My Day Todos: weather update and the lite(free) version

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been quite busy preparing for the holiday season i.e. I am hoping to generate some more sales for my iOS app, My Day Todos. I have been trying to update the app to add certain features and to streamline certain things to make it a more compelling case for people to buy it. In this post, I will briefly talk about the last two(1.6 & 1.7) updates for My Day Todos and a more detailed description of My Day Todos Lite i.e. the free version of the app. I will talk about some of the challenges to releasing it and my decisions to prepare a free version without loosing the essence of the actual app. All right, let's start with the updates,

The 1.6 update: Weather info

I always thought that the app would be awesome if it woke you up, told you what you are doing for the day followed by what the weather is like where you are. I initially added this feature to the first release but I decided to remove it as it wasn't fully tested at the time and doing so would just delay the release. So as planned I added it as an update for the app. Yes the app now uses CLLocationManager to determine the user's location and then use that information to get the weather info for the area.

The 1.7 update: User Onbording

Prior to the 1.7 update(which is waiting for review), the app did not do the best job of explaining to it's users how to use it. The app provided links to videos and text based tutorials to the App Website and this is what there was an extra tab(Help) in the app. The 1.7 update removes the help tab and instead each tab(Todo, Alarms, Settings & Manage) now have pop-up that's controlled via the settings tab which will provide instructions on how to use it. I will continue thinking about how I can improve the oboarding process for the app but this should do for now and I will also make some new video tutorials that show how to use the app.

My Day Todos Lite: Free version

Finishing work on the 1.7 update lead to work commencing on the free version, as I wanted to have a better oboarding process in the app as both versions of the app share that,

I did give the Lite version quite a bit of thought as I wanted to release something for free while preserving the essence of the app i.e. only leave out the "nice to have" features from the Lite version.

Ok great, so what do I see as "Nice to have" features?

To elaborate on this, I think it's best that I define the main purpose of My Day Todos in one line: "My Day Todos is an app that can wake you up in the morning and tell you all that you are doing for the day by reading out your todo list for the day"! I think that sums it up, because that was my primary motivation for building this app and I wanted the Lite version to be able to do that i.e. preserve the essence of the app . So in the light of that statement, these are the features that I disabled in the lite version

Speech selection

The paid version of the app lets you select a voice(or speech) from a number of different languages of which I will only mention a few. It can be English with American, Australian ascent or a European language such as German or an Asian language such as Chinese or Japanese, however do note that if a non-english speech/voice like Japanese and make it read English text, it will read that with a heavy Japanese ascent. At this stage, I think this feature is a nice-to-have and I could limit the free version to just one voice and even by doing that the app can still wake you up and read your todo list to you. 

Weather

This feature is most definitely an added extra and taking it out doesn't affect the essence of the app, so it's not in the Lite version.

Icon for My Day Todos Lite

Once I prepared all the code for the Lite app, there was still one more problem to solve: The Icon. The primary objective here was to submit something to the app store real quick, I mean the iOS App Store is closed for all new submissions from 22nd Dec to 29th Dec!

The designer on Fiverr who originally made the app icon was the obvious choice but with the holiday season and all, there may or may not be any delays and I wasn't willing to take that chance. Thankfully I found this awesome site to overlay text onto an image and ended up making a little crude, but good enough app icon to submit the app to the App Store for review. For those reading this post maybe thinking that I may have shipped a buggy product in trying to rush things? well I did test it enough to make sure there were no obvious crashes as such. If you use the app and find that it crashes? then please let me know and I will try to fix it ASAP.

As it stands both the 1.7 update and My Day Todos Lite have been submitted to the App Store for review, so I hope they are approved to be released soon. 

Finally, why the rush? 

I started off this post by saying, I was preparing for the holiday season. Well...yes and my plan is to spend some money on advertising this app or have a think about how I can go about doing that. The main reason why I was holding off on spending money on advertising the app is actually pretty obvious. I wanted there to be a free version of the app when I advertise so if people don't feel like spending money on buying the app, they can at least try the free version and get a feel of what the app is. If people don't feel like buying the app that's fine too, I can only hope they find the app useful enough to keep using it and maybe give me a few suggestions on how I can improve it or report any problems with it.