Ballroom Tracker iOS

Today, the pre-order period ended, and the app is now available to everyone on the Apple App store. I am already seeing an uptick in sessions and user interaction on Amplitude, and I am continuing to monitor.

Sadly, the App Store Analytics reporting is always a couple of days behind, so I cannot watch the number of installs, etc.

Some days ago, I started an Instagram Meme page for the ballroom dancing niche and have already gathered 130 followers. There are already several ballroom dancing meme pages, but they've all not posted in several months.
I hope that I can quickly grow the page by mass-following the followers of these dormant meme pages and once I hit 500-1000 followers I can start promoting my app in the form of memes.

I chose to try this marketing experiment, since I'm still struggling to find ways of reaching my potential customers outside the US. I have experimented with Reddit posts, but I'm mostly reaching US users.

After some back and forth with the Apple review team, I finally got the app accepted into the App Store.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ballroom-tracker-dance-good/id1589604382#?platform=iphone

The problem for being denied multiple times was having included the trademark "Apple Watch" in one of my description strings. Over multiple updates, I removed all occurrences of "Apple Watch" and replaced them with only "Watch", only to realize the offending string was not inside the app but rather on the App Store page itself. Make sure to search through all App Store subpages, not only the first one!

Next I will be focusing on marketing the landing-page / pre-order page. I am not very sure if I should post on Reddit et al. about the app being in pre-order vs when the app has been released on February 1. On the one hand, I'd like to get people excited and pre-order the app, on the other I feel like there's not really a lot to show for it without the app being fully out.

There are still some minor fixes within the app and landing-page that I want to land until the release on February 1.

I am coming closer to the launch of Ballroom Tracker for iPhone and Apple Watch and have spent the last weeks polishing design, features and landing-page. I spent countless hours designing marketing-material for the App Store and the website.

Therefore, decided to cut some features in MVP stage I have already finished for this launch as there's more polish needed to release them. I am eager to get the app into the hands of users and collect real-world insights and feedback from users.

I'll see how the App Store review goes.

Today, I finished building the landing page for my iOS app. I bought the domain ballroomtracker.app to put the landing page on.

I used the open-source template Pavo Mobile App Website which is built using Tailwind CSS. I ported the design into a simple NextJS app and converted the components that I need into React components. There was not a lot of work needed to adapt the design of the landing page for my needs, since my app uses blue as a theme color. I created the graphics using Figma, which has become my favourite design tool, as it's just as powerful as Sketch for Mac but offers more collaboration features. And it's free.

Today, I published my first MVP of the app to GitHub. I got the basic functionality working, which allows the users to track time spent in different dances like Cha Cha Cha or Waltz. The users can easily change the current dance from their wrist on the Apple Watch.

Since I am using SwiftUI for the project, and this is my first time using this new technology from Apple, I am spending quite a bit of time learning about best practices and code patterns while building this app. Next I will flesh out the design and start working on a landing-page for the app.