Shirabe

My iOS app for Japanese spaced repetition hit 100 users. I try to post on Reddit in /r/LearnJapanese, and plug my app (when appropriate). I also added a link to my app in my various social profiles (Reddit, mainly). Other than that, it's mostly been organic.

I have finally hit 30 downloads on the app store! 10 USA, 3 Australia, then various other countries. Exciting ! I don't have many more features I feel are needed at this point... I need to find a better way to start marketing my app. I use it every day and find it immensely useful, I'm sure others learning Japanese will too.

I got some acquaintances to try the app and got some valuable feedback, which I intend on implementing this week:

• Include Hiragana in the notification
• Add a history of words looked up by the user
• Include example sentences
• Make the notifications a bit more randomly timed - if you look up a bunch of words at once, you receive a notification exactly 1/3/18 hours later - it would be better to be "around 18 hours time" etc
• Touching on a notification should open the app and take you to that entry

After building the MVP in about a week, I spent the next week iterating on it, whilst preparing to submit my app the the App Store. It's my first time publishing on the App Store, and I learned a ton.

There are quite a few things you need to do, which I hadn't thought about. Namely:

• A contact email and privacy policy. I registered https://shirabe.app and contact@shirabe.app.
• Screenshots for various device sizes. I used the iOS simulators in Xcode to take these

I spend most of my time building a simple landing page, cleaning up the rough edges of the app, and planning my marketing strategy. For now I'm going to release the app as free, and aim to get people I know (both personally and via /r/LearnJapanese) to try it out and get feedback. Long term, I'd like to charge a 1 off flat rate, probably $1.50 or so.

After trying what feels like every dictionary and spaced repetition app out there, I decided it was time to have a crack at the problem myself.

As a lifelong student of Japanese, I'm constantly looking up new words I've read in an article, or heard on a podcast. Problem is, if I don't hear them again, I forget them hours later.

My idea is a simple Japanese dictionary app that sends period reminders of words I've looked up recently.

The MVP is a simply a form that submits a query to an API, and shows the definition. It then gives me a notification of the word a few hours later, the next day, and the following day. This helps reinforce the meaning.

I hacked together a iOS app using the new SwiftUI in about a week, and started using it immediately. I've still got a lot of improvements to make, but the MVP is already serving me well!