Paperback

A chain reaction of getting picked up on a reddit thread as well as a local tech news blog here in Germany pushed my downloads up to 10k for the month as well as a lot of new 5 start reviews :) Looking forward to making the app even better with all the new feedback and input.

The product hasn't been marketed properly as I still want to iron out some issues and add share extension support. I am, however, happy with receiving some first sales, a little bit of motivation and validation goes a long way. I'm looking forward to improving the app further.

After a pretty long break from working on it, Paperback is ranked and getting more traffic than ever. I rewrote significant sections of it, including an entirely new scraping article engine which is now done on-device. With all data stored in CloudKit, Paperback is not totally private.

Paperback has orgnically grown to around 160 registered users, after the most recent release which included various improvements to the UI and UX of login and signup fields. The latest changes brought deep integration with Apple's keychain and shared web credentials meaning users can now login without filling a form and simply using their touch ID.

Tagging is completed and released to the app store as well as a whole host of UI improvements and refinements. Most of these were made possible byt the switch to SwiftUI and Combine. Small features have also been added to the PWA and we've welcomed a few new users.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/paperback/id1453198910#?platform=iphone

I took a break from finishing up tagging on iOS while the iOS 13 + Catalina release was rolling out. User base continues to grow organically, I still haven't put any time into marketing. During this time I built a small proof of concept webapp, this will eventually be a full PWA with offline support but many features aren't there yet. You can check it out here, tell me what you think:
https://www.paperback.ink/

While I'm still working on tagging and refactoring, Paperback has passively reached over 10 users. I have intentionally held off from doing a larger marketing push due to wanting to get a few features out and work on stability first. Looking forward to releasing tagging.

I put up an ASK HN post asking people what they loved and didn't love about existing read it later services and what their dream one would include. After having spend the last few paperback releases working purely on stabilising and fixing bugs it was great to get some feedback on which features from the huge backlog I've collected I should be prioritising.

Learned a lot about iOS development and swift as this was my first iOS app. I have a few initial users and some good feedback. The MVP is extremely lacking in features but is a solid base to build on. I will continue making bug fixes and improvements before starting on the backlog of new features. I'm not planning to market the app until some of these are finished.