FWIW: Your initial proposition, "Your days are slipping away." is a negative framing. Maybe this is a good way of appealing to people's fears, but I thought it was depressing and was not eager to read more.
An alternative could be something like "Make the most of your days".
APP NAME - Three Cells: Your Life System
Some history: A couple of days ago my app finally got approved and released on app store.
Overall really happy with the release. Now I finally have something that I use every single day. Whereas previously I was using various different apps to journal, track habits, track my weight and manage tasks etc. Now I have all of that in one place.
Initially it was a website that I built for myself but I realised that something like this is better built in an app after speaking with lots of people.
I used Convex dev for my backend and that honestly made the backend part of creating this part very easy because I could just use the same structure I had for the web app. Convex was my choice because even for a website I wanted the data to always be in sync whether I access it on my phone or laptop.
The most annoying part about building an app is having to go through the review process of app store. For a website, I can just make a change and it can be live in less than a minute. But the app store review process alone took me 2 weeks to release this.
Using AI made migrating the website into an app really easy. I had some components like heat-maps and graphs which would have been really difficult to migrate over if I was doing this a couple of years back.
The idea itself actually came from reading lots of productivity books and then stumbling upon an interview from Jim Collins who talks about how he tracks his own life and makes sure it's going in a direction that he wants
Impressive work for a solo effort.
Would love to see less front loading on the registration side - I fell off onboarding because I couldn’t get through the 12(!) page questionnaire.
The value proposition is clear, just let me use the app. Notes (my current solution for this) doesn’t make me read summaries of other people’s research every time I open the app :-)
I agree. And I dont understand how this isn't a universal rule for all of software: let the user use the thing ASAP. Just let me fucking play with it instead of forcing me to read intros, watch videos, click through a tutorial, etc. Just let me explore and interact! And only then also offer me some guidance that I can jump in and out of.
I couldn't agree more, for any apps I make I try to make the on boarding zero
Yeah, maybe it would be nice to have a fast-track onboarding option for common goals: lose weight, finish homework or chores, etc.
Thanks for the feedback, I will implement something to skip onboarding maybe for users who clearly understand the value proposition
Does your app have a name?
Yeah, it's called Three Cells: Your Life System on Appstore
Congrats, maghfoor. But the lack of price transparency is a real turn-off. Nothing on the website or in the App Store — you have to download the app to find out how much it will cost you.
For what it’s worth, in the iOS App Store, you can scroll down to look at the “In-App Purchases” drop down menu, and all of the prices are shown there.
This is true for every app with IAP. It’s how I typically decide if I’ll download an app with IAP.
That's helpful, thank you.
But I'm not even going to bother looking if an app can't clearly advertise its price.
It just feels like a dark pattern, like they're intentionally trying to trick me from the very start.
Maybe the price will turn out to be fine, but it's sure not building trust from the start.
That is the standard way to advertise your price in the App Store. What is more transparent than.. clearly posting your price?
I'm talking about the website that has been posted.
Making the app cost X amount makes it immediately obvious how much it costs. IAP do not share this, even if they are posted publicly off in some corner.
Wild. I've been using iPhones for 17 years and it took until today for me to learn this. Thanks j_bum.
There is no free option, so hiding it under IAPs is kinda shady too.
So how much is it for those of us non iOS people?
Anyone should be able to view it, even without an Apple account: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/three-cells-your-life-system/i... (bottom right):
> Three Cells Weekly $2.99
> Lifetime Access to Three Cells $29.99
> Three Cells Weekly $2.99
The ratio here feels a bit off, $155.48/y or $29.99 for life screams "trying to push you to pay a lot for an app I know you won't stick with" rather than "we've got great value options for any type of user". There is a 7 day trial as well, so even more confusing as to which kind of user is supposed to want the weekly payment.
Insanely expensive weekly subscriptions are the new (scammy) meta in B2C apps. I find it off-putting as well.
People are just hoping they can skip from "hobby project" all the way to a project that funds a couple salaries just by overcharging for subscriptions. Apps that are meant to cater towards unorganized people are the worst for this because they know you won't stick with it. A week trial is just short of how long you'll likely use it before you forget or realize it's not working for you.
My guess is it’s unavailable since it’s an iOS app
I meant how much is it since I can't install it to find out
Does anyone know what makes habit trackers such a trendy project in the last few years? In a world of possibilities, why do so many people make so many habit trackers?
My take is that the right workflow for people is quite varied. Everyone wants something that’s low friction and will keep them engaged but these daily behaviors are fundamentally high friction habits, so existing solutions are rarely satisfying in the long run.
They are also easy to build - you need one primitive: basic text storage, although scheduled push notifications are great to have. No need to sync stuff, no sharing/permission model, no scale issues you can’t solve with a b-tree SQLite index.
I think another factor is an increase in productivity-lifestyle content influencers, the sort of people who talk about Notion on TikTok. Speaking of Notion there’s like a zillion user-created habit tracker templates for Notion too. I work at Notion but don’t use it daily outside of work.
It's the same with mobile games.
There are only a limited number of game mechanics, people install for the theme and come back because of it.
You can take a 1:1 copy of a game, reskin it 12 different ways and 1 of those might be a hit.
For apps like this there aren't that many ways to track what you're doing, but people like different kinds of UX.
> Productivity-lifestyle content influencers
100% this. They fall into the same camp as "self-help books", "life coaches", and to certain extent "spiritual gurus".
> My take is that the right workflow for people is quite varied.
I agree. I've been tempted lately to write my own local todo + notes + calendar app that fits the way I think about tasks and time. Kind of like developing a software glove for ones mental model. It's no wonder there are so many "gloves" in this space, everyone's model is unique.
I would like notion to support this kind of glove making perfectly but right now it’s too slow and high friction to make sense for the domain for most people. Currently it only works for people with huge friction tolerance, and it’s missing quality calendar tooling & trustworthy configurable push.
For me personally I did try a lot of these habit trackers and notetaking systems and none of them quite worked for me so I just decided to build something that's very specific to how I like things. I didn't just build a habit tracker or whatever just for the sake of building another one, I built one that specifically suits my needs.
Usually what happens is a lot of other people in the world also feel the same way as me and if they like how I have approached the app then they would download it and use it and I think that's how you get a lot of different types of habit trackers coming up all the time
Everyone thinks it’s what they need until they realize they don’t.
They are easy to make and people are very opinionated about what works best for them. Although I'm close to 40 and I feel like they mostly don't help at all. If you're motivated you don't need them, and if you're not motivated they won't motivate you.
They are a great little project to procrastinate from doing something useful.
Hey, congrats on the launch! I think the onboarding was really interesting -- love the different illustrations. For consumer apps, everything needs to be as easy as possible, because you're competing with YT Shorts, TikTok (crack-level distractions). On iOS, I hit one roadblock where the keyboard blocked the "next" button -- small detail, but that required some thinking.
I was also keen to see how the whole system fits into my life before I paid, and since it take 66 days ;) I thought it would be nice to see if it actually worked before I decided to pay. Just a thought. I almost made it all the way through!
Curious how you used AI to migrate the website into an app. Could you share more about that process?
Great job -- shipping something is always exciting and doing so in such a short timeframe is something to be proud of.
Hey thank you so so much for the thorough feedback, it's very much appreciated! I will have a look at these bugs and fix them. I mostly just get time to work on this on weekends and evenings so progress is a bit slow but better than nothing nonetheless
Off topic, anyone building Duolingo alternative?
I find the duolingo course very slow paced, gems and gamifications are just bad.
There's https://lingonaut.app/ , which is not open-source but at least open data. It's sort of like early-days duolingo with volunteer-driven courses. Some of the courses are surprisingly well thought out (if yet to be implemented to a usable extent), but quality will be mixed. I don't think they have an answer for proper pacing at the moment, but being a free product they're at least not incentivized to keep you repeating the same content indefinitely.
I'm getting a lot out of Anki with premade decks these days, combined with watching tons of video content.
Not a duolingo alternative, but I recently built a (WIP) web app for journaling in your target language with LLM-powered feedback and in-context word discovery.
I built it for myself as I wanted to practice writing in my target languages, while also wanting to learn new words... The idea was that hopefully I would remember the words if I could associate them to my journal for that day.
It's a little clunky, but give it a go if you're interested!
Right now it's a bring-your-own claude token model, but let me know if you're not comfortable with that.
If it is too slow paced for you, then you are not looking for duolingo alternative. You are looking for something entirely different. The whole Duolingo deal is fun, relaxing, low effort learning in exchange for slower progress.
And of course there are competitors, many of them. There are also many free language learning resources. But, you did not said which language you are learning and whether you are beginner or not. And most of free resources are made for specific language.
Sounds like you actually want to learn a language. You don't need a duolingo alternative, you need youtube, textbooks, podcasts and grinding vocab on Anki.
I started watching Dreaming Spanish videos and started improving like 10x faster than with duolingo. At least with comprehending other people speaking.
Specifically for Kanji I am building shodoku.app
It is very different from duolingo though. No gamification, only two types of cards (reading and writing) every card has basically all the information about that kanji available from the dictionary. Content is sourced directly and unaltered from a couple of open sourced dictionary, so no AI or content writing either.
Equally, feels like there should be a duolingo marketplace - want to learn electronics, maths, history etc through the duolingo framework - could be 'short' courses type materials, or ongoing/never ending type learning.
I've bought a few courses from various places, but I want bite size and daily learning.
I am trying prospanish (prospanish.co.uk) free lessons on youtube. I think this approach of pyramid/Lego learning is fastest and easiest way to quickly learn how to converse.
Am I missing something? Is this really worth being at the top of HN?
Tough talk given your post history mate
If there was an Android version, I would have gotten it. The privacy agreement seems adequate enough on my first read.
Unfortunately I'm not leaving Android for iOS, so I wish you success and eventual expansion to Android.
Congratulations! Beautiful design, very simple and appealing. The onboarding flow filled me with optimism, which I appreciated.
That said, I bounced off at the pricing. The $30 lifetime price isn’t something I find inherently too expensive, but I need to see if the app works for me before committing to it. It was weird that if I went forward with the free trial it would automatically put me on the exorbitant $3/week price. That option was repellent and got me worried about forgetting to either cancel or make the purchase. Compounding the issue was uncertainty about whether I even _could_ make the lifetime purchase after accepting the free trial.
Then I lost momentum and started thinking about how I was about to drop $30 on an app that’s just some HN poster’s 4-month project, and I have no clue how crippled it will be if (when) you decide to shut down the API.
If you’re confident the app itself is habit-forming, I’d recommend just letting people use it for a couple weeks and then hitting them with the paywall. And when you’re asking for that kind of money and using the word “lifetime”, I’d describe how you’re going to guarantee that to the user, even if they’re the only person who ended up buying your app.
Edit: Now I’m stuck on the payment options screen with no way to delete my account. Not happy about that.
Thank you for a thorough review. It's very helpful honestly. You raise some valid concerns I will make the following changes.
- I will add an option for the user to delete their account upon hitting the paywall if they don't want to continue. - I didn't want the app to be free to begin with as it doesn't attract serious users and also because I'm an indie maker and free users is not something that I can ultimately afford at this current stage. - You're right, I should have a way for the user to trial the app and then pay once instead of the trial being on the weekly subscription only.
As for guaranteeing lifetime access, a lot of web based products offer lifetime access and I guess it's just a matter of trusting the maker if they will support it. For my particular app I know that I've been involved in the productivity space for quite some years and only now making an app that suits my needs. I imagine myself using this for all the years to come and if I stop using it, it's self hosted on a server I own and I will keep it live forever. If the user doesn't trust that then that's completely fair and fine. No issues with that.
Lots of useful feedback, thanks again for the write up! Still building and learning and trying to be as genuine as possible.
What’s the value proposition here, exactly? You could replicate this functionality 1:1 by using a very simple spreadsheet with a couple charts - it wouldn’t take more than half an hour to make, you’d retain full control over your data and you wouldn’t have to pay $3/week for a product that can disappear at any time.
This looks nice! Do you plan to build integrations to do some fitness auto-tracking? For example apple fitness, or garmin connect?
Haha funny that you mention that because yeah I would like to have that in the future. it would be nice to have all my Strava data synced into this sometime in the future
On the pricing, it feels a bit pricy for lifetime, though something like $10 yearly would be probably better all around but does ruin the position of full purchase so
It isn’t a bad deal at $30 but it’s just enough for me to go “oh” and not really open the app/push through.
Does filling the entire landing page with only "punchy" sentences actually work? It feels like I am reading a trailer.
What is the reasoning behind the pricing model? 2.99 weekly but only 29.99 for lifetime?
If I'm honest I haven't thought about it fully yet but atm I felt comfortable enough to give access for 29.99 forever. And if users don't want to spend that much and maybe only want to try it for a couple of weeks then they can get on the weekly plan with a free trial
One thing I noticed is the app doesn’t support larger fonts very well. Kind of a deal breaker for a lot of us. For example the login screen has text that overlaps making it very difficult to read or use.
noted, thank you for the feedback. I will improve on this. Didn't test this case during my development phase. Much appreciated
Thanks for the quick response.
Nice! Exactly the things i try to log in my daily note, with the addition of streak visualization, boom! How is the data stored? Didnt find anything on the site, exportable?
Thank you for the lovely comment!
It's stored in a VPS hosted convex backend. I'm currently building functionality to export data :)
If you are so innclined the app may serve, but reality is that you are who you are and any attempt to force your unconscious is going to fail. Be nice to yourself
anything like this but for android?
You could build a solid alternative in Google Sheets in a couple minutes. It’s basically a simple visualisation of a database table with 4 columns.
Is "Duolingo for X" supposed to be a good thing?
Duolingo is just another mobile game, but pretending to be a learning app.
I think so. Duolingo for X means low friction, lots of positive feedback, and probably more healthy then doomscrolling
True, but "more health than doom scrolling" is like saying "more healthy than shooting yourself in the foot".
Any ETA on the Android app? Or mobile web?
Your app doesn’t support dark mode :(
This is neat, but I already have a todo app that lets me tag tasks; I think this is not for me.
Android version?
I think that I have heard or read "Make the most of your days" in various ads and inspirational motivators too many times. It is something that makes me ignore whoever is saying it, because it was overused by everyone else.
Dude, that is so true. I think I agree with you and your reframing. Going to change it to that
And just like that, changed it in under 1min. Beauty of web dev.
you should reconsider, make the most if your days sounds like new years resolution that will end by the time you run of of ham
I think your comment is more a statement about you and your past experiences, because I vibe with "make the most of your days" in a positive way
Sounds like soulless generic ad copy that you see everywhere to me(respectfully, that's just how I read it).
That's fine. I'm not saying that particular example was great. Just that it might be better to have a positive rather than a negative "vibe".
carpe diem eh? never heard that before :)
You could consider running an A/B experiment, and track which treatment users engage with most.
I actually think about my life slipping away almost daily, but the reframing works too.