One year of Flyleaf
Exactly one year ago, I launched the first version of Flyleaf on the iOS and Mac App Store. I built Flyleaf because I wanted a read-later app that offers book-like pagination that isn’t just an afterthought and that also works great on macOS. Back then, I wrote a short blog post which went into more detail.
iPhone, iPad and Mac
Now, it’s been a year. Time for a small retrospective.
Over the last year, I managed to publish 12 updates, at a steady pace of about one update per month. Most of these were essentially bug fixing and fine-tuning, but I also shipped some substantial feature additions, like the Discover view and the gesture-driven reading interface.
The worst time developing Flyleaf was undoubtedly shortly before the release of iOS 18. There were many bugs in the iOS 18 betas which caused crashes and issues in Flyleaf. It was a lot of work to find workarounds as I was scrambling to get Flyleaf running more or less stable on iOS 18. I found it very stressful to be at the mercy of Apple’s development cycle like that. I hope that I will manage this better this year.
What has been awesome is the feedback from users. I get about one email a week from someone who uses and loves Flyleaf and wants to report a bug or ask for some feature. I know this will not be sustainable forever, but for now I have been enjoying these emails a lot and reply to all of them. It’s nice to know that I did not only build Flyleaf for myself, but to hear that other people enjoy and care about it, too.
Another way this enjoyment manifests is, of course, subscriptions. Over the last year, I managed to convince over 130 people to support Flyleaf with their hard-earned money. Thats not a life-changing, cancel-your-day-job amount, but it greatly surpassed my expectations and it’s a big motivation to continue working on Flyleaf.
Overall, I’m glad I decided to go with a subscription model with Flyleaf, even though I know many people are annoyed by subscription apps. With a pay-once model, I constantly would have to think about ways to acquire new customers. Thanks to the subscriptions, I can think of ways to make the app better for existing users instead, which is much less stressful for me. It also makes the app easier to sustain with it’s small user-base.
In general, it’s difficult to get a small-time indie app noticed on the App Store. I now get between 5 and 10 organic downloads per day, which is not a lot. I only saw brief changes in the download numbers when someone recommended Flyleaf. By far my biggest bump in downloads came when Justin Pot wrote a generous article about Flyleaf on LifeHacker in September, which made a huge difference.
My only piece of advice here is to actually get in touch with individual journalists and bloggers. Sending press releases to big outlets is pretty much pointless; contacting individual authors and editors is a little more effective in my experience.
So, what are my plans for the future?
Now that the first year is over, it will be time for my yearly subscribers to renew their subscriptions. This is a little bit scary. I really hope I managed to convince people that Flyleaf is a project which makes sense to support in the long term, but time will tell how my subscriber numbers will develop.
But for now, Flyleaf remains a hobby I work on in the evenings once the kids are asleep. I still use the app myself every day, so I’m motivated to keep improving it. I hope to continue the pace of updates and actually ship some substantial features people have been asking for. But more about that later.
To keep up with the latest developments, you can follow my very occasional posts on Mastodon. If you are interested in joining the TestFlight, feel free to get in touch. Thanks for reading and thanks for your continued support!