2024 in review
30 Dec 2024
In what’s now become a yearly tradition, here’s my end of year review for 2024. I’ll talk about how my apps performed, what I learned, and what I’m looking forward to in 2025.
If you’d like to catch up on previous years first, check out 2023, 2022, 2021, and 2020.
Overall
I set myself three goals for 2024:
Ship two new apps
Status: Achieved ✅
I actually ended up shipping three new apps this year.
In February I released SalaryPig, an app for tracking your salary. It’s pretty niche, but in December 2023 I started a new job and absolutely hated it from day one. I made SalaryPig as a way to distract myself from it. You’ll be pleased to read that I’ve since left that job and I now work somewhere I’m much happier at.
Later in the year I followed this up with two new apps, both simple quiz apps. My app Taylor’s Version already contained a quiz, and my friend Rauno suggested I split it into a separate app. A few months after that I made a second quiz app, this time about football.
To make it easier to make more quiz apps, I created a private framework named QuizKit. The idea was that QuizKit would handle 95% of the logic, so all I’d need to do is customise the questions and some theming for each app, allowing me to quickly make lots of apps like this. If each made a small amount of revenue, they could add up to make a good income.
Unfortunately, with both quiz apps I had a lot of issues getting them through Apple’s App Review team. It was enough of a hassle to put me off from making any more, so I decided to leave it at just these two quizzes for now.
- Read Taylor Swift Quiz’s introduction post
- Read Football Quiz’s introduction post
- Get Football Quizzes on the App Store
Add goal tracking to Personal Best
Status: Missed 😭
Not much to say here, I just didn’t have time, and prioritised some other things instead. I’m hoping to get to it in 2025…
Use an Apple Vision Pro
Status: Achieved ✅
A bit of a frivolous goal, but I was fortunate to attend one of Apple’s Vision Pro developer workshops this year. It was great to get some hands on time with the headset, and I was able to ship a VisionOS version of SalaryPig as a result.
Getting featured
This year something amazing happened – Personal Best was featured as App of the Day on the App Store in over 150 regions! It was incredible to be recognised and I still can’t actually believe it happened! As always, I’m grateful to the App Store editorial team for promoting my work ❤️
Delivery
Outside of the other apps I mentioned above, I shipped a lot of improvements to Personal Best, my workout app which I consider to be my ‘main’ app. The improvements were more transitional than feature based, with a lot of behind-the-scenes work focused on improving the app’s foundations for the future.
Pace customisation
Up to now, pace was always expressed in terms of seconds per mile or kilometre, based on your distance setting. This makes sense for most workouts, but not for things like swimming where you’d typically measure pace in other ways, like seconds per 100m or seconds per 25yds. To fix this, I made how you view pace completely customisable for each type of workout.
The default options are sensible so most users won’t need to change them, but for those who want more customisation there’s now full flexibility to see pace however makes the most sense to you.
All-new leaderboards
Leaderboards are one of the most-loved features in Personal Best, but they were also one of the oldest parts of the codebase, from back in May 2020. I’d often get requests for improvements, but due to some poor decisions I made with the Core Data schema back then, I wasn’t able to easily deliver them.
So, I completely rewrote leaderboards from scratch using Swift Data, with a much more flexible schema to allow for more customisation. I was pretty nervous about shipping this, in case the migration script didn’t work, but after many, many hours of thorough testing, I released it in November and there have been zero issues so far.
Improved help
I added a new Help and FAQs section to the app, with answers to common queries. I’ve maintained an FAQs page on Personal Best’s website for a few years, but I noticed that I was receiving a lot of emails from people asking things that were already covered in the FAQs. To improve this, I built the FAQs into the app directly to make it easier for people to find answers.
Price experiments
I changed some of the plumbing inside Personal Best to allow me to make use of RevenueCat’s Experiments feature, to experiment with pricing and paywall variations.
Hiding facts
I added the ability to hide facts from your workout stats, for people who don’t want to see them for whatever reason. This was driven by a request from somebody who didn’t want to see food-based facts, but I extended it to work on all categories.
Numbers
So, how did I do for revenue this year? Last year saw an enormous increase in downloads and revenue, and going into this year I was a mixture of excited about growing it further, and nervous about maintaining it.
Downloads
Personal Best’s growth continued this year, which is amazing to see. It went from 87,000 downloads in 2023 to 180,000 this year, which is just over double.
Taylor’s Version’s downloads dropped from 13,000 in 2023 to 5,500 in 2024. This makes sense, as this app is only used for replacing Taylor Swift songs in your playlists, and no new Taylor’s Version albums came out this year.
SalaryPig did ok in its debut year, with just over 1,000 downloads. I’d have loved to see more, but given how niche it is, it’s understandable.
My Taylor Swift quiz got just under 3,000 downloads, which feels pretty good for an app I built in a weekend and did no marketing for.
Finally, my poor, unloved Football Quiz app had just 169 downloads this year.
Sales
Sales were great this year, once again driven by Personal Best. It accounted for $35,000 of revenue, roughly a 2x increase on 2023.
My other apps had very minimal sales: Taylor Swift Quiz made $330, SalaryPig $200, Taylor’s Version $179, and in last place Football Quiz made just $4.
Users
I use TelemetryDeck to get privacy-first analytics in my apps.
I only track Personal Best’s active users as it’s the app I’m mostly focused on growing, and it had a healthy increase this year, with 43,000 monthly active users, up from 28,000 in 2023.
Goals for 2025
So what’s next? I’m setting myself some loose goals for the coming year. As with last year I’m not setting any revenue-based goals.
Focus on Personal Best
If the graphs above show one thing, it’s that Personal Best deserves to be my main focus. I think it has huge growth potential to become even bigger if I put more focus into making it a best-in-class iOS app. I’m terrible for getting distracted and building other apps, but this year I intend to focus only on improving Personal Best.
I have a day job that I love, but it does mean that I’m often not able to spend as much time on my apps as I want. Next year I’m going to try and block out specific evenings in my calendar to work on Personal Best, to see if that will help me balance my time better.
Build goal tracking
I’m carrying over this goal from last year into 2025, as I really need to get to it eventually, and I think it has the potential to be a game-changing feature.
Continue refactoring
I’ve been improving a lot of Personal Best’s codebase behind the scenes, like switching from callback-based APIs to async/await ones, and I want to do that along with keep working on improving performance.
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.
Personal Best
Level up your workouts
Taylor's Version
Upgrade Taylor Swift songs in your playlists
SalaryPig
Meet Trevor, the salary-tracking pig
Taylor Swift Quiz
How well do you know Taylor Swift?