Suntime

Hopefully the first of many! Our free period ended at midnight Saturday (EST), and our first few paid downloads started Sunday.

We're in it for the long haul. Working on refining our marketing strategy and clarifying exactly what niches we appeal to most. One obvious next goal: getting our App Store conversion rate up.

We got featured by AppAdvice on the 22nd, kind of randomly: https://appadvice.com/app/suntime-sun-moon-timeline/1499018429

The app was free for its first week, and downloads took off almost immediately after getting posted in the AppAdvice app. Glad to have gotten lots of immediate feedback and ratings!

The project started as a sabbatical project. I was mostly looking to build up intuition about solar and lunar cycles by learning about astrodynamics, and maybe get some experience with mobile development.

In the early days, this was all a highly experimental side-project. I wrote shaders to simulate the color of the sky, and neural networks to generate pretty clouds. The app was very nearly a magical talking mirror. Seriously.

Thankfully, I had a lot of help from my partner, and feedback from friends. The design of the app took a turn towards its "timeline" look around October 2019. Work picked up substantially around January 2020, and it went into beta on April 1.

I'm very glad to have had supportive beta testers. The feedback we got was great, and the app is much more functional because of it. Seeing your own designs fail is a humbling experience. Seeing revisions succeed is exhilarating.

The app is free from launch through the 28th. We're hoping to get lots of early reviews and feedback. With any luck, this release will be the first of many!