Reading Queue

For a read-it-later app, platform ubiquity is mandatory. Users expect to be able to save links from their desktop browser or Twitter on their phone, and access their synchronized list on any of their devices.

Reading Queue being launched initially only on iPhone, it was starting to get embarrassing 6 months later! I'm so thankful to the users who keep using the app despite this huge limitation.

After months of rewriting most parts of the app, and adding iCloud synchronization on top, I finally released the biggest update since launch. Now that sync is ready, I can finally start working on desktop browser extensions for Safari, Chrome and Firefox... which will add 3 more apps to maintain 🎊

Not sure whether it was on Designer News or Dense Discovery, but someone at LifeHacker heard about the app and wrote an article about it! Having an editor emailing me with questions in order to write a story about something I build is definitely a great feeling, especially right at the beginning of the year!

With 1000 more installs and so many App Store nice reviews, I decided I will spend all my time on it in 2019, to build new features and try to generate my first $$$ with it.

Dense Discovery is a weekly newsletter by the guy behind the indie magazine Offscreen, read by over 20000 people. I submitted Reading Queue and the author kindly wrote about it.

Despite the app fatigue we're all having nowadays, and after the great feedback from the Designer News community, getting 500 more people going through the trouble of downloading and trying it, confirmed that designers could be the population the most naturally interested into the problem I'm trying to solve!

Without expecting much from it, I wrote a post explaining the story of the app and asking for feedback on Designer News. The post became one of the more popular of the week, got featured on the weekly newsletter, got around 350 installs, but more importantly, brought me sweet words of encouragements and a lot of feedback.

After the eye opening experience of observing my friends absolutely confused by the onboarding of the 1.0, I went back to the drawing board and reworked it from scratch.

Having being using the app daily for over a year, it was cruelly hard to put myself in the shoes of someone who doesn't even know what it is for!

Annoyed by the inconveniences of TestFlight (cumbersome registration process and install flow for users, no easy way to send feedback, updates that need to be installed manually by the user, annoying update notifications), I gave up and released straight to the App Store, with a very terrible onboarding experience.