Phrasista

English is not my first language and I often face many unknown English phrases in every-day life still. To remember those new phrases, I write it down to my notebook so that I can look at them again and remember. However, as you may know, we often forget where those phrases were written down and, more often, we forget that we wrote down those phrases at all (!!)

So, I wanted to have a single place to record new phrases on my mobile and wanted that app to provide useful features such as:

• Text recognition (I don't want to type phrase every time!)
• Built-in dictionary (I don't want to look up new phrases every time!)
• Text-to-speech (I want to remember a new phrase with its pronunciation!)
• and so on and so forth...
  That’s why I built this app.

I came up this rough idea on 24th June 2022 and thought there would be some people who have the same pain point. Then, as my side project, I decided to focus on Japan in the first instance as I know many Japanese people are struggling with memorising English phrases.

As I am a solo developer and must do everything by myself, I started learning Flutter to save my time for the future when I will need to support both iOS and Android users. I was not sure if I could do but I also wanted to implement freemium model with a monthly subscription which would motivate myself to continue this development journey.

Since then, I spent about 6 months for building the app from scratch and I released v1.0 in Dec 2022 and had more than 2 releases every month to add new functions and fix many minor bugs. It was not easy journey but very exciting for me.

I finally implemented the monthly subscription to the latest version v1.3.0 and it was released in Apple's App Store (Japan) 3 days ago, and then I'm writing this blog on 24th June 2023. Just one year but took one small step forward.