App published - trending 2nd in payed apps on day one!

It’s true! But it turned out to just be a product of category (travel) and a small population (Norway), so when the numbers were available the day after it showed total sales of ten (thank you friends and family). Still made my heart race for a few hours before I found out the trends were country specific.

So my last update was 4 months ago. I was struggling to make the app work offline. I had to download the code and edit the project in vscode. This is where my struggles really escalated. I came in to this with absolutely no prior experience. Like I said in my first post I’m 40+, have two kids sub 3 years old and can hardly turn on the tv if I’m in some friends house. I’ll get to the challenges in a bit as they might be helpful to some but first I’ll say something about the app and my motivation.

Those who have tried flying with a toddler probably know all about the struggles associated with this. One in particular is the ear pain due to pressure changes. Turns out the best remedy for this is yawning. And on a flight about a year ago I saved a bunch of yawning images on my phone to show our daughter during takeoff and landing, based on the fact that yawning is contagious. It worked pretty well and I thought it would be a good idea for an app and when looking for it I realized it didn’t exist. So I googled how to make one and ended up using Flutterflow after a hand full of other dead ends.

It was a steep learning curve (read more about it in some earlier treads) but I got the hang of it after a while. I wanted the app to work offline and for this I needed the function to call images from assets in a randomized list. Flutterflow does (did?) not support this so I downloaded code and kept working on it in vscode. This is where LLM support really shines as you can prompt them the code and get really good help. I managed to make some rather big changes in here - like making sure the same image isn’t presented twice in a row - which I think would be hard to achieve in Flutterflow without the actions tree growing out of control.

But the main struggle was setting up the pods and getting it to actually run on a simulator. I nearly gave up when I realized downloading something I needed wasn’t as straight forward as I would think. Start by opening the terminal!? I had never even seen that thing. Then write something like “psudo install gems” Say what? Just navigating to the right directory in there proved to be a challenge. But after a bit (thanks again LLM) I felt like some kind of a super hacker writing commands and making things happen. Sometimes ChatGPT sent me in circles which of course I didn’t realize before after having completed the full circles a good few times. Even though it’s super helpful as you can copy the error message you get in the terminal and then paste a solution given to you by LLM in reality it’s not that easy as every step has a few potential solutions and when you run in to more problems along the way the timeline splits and you really have to stay focused. It is by far the most challenging thing I have ever done and I have the greatest respect to everyone who was working with this prior to LLMs!

So to cut it short. I made it work. Then when I finally submitted it after having to make two websites too - one for the company and one for the app - it was promptly rejected due to 4.2. “Minimal functionality” What a fist in the face! I wrote a long reply explaining the theory behind everything and my reasoning behind keeping it simple. Then got a two lines generic reply telling me to make the necessary changes to the app and resubmit. At this point that was never an option as that would set me back probably 4 months and I had already spent way too much time on this in the first place, but I did opt in on a call meeting with Apple not expecting much. The woman I spoke to took one look at the app and said sorry, we have clearly made a mistake here, I’ll have it published by the time you wake up tomorrow.

So all good in the end. I don’t know if this app/game will ever catch on but my motivation was really all about the journey. Learning something new. Maybe I get a good idea in the future and now I know I can do it if just given enough time.

It’s true! But it turned out to just be a product of category (travel) and a small population (Norway), so when the numbers were available the day after it showed total sales of ten (thank you friends and family). Still made my heart race for a few hours before I found out the trends were country specific.

So my last update was 4 months ago. I was struggling to make the app work offline. I had to download the code and edit the project in vscode. This is where my struggles really escalated. I came in to this with absolutely no prior experience. Like I said in my first post I’m 40+, have two kids sub 3 years old and can hardly turn on the tv if I’m in some friends house. I’ll get to the challenges in a bit as they might be helpful to some but first I’ll say something about the app and my motivation.

Those who have tried flying with a toddler probably know all about the struggles associated with this. One in particular is the ear pain due to pressure changes. Turns out the best remedy for this is yawning. And on a flight about a year ago I saved a bunch of yawning images on my phone to show our daughter during takeoff and landing, based on the fact that yawning is contagious. It worked pretty well and I thought it would be a good idea for an app and when looking for it I realized it didn’t exist. So I googled how to make one and ended up using Flutterflow after a hand full of other dead ends.

It was a steep learning curve (read more about it in some earlier treads) but I got the hang of it after a while. I wanted the app to work offline and for this I needed the function to call images from assets in a randomized list. Flutterflow does (did?) not support this so I downloaded code and kept working on it in vscode. This is where LLM support really shines as you can prompt them the code and get really good help. I managed to make some rather big changes in here - like making sure the same image isn’t presented twice in a row - which I think would be hard to achieve in Flutterflow without the actions tree growing out of control.

But the main struggle was setting up the pods and getting it to actually run on a simulator. I nearly gave up when I realized downloading something I needed wasn’t as straight forward as I would think. Start by opening the terminal!? I had never even seen that thing. Then write something like “psudo install gems” Say what? Just navigating to the right directory in there proved to be a challenge. But after a bit (thanks again LLM) I felt like some kind of a super hacker writing commands and making things happen. Sometimes ChatGPT sent me in circles which of course I didn’t realize before after having completed the full circles a good few times. Even though it’s super helpful as you can copy the error message you get in the terminal and then paste a solution given to you by LLM in reality it’s not that easy as every step has a few potential solutions and when you run in to more problems along the way the timeline splits and you really have to stay focused. It is by far the most challenging thing I have ever done and I have the greatest respect to everyone who was working with this prior to LLMs!

So to cut it short. I made it work. Then when I finally submitted it after having to make two websites too - one for the company and one for the app - it was promptly rejected due to 4.2. “Minimal functionality” What a fist in the face! I wrote a long reply explaining the theory behind everything and my reasoning behind keeping it simple. Then got a two lines generic reply telling me to make the necessary changes to the app and resubmit. At this point that was never an option as that would set me back probably 4 months and I had already spent way too much time on this in the first place, but I did opt in on a call meeting with Apple not expecting much. The woman I spoke to took one look at the app and said sorry, we have clearly made a mistake here, I’ll have it published by the time you wake up tomorrow.

So all good in the end. I don’t know if this app/game will ever catch on but my motivation was really all about the journey. Learning something new. Maybe I get a good idea in the future and now I know I can do it if just given enough time.