Experimenting with a new app

31 Mar 2024

In my quest for more revenue from my app business, I’ve made a new app: a Taylor Swift quiz.

Why

My app Taylor’s Version already features a small quiz that appears while it makes a slow request to an external API. Recently after talking to a friend I had the idea to split this into its own app.

There are a few apps like this already, but they often have really poor UX, huge download sizes, and just generally don’t come across great. I saw this as an opportunity for me to build a compelling experience, as well as a way for me to continue developing my design skills by tackling a type of app I haven’t really done before.

How

I’m wary of spreading myself too thin and taking focus from my main app Personal Best, so I set myself some constraints:

Ready in one weekend

I would spend exactly one weekend on the app, so that I didn’t end up sinking weeks into it.

No scope creep

I’m terrible for increasing the scope of my apps. My “it’ll just take a weekend” projects often grow into month-long sagas. To help me keep things lean, I defined the scope ahead of time and didn’t allow it to budge. The app needed to:

Offer a range of quizzes for people to complete. Some of them would be free, with others unlockable via in-app purchase.
Have a nice UX that would make it stand out amongst other apps. I wanted each quiz to have its own colour scheme so they’d feel distinct from each other, and I wanted to have slick animations and haptics throughout. If Apple themselves made a trivia app, it might look something like this.
Allow people to share images of their results, as this could potentially help growth.
Support iPhone and iPad.

Learn something new

Each time I make a new app, I try to do something I’ve never done before as a way of learning something I can then apply to other apps. For example when I built SalaryPig I learned how to make interactive, animated 2D graphics.

For this, I chose Swift Data as the new thing I’d learn. I want to use it on Personal Best in the future, so this would be a good introduction to it inside a real production app.

The finished product

The app is now live on the App Store. It supports iPhone and iPad, as well as macOS and visionOS via the iPad app compatibility mode.

Screenshots of Quiz for Taylor Swift

Next steps

I intend to let the app breathe and see how it performs before doing more with it. My hope is that it’ll pick up some downloads over time via word of mouth and having good ASO

If it does well, it’ll be very easy for me adapt it to make more trivia apps about other topics (e.g. a football quiz, movies quiz, and so on).

There’s also some more roads I could go down if I decide to further develop this app, like:

Support more platforms

I’ve never made an Android app, and this could be a good way to get started with that. It could also translate well to tvOS, or even Apple Watch so people can play on the go.

I’ve never included ads in an app, but if this does sufficiently good numbers it’ll be worth considering.

Stats and achievements

It’d be fairly simple to add things like this too, and I could even add support for Game Centre while I’m at it.

More purchase options

Right now, each premium quiz costs 49p. I could offer more diverse pricing, like a bundle where you get 5 quizzes of your choice for a discount, or a ‘mega’ purchase to unlock everything.

Finally

I’ll be sure to post an update in the future about how it’s performing. In the meantime, one of my goals for 2024 was ship two new apps. With this and SalaryPig, mission accomplished 😎

Thanks for reading.

To get in touch, email me or find me on Mastodon or Twitter.

If you liked this post, you'll love my iOS apps. Check them out below.