The App Works. People Just Can't Find It.

Every three months I sit down and look at how Unplugged is doing. How much money it made, how many people downloaded it, how many stuck around. It's a reminder in my calendar, which is honestly the only reason it happens. This time I pushed it back a week because I was too busy building things. That turned out to be a pretty good summary of the problem.

I've always tried to be open about how the app is doing, so this time I want to share the real numbers. Partly because I love reading posts like this from other indie developers. Partly because writing it down forces me to be honest with myself.

The goal for the summer was simple: get people to stay. Earlier this year, a lot of people would download Unplugged, try it for a bit, and quietly leave. Some subscribers would cancel after a month or two.

So I spent the summer building. I wrote about everything that shipped in the previous post. This one is about what it actually did.

Some of it worked really well. Some of it didn't move at all.

The good news: people who subscribe are staying longer than ever. At the start of the year, almost one in five subscribers cancelled every month. Now it's fewer than one in twenty. The app earns more from subscriptions every month than it ever has, about €233 a month right now.

The less good news: that number is growing very slowly. It went up €16 this summer, compared to €41 in spring. I was hoping to reach somewhere between €350 and €500. At this pace, that's about two years away.

And overall, the app made less money. €999 this summer, down from €1,434 in spring. September was the weakest month of the year.

If subscribers are staying, how can the app make less? Because most of the money comes from new people buying for the first time. Fewer new people showed up, so fewer people bought.

How an app like this does really comes down to three things. How many people find it. How many of them decide to pay. And how long they stick around.

The last one is in great shape. People stay.

The middle one barely changes. Out of every hundred people who download Unplugged, about four start a free trial or buy something. That's been true all year, in good months and bad. And people who have an Apple Watch are about twice as likely to pay, which makes sense for an app built around the watch.

The first one is the problem. Fewer people are finding the app. About 1,800 people downloaded it in May. In August it was closer to 1,200.

So the app does its job. When the right person finds it, some of them pay, and once they pay, they stay. They just aren't finding it as often.

This was uncomfortable to realize, because almost everything I built this year made existing users happier. Which is great! But none of it brought new people in. Siri support is genuinely useful, but nobody goes to the App Store and searches for "battery app with Siri". Nobody sees it in a screenshot and thinks "I need that".

I have about ten hours a week for Unplugged, next to a full-time job and a toddler. For most of the app's life, almost all of that time went into building.

For the next few months, about two thirds of it goes into helping people find the app, and one third into the app itself. That means better wording on the App Store so the right people find it when they search, new screenshots that show the watch first, asking happy users for a rating at a good moment (coming in the next update), reaching out to a few people who make videos about Apple stuff, and making the most of the new iPhone Duo.

I'm not spending money on ads, apart from a tiny amount on a few watch-related searches that already pay for themselves. Right now, each new download is worth roughly 25 to 30 cents to me. The last time I tried ads more broadly, each download cost me about 76 cents. That doesn't add up.

The app still gets a third of my time. But I'm asking a new question before building something: will people notice it? Can they see it, search for it, or show it to a friend? Custom complications pass that test. They live on a watch face people look at all day, and they look great in a screenshot. Some of the bigger things I'd love to build, like battery history and forecasts on the watch, will have to wait a bit.

I owe you an honest update here. I've said iPad support was coming for a long time, and it's actually close. But the closer I got, the more questions I couldn't answer. A lot of people have more than one iPad. Which one sends the alerts? Which one shows up on your watch? What happens when one sits in a drawer for a week? Every answer made the app more complicated, and I'm honestly not sure the result would be worth it.

The work wasn't wasted, though. Most of what I built for bigger screens turned into support for the new iPhone Duo, which is coming very soon.

Finishing iPad properly would still take a lot of time I don't have, and it's hard to justify without knowing it really matters to enough of you. So this is where you come in. There's a feature request board in the app, and I look at it every week. If iPad matters to you, or anything else does, vote for it and tell me why. It shapes what I build more than you'd think.

Mostly because you might wonder why I'm suddenly talking about the App Store and the iPhone Duo launch so much.

But also because this is what being a solo developer actually looks like. What I want to do is build. Try an idea, see it come alive on my wrist. That's why Unplugged exists. What the numbers are telling me is that building alone isn't enough right now, and that the work keeping the app alive is the work I enjoy least.

So I'm doing it anyway, and I'll try to keep it fun. The better Unplugged does, the more time I can give it, and the more of the stuff I actually want to build becomes possible.

There's one small early sign I'll take. People who downloaded the app in August stuck around a bit more than before. It's only one month, so I'm not celebrating yet. But it's a start.

If Unplugged has been useful to you, the most helpful thing you can do right now is tell one friend with an Apple Watch about it. And if you think I'm reading this wrong, I'd honestly love to hear it. Just reply.

Written by Christian Skorobogatow