Show HN: Patterns – Habit Tracker App

[degisner]

Hi everyone

I'm a Notion-addicted person and love to build my own template to cover different aspects of my life, either work or personal stuff. Once, I wanted to build a habit tracker template, and I realized Notion was not the best solution. You can organize it in a much more efficient way just with a pen and a piece of paper. However, the best tool should live on your devices and have a correct structure. Then, I decided to try to build an app using SwiftUI and SwiftData.

The goal was to make it a very basic version in one month. But it took me two months. I tried to add only the core features for MVP and see if it works for others. On Twitter, it already received some love, and I'm very excited to share the app here to get even more feedback.

Let me know what you think

[simonbarker87]

Lovely looking app, well done. I hope you're able to build enough of a business around this to keep the updates and improvements flowing.

To those complaining about subscriptions, it's the only viable way to build a business around an app now (even one small enough to justify hobby time spent on it when it's not so fun any more).

Why?

1. Customer acquisition cost is sky high, after the initial release bump, getting new users is a trudge and expensive, the amount people are willing to pay for a one off is too low to make most apps viable.

2. Software isn't one and done, even a little app like this needs annual updates to keep inline with the OS.

3. Users say they don't want new features, but they do, to do that the dev needs to be incentivised to keep working on it.

4. Subscriptions = better software ... because the dev gets to keep working on the app.

5. They allow indies in to the market, bigger companies with enterprise offerings and more routes to market can charge one and done, free, ad supported etc. Indies need regular predictable income, subscriptions provide that.

The people who say "give me a lifetime price" are really saying "give it to me free". Even those who do land up paying the inflation adjusted correct price for it based on what you paid back in the day (seriously, look at the inflation adjusted price for the one and done software from 20 years ago, it's laughably expensive compared to a few bucks a month sub) land up costing the dev money in the long run. Any established indie app developer (especially if they have server costs) who offered lifetime regrets it after a few years.

[HenryBemis]

I had made one app for iOS back in 2017. What people don't get is that even if the changes on the iOS are minimally impacting YOUR app, you still need to be reviewing the iOS changes, testing, updating it constantly (every couple of months you need to make sure it's up to par). Also the time from clients' questions, getting feedback and making improvements, etc.

The fee also hurts. Especially if this is how you make a living. I pulled the app as the costs + income - time was not worth it (I put a big price-tag on my time)

> 4. Subscriptions = better software

this is the way to go, and one better has a darn good app because nobody will be paying you $1-$2-$5-$10 per month in perpetuity if it's not great

[astromd]

The problem with most habit tracking apps is that they don’t put your habits in context with the rest of the day. For example, let’s say you miss a day reading, and that becomes a pattern. Current apps may not surface the fact that you’ve taken on too many evening commitments because they can’t show you your calendar.

I’ve been using Chronicling, another iOS app by an indie dev, and it lets you track just about anything, but since you can’t get data out easily you end up having a silo of events about habits without any sense of why you may or may not be keeping habits.

So, I’m building my own activity tracking now with a grist database since they have a nice API and in the end you end up with SQLite files which are highly portable. I am integrating a bunch of iOS shortcuts and also using n8n to auto populate as much as possible into the tracker so that I can correlate habits with other daily activities.

[degisner]

This is the reason why there are so many different habit app approaches. My understanding of habits was to see it kind of from the bird's eye view. I want to grow it and cover more cases like repetitive habits, reading data from the Health app, etc.

[nbbaier]

Do you have any of that work written up or the code up somewhere?

[tsurba]

Like others said, subscriptions suck, and especially since there are apps like ”Habit List” (which I use) that have a one-time payment of only 6€, I’ll rather use that.

It should not be a complicated app to make and maintain. The yearly Apple developer payment sucks but that is not my problem.

[vapidness_is]

I think subscriptions are great especially for solo projects like this. They align incentives between the developer and the customer and can support maintenance and feature requests. If it's a one off payment I'm worried the app will die and not be supported.

[warabe]

I use https://github.com/iSoron/uhabits This is actually really a good app!

[bloopernova]

Does Loop support a variable schedule? Like "every 3 to 5 days"

[degisner]

The main view looks similar. I love this approach!

[helpfulmountain]

Hard to understand why something this simple would need iOS 17? Seems potentially worth it to digging into ehy you can't do a slight refactor to support ios 15,16

[simonbarker87]

Interactive widgets is iOS 17 only. Also, since it's a new app (and I think) a new-ish developer, I doubt they want the hassle of supporting old OSes for a key app feature.

[danproductman]

In the the post he mentioned building the app with SwiftData. SwiftData came with the iOS 17 release.

[anonymouse008]

Probably SwiftUI dependencies - onChange was changed in 17 which breaks and complicates a lot of code

[SingAlong]

I love the design. Thank you for making this.

I like the fact that you have a lifetime plan. Given that this is a mobile app, having a lifetime plan is easier to pay-and-forget.

Hope you find success with this app.

[degisner]

Thank you for the support!

[mezod]

The app looks good so far! As the indie developer behind https://everyday.app I'm happy to see more indies joining the market :) You have a lot of work to do ahead!! heheh

Cheers and happy to help!

[degisner]

I've just checked Everyday. Such a wonderful app! I'm going to dive deep into the competitors' functionality rabbit hole soon to see how far I can go lol.

Thank you for being polite and positive. Before, I got only bad reactions from other competitors (if they were really competitors).

[Void_]

I used this one for a while: https://polarhabits.com

However these apps should integrate with HealthKit.. I want to run 30km/week, it should be able to track that.

Beeminder is cool with their visualizations.

[HenryBemis]

Cool shameless plug AND a very nice interface.. I really like the look of it!

[illiac786]

Suggestion: make it possible to track events rather than habits, without a monthly/weekly/daily objective, and then a couple of stats (day of the week / hour of the day graphs for example)

[degisner]

Good suggestion! I'll consider it.

[lucharo]

I love the concept of this app, I organise my habits in this way using an excel spreadsheet but I really like the idea of having this as a minimalist alternative to that

[sintezcs]

Is there any reason for regional restrictions? The app is not available on my AppStore (Russia)

[lnalx]

I ditched all apps for habits, focus, goal oriented. I realized my brain could do that for free and without technology, with some work.

[seec]

I think most people do not realize that the real secret is just doing the thing most of the time and not overthink the times the thing could not be done. And many don't understand that time is limited but energy and focus also is. It does not matter that stuff are planned/schedule or that there are blocks of "free" time, you really can't maximize efficiency for everything, and it would not make a significant difference anyway. The key is strong focus on what matters and letting everything else in the background.

This is why very often I get absolutely stunned at how much inefficient crap people put up with in their life, of course at the end of the day they have no real time/focus power to do anything worthwhile.

[neontomo]

The task of managing your habits can also become another thing to put energy into. When it's frictionless it helps get stuff done, but when it's complicated you end up organising and moving information around instead of becoming more effective.

[pknerd]

does anyone know the Android alternative?

Or I request author to make one

[crabmusket]

I've been using Loop for years, I find it very simple and efficient to use. It's open source and has just enough features to do its job well.

[scns]

https://habitica.com/static/home

A gamified approach for both Android and iOS.

[vapidness_is]

I use https://conjure.so/ it's by far the best habit tracker I've found

[mezod]

https://everyday.app supports android and ios too

[degisner]

I wish I could build an Android version using SwiftUI... This is so sad I can't cover both platforms atm.

[wirrbel]

What does it other than habitty

[sneak]

Thank you for not including surveillance in the app. I’m buying it to show my support for this decision, even before I know if I will use it or not.

Edit: spoke too soon. It seems to hang on “Loading pricing plans…” so I can’t seem to. It’s good you offer a lifetime plan (the only way I would buy it) but subscriptionware is repulsive. Please consider just not using subscriptions.

[bossyTeacher]

Expecting not to have a subscription for a mobile app in 2023 is not realistic.

For an app to be available on the app store, even if no features are added, needs to be regularly maintained. That maintenance has a cost. If you want to have an application with no maintenance, just side load an app file and be done with it.

[bigblind]

> [...] but subscriptionware is repulsive. Please consider just not using subscriptions.

I get where you're coming from, especially if an app has no service component, but it's inevitable if a platform has no good way to charge for upgrades. And as much as some people would like to buy a version of an app once and keep using that same version forever, platforms also make that impossible by changing the environment an app runs in in backwards-incompatible ways, so the software needs to be maintained, and that has a price.

[robertlagrant]

> subscriptionware is repulsive

This is far too extreme. It's not repulsive. Just don't choose it if you don't want it.

[degisner]

Thank you for buying the premium! I don't really love the subscription type of paying as a user as well, so I included the lifetime option.