Making Day & Night

I have been asked about my experience making and publishing an app to the AppStore so I thought that this would be as good of a spot as any.

My app is called Day & Night  and the idea had come from a Reddit post . This idea of changing wallpapers based on time of day had been accomplished by others as well as me making scripts and cron jobs to eyeball the times.

The First Version

So when I first set out to make the app I had to think what would make it different and make it so people would want to buy it.

1. No scripts required
2. Would use actual sunrise / sunset times

The first came when I implemented just a basic app that held on to the image file locations and ran NSTimers. I then used data provided by sunrise-sunset.org . I realized that the app needed to cache the data it received as well as function without the user’s location and internet.

This came to be a mashup between NSTimer and NSBackgroundActivityScheduler.

The first version of this app was $0.99 and had only the image through a file-picker and sent location data to an API request to sunrise-sunset.org .

Publishing

This version of the app was approved after modifications to parts of it’s UI to conform to Apple’s model for the AppStore.

Soon after publishing I had gotten feedback from customers that had used my app. The most helpful feedback were criticisms and feature requests.

Requests included

• Ability to add dragging and dropping files onto the part of the app that represented the time.
• Control multi-monitor support
• Higher refresh rate
• Offline date calculation

The first two were added easily but the second two weren’t possible with the current API I was using. Then some Redditor brought up ceeK/Solar  and I now had a way to calculate sunrise and sunset times offline. However the framework had used Swift struts and needed to be reinitialized for every check and update to the location.

The app then would have to hold on to all the initialization data and fire multiple useless calculations every time it checked conditions that might be called in multiple places to keep it up-to-date.

I became aware that this didn’t suit my needs but could. I had then forked the repo to BrandonRoehl/Solar  where I made the modifications necessary to convert it into a class that only initialized the version of sunset sunrise that was needed being able to cache calculations and update times without reinitialization. And after implementing it in my own app offered a pull request  on the original repo.

Number 2.0

For the second version I had implemented everything in the first Version as well as changed the monetization scheme of the app to a Freemium based product.

I had done this because I had read somewhere, don’t remember where

90% of your sales come from 10% of your customers

I had implemented the Freemium version and had actually seen an increase in the sales showing far more people were willing to give the app a try when it was free than when it was only paid.

So this app even with that scheme and 450 units on itunesconnect  this will never pass the money it took to publish it, but I have learned a ton along the way and will continue to maintain it for the few who’s lives I’ve improved.