bit.

• Subscription Shock: My uninstall rate was steady at 50% but spiked to 60% when I introduced the subscription screen. Users see a paywall and immediately get their guard up, even though most features are free. I need to fix this onboarding UX.

• Complex UI – Poor UX: I added “Multi-Profile” support, but it confused users (including existing DAU) so much that uninstalls spiked again. I had to build a specific “spotlight” tutorial just to explain the UI.

Next Steps

• Focus on Development: Add more features. I am a developer, that’s my first instinct.

  • Website Blocking, In-App Component Blocking (Youtube Shorts, Instagram Reel, Weekly/Hourly usage cap, Strict Mode: Hide stop button, restrict changing pause settings, prevent app uninstallation – More UX improvements

• Focus on ASO: Improve PlayStore Listing by adding a video, better screen shots and machine translations for few other popular languages.

The whole journey has been humbling. I have come far but I can still see a long road ahead of me. If I can continue to develop my app at this pace for another 18 months, I think it can turn into a great one.

I hit 500 total downloads yesterday, just a week shy of App Pause‘s 3 months Birthday. I know it’s not a huge number and compared to other apps that go viral, the growth has been very modest, but it still feels like a big deal to me. I have come far considering I started from scratch as an App Developer.

When I started 3 months ago, all I had an idea.

• No MVP.

• No app.

• No website.

• No company.

• No social media presence.

Today, I have:

• An app with 500 downloads, 180 MAU and 40 DAU.

• I am now director of a Private Ltd Company called “Unrushed Apps Ltd”

• I have my own website, landing page and a blog with 0 subscribers.

• A threads account with ~300 followers.

• More experience. I have made quite a few mistakes, so I feel wiser now.

But how did I reach here? What went well and what went bad? This is the reflection on my journey.

Things that went well

Luck is always a factor and I would be lying if I denied the random fortunate events. Few places where I got lucky:

• Quick MVP creation and its release: My first git commit was on April 23 and I published my app on May 20. So around a month to complete my MVP AND publish it live on Google PlayStore. That was quick. The journey wasn’t smooth and there were multiple challenges, but it could have taken much longer easily and had it done so, my motivation would have drained quickly.

• Bypassed PlayStore Internal Testing Policy: I created a private ltd company to mostly hide my personal information on Google PlayStore page (didn’t feel comfortable showing my name and full address to millions of people). Turns out, if you have a corporate account with Google PlayStore, you are not required to do fullfill Google Play’s policy of getting your app tested by 12 internal testers for 14 days. That saved a lot of time!

• Got Early Genuine Feedback: Right after publishing my app, I posted on Reddit to promote it. It didn’t get much traction – just a single comment from one user. But this single person gave my app a try and sent very detailed feedback by email. Next day, another user emailed me with detailed feedback. So right off the bat, I got two kind users who gave me detailed feedback for improving the app. That helped shape my road map as continued adding more features and polishing the app.

• Early Positive Feedback: I got 8 five-star reviews for my app very quickly (within a month). That was motivating. I haven’t been getting a lot of reviews since then though.

• Building in Public: Right before publishing, I opened a threads account to promote my app. (My first post here). After few posts, the algorithm started showing me accounts that were “building in public”. I got inspired by them. These folks were friendly, so I asked them questions on comments and they answered. Learned a ton. I started doing the same with my app and quickly built up a following base (as of today, 293 followers).

Things that didn’t go well

Let’s take a look at all the mistakes I made.

• AdSense Account Suspension for Silly Reason: Got my AdSense account blocked. I wasn’t even trying to show ads 🤦‍♂️. I just needed to use Admob’s UMP SDK for consent management to handle GDPR and they suspended my account (for life) due to “suspicious activity”. Bruh. You can appeal it once and I already wasted my chance.

  • I have since then switched to a different CMP SDK and my advice to new app devs would be to stay away from Admob UNTIL you have significant userbase.

• User Data Corruption During Update: Botched up a database migration during v0.11.0 release and impacted 26 users. You can read more about it here.

• Didn’t Market with Trackable Link: At one point, I suddenly got a surge of new users, but I didn’t have a clue about the source. Learned the hard way about using UTM sources for creating trackable links.

Things where I need to improve

• Improve the landing page: Even though I don’t get a lot of traffic to my website at all. Is there any point? I guess it’s better to stay prepared in case I start getting more visitors.

• Track Referrals Better: I still have no clue where I am getting all my users from, other than organic PlayStore traffic. I have been using UTM sources with my link, but the traffic has been so little that PlayStore reports them as “Others” on the dashboard. Perhaps I can improve the accuracy somehow? Maybe integrating with Play Referral API would do the trick?

• Add more features: Spend more time in development instead of worrying about marketing. Marketing really hurts the pace.

• More Marketing: Launch it on more sites. I have been feeling shy about it.

• Monetisation: Add a tip jar such that Google gets a cut. I hear they tend to promote apps that earn them money.

• Keep on Writing on my Blog: Write about my lessons on the blog. Try to build up a newsletter on the side (why not?). I currently have 0 subscribers. If you are reading this, maybe consider signing up? 🙏

• Keep on building in public