
Alpenglow has just hit 100 active subscribers after introducing In-App Subscriptions in October, shortly after iOS 14 was launched. Alpenglow allows users to view Sunrise, Sunset, and Golden Hour times for their location alongside Sunrise & Sunset Forecasts. 

#### Some Backstory

Alpenglow started as a free app back in 2016. It looked quite different as the app was focused on crowdsourcing sunrise/sunset quality reports from users to power notifications to other users in the area. While this worked, it required way more users to be really useful across the world. A great example of this idea is the [hello aurora](https://www.hello-aurora.com) app, which crowdsources sightings of the Northern Lights, which is way more localized than the whole globe.

Later in 2016, I became aware of [SunsetWX](https://sunsetwx.com) who created a model to forecast sunrise and sunset quality using many meteorological factors. They opened up their API, which I helped beta test for some time in the early versions of a pivoted Alpenglow. The app remained free with no revenue, and once the SunsetWX API became paid, I paid for it out of pocket.

In 2018 I introduced the ability to tip. This covered some of the costs; however, the tip amounts were quite low, and I continued to pay most of the running costs out of my pocket.

![The Original Tip Jar](/images/blog/alpenglow-100-subs/tipJar1.png)
<div align="center"><p><em>The original Tip jar in 2019.</em></p></div>

At the start of 2020, I made some updates to the app to allow tips to unlock a couple of features. Features included the ability to see further into the future rather than just today and tomorrow, and a more accurate location was used to retrieve forecasts. I think the biggest draw was the ability to subscribe to forecast notifications, which would deliver the forecast for sunrise and/or sunset an hour before. This quickly increased the number of tips to cover 90% of the costs month to month rather than about $10 a month (if lucky). 

Apple featured Alpenglow on the App Store Today Page in August.  With the feature driving way more downloads, I had to reach out to SunsetWX to see if I could increase the subscription past the currently offered tiers as Alpenglow was very close to hitting its daily request limit. An amazing problem to have! They noticed I had adjusted the tip system and pointed out that the non-commercial subscriptions were no longer applicable according to their terms, increasing the subscription cost five times. Albeit with more headroom for requests. 

![Net Revenue until September 2020](/images/blog/alpenglow-100-subs/graph1.png)
*Net Revenue between December 2018 - October 2020 including the additional tips thanks to the Today Page feature in August*

#### Alpenglow v6.0
Fortunately, at this time, I was already working away on Alpenglow v6.0 after Apple's World Wide Developer Conference in July. The update ended up being a complete rewrite of the app using SwiftUI and included a restructuring of features within two tiers of In-App Purchases. Alpenglow Plus is unlocked via a one-time tip, and Alpenglow Pro via a subscription that has a monthly, yearly, or one-time lifetime option.

I also introduced the same structure within the Android app, albeit with a more limited feature set while I continue to get the Android app in line with the iOS version. 

With 100 subscribers across both iOS and Android, these now cover the SunsetWX subscription. Alpenglow's Subscribers are on course to cover all of the monthly running costs in a couple of months and hopefully a few one-off purchases, including a brand new icon from the talented [Michael Flarup](https://dribbble.com/shots/14335414-Alpenglow).

New subscribers have evened out a little since the October launch's initial hype, but it continues to go in the right direction.

![Net Revenue until December 2020](/images/blog/alpenglow-100-subs/graph2.png)
*Net Revenue between December 2018 - December 2020 showing the increase from the introduction of Subscriptions & additional unlockable features.*

#### What's Next?
Apple has been in touch for some artwork for a possible feature in the App Store. I've implemented the ability to remotely put free users into a lower usage mode so some value can be provided to all users if it is looking like limits may be hit. SunsetWX has also been super helpful and has temporarily increased my limit if a feature surprises us. I may stick with the increased limit and use the increased limit to power some new features for Plus and Pro users.

I've also been sitting on a watchOS app for a couple of months, trying to ensure that Complications are working smoothly. I planned to release the watchOS app in v6.1 but ended up pushing the submission back multiple weeks before removing it from the release to get the update out.

I'm also working on implementing trials for the Pro tier, with some additional improvements to reveal the savings when going with the yearly vs. monthly option.

![New Pro IAP Screen with Trials](/images/blog/alpenglow-100-subs/pro1.jpeg)
<div align="center"><p><em>New Pro IAP Screen with Trials.</em></p></div>

I'm hoping to document the journey a little more now that I have a new site & I'm focusing on building up revenue by introducing new features. So watch this space.

Alpenglow - Hitting 100 Subscribers


With everything going on in the world I recently decided to make CouchQuiz free and started hacking away at an update I initially started last year but never competed. I’m pleased to report it is now live on both the iOS and Apple TV App Stores.

In the last week I have added the ability to play CouchQuiz multiplayer across multiple households to make social distancing a little easier. Someone can set up a game on their Apple TV or iPad and Apple TV’s or iPads in totally different locations can join the same game. Doing away with the need to point a webcam at the Apple TV/iPad in Zoom.

Players can then join the game from their own iOS devices or via any browser via CouchQuiz.tv/play just like they normally would.

In the coming weeks I’ll be adding the option to send “tips” to support further development of CouchQuiz and to help cover server costs. We’ll also hopefully update some of the categories with new questions and introduce a few new ones along the way.

Search for “CouchQuiz” on the Apple TV App Store or download it on iPad [here](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/couchquiz-multiplayer-trivia/id1044141738#?platform=ipad).

CouchQuiz v7.0


With under a week until developers from around the world start to descend on San Jose for Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference.

ConfFriends (formerly WWDC Family) has been updated for 2019 to include a bunch of new features to help organize get-togethers with other attendees of WWDC and neighboring events. I even managed to get “WWDC” back into the App Title.



### Gatherings

This year with the closure of Beacon, which previously made it easy to plan smaller events at previous WWDCs, I added the ability to add Gatherings to ConfFriends. Anyone can add a gathering to the app and provide all of the details, including whether a ticket is required.

Gatherings can really be anything, a trip to a particular restaurant, city meetups or even whole country get-togethers or perhaps you want to exchange a few WWDC pins.

Each gathering has its own chat where you’re able to ask questions or organize meeting up before heading to the venue etc.

Coming soon: In an update coming later this week you’ll be able to see upcoming and past gatherings, gathering creators will be able to edit gatherings to keep things current.

### Privacy
I’ve not added any additional privacy features this year, but here’s a recap of all of the features available in ConfFriends.

#### Disable & Hide Location
You can disable and hide your location at anytime. This will remove your location immediately and will avoid adding your location back until you re-enable it.

#### Privacy Zone
Adding a privacy zone will stop the app from sharing your location within the selected area. If you enter the area the app will not update it, only updating once you then again leave that zone. You should avoid centering your privacy zone over your home or hotel so the location can’t be discovered over time.

#### Location Fuzzing
When you enable location fuzzing the app will change your location by a set distance in a random direction. The direction is set on the device and stored so your actual location cannot be determined over time. You can also select how far you want your location to be fuzzed.

#### Account Deletion
At any point you can delete your account entirely right from the app. No need to drop anyone an email and wait for days.

#### Got feedback?

Ran into an issue with ConfFriends or have a suggestion for a quick update this year or for ConfFriends 2020 then drop me a tweet or DM.

#### Into coffee?

If you’re into coffee and/or want to kick off your WWDC mornings with some chatter with other developers in town the SF iOS Coffee group is hosting a meetup each morning. It’s a great way to kickstart the day and meet a bunch of new people. You can check out the schedule at our awesome domain coffeecoffeecoffee.coffee or use our nifty app available on the App Store. Coffee’s will also be added to ConfFriends. 🙂

ConfFriends 2019


*This post was originally shared on [Medium](https://medium.com/buffer-posts/couchquiz-apple-tv-side-project-937829b72d09).*

It’s now over 100 days since CouchQuiz hit the Apple TV App Store in it’s super lean form. I was fortunate to get one of the developer kits, allowing for CouchQuiz to hit the store on November 2nd, just a few days after the 4th Generation Apple TV launched.

I thought I’d take a few moments to write about how things have gone so far including sales, promoting and thoughts for anyone who is thinking about publishing an app on Apple TV.

### Keeping it lean for v1.0
The initial plan for CouchQuiz was to be a multiplayer quiz that would allow people to connect from their iOS devices to compete against one another to answer as many questions correctly per round.

To get the app out as soon as possible I decided to focus on and get a single player mode out before working out the trickier networking code to enable multiplayer play. That way I could get the word out and also get a gauge of the brand new Apple TV App Store.

CouchQuiz makes use of Parse for storing all of the topics and questions, allowing for content to be added remotely. Brand new questions can be added without any additional review from Apple, also topical or seasonal topics can be included for short periods. For instance we have a Chinese New Year topic available currently. For v1.0 there wasn’t tvOS support in the Official Parse iOS SDK so I built out a basic client to fetch questions and swapped it out for the official SDK once available. I’ll soon be thinking about a migration plan after Parse’s announcement.

### Launching & Early Sales
Once on the App Store I promoted it through my Twitter, Facebook, Product Hunt and a few forum/reddit posts. I also went ahead and created CouchQuiz Profiles/Pages on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook ahead of pushing CouchQuiz via those avenues.

Within its first month CouchQuiz sold a total of 119 units, making the proceeds around $80 after Apple’s 30%. While not huge numbers, it seemed quite comparable to the early figures of the iOS App Store when that first launched.

![November 2015](/images/blog/couchquiz-feb-16/november-2015.png)

Within that period CouchQuiz was priced at various different tiers in the Store ranging from $0.79 to $2.99. Trying out different pricing tiers to see if any would stick.

### Launching Multiplayer ready for Christmas

With Christmas & New Year approaching, I finished up building out the multiplayer mode. 6 players could connect from any iOS device with iOS 8+ using a CouchQuiz Companion app.

![November 2015](/images/blog/couchquiz-feb-16/multiplayer-mode.png)

An approach taken with various Buffer products is to release frequently, so CouchQuiz soon hit version 2.0. I built out a new website using Squarespace, as it was the quickest way to get something online. Up until this point the CouchQuiz website was a basic landing page with “Search for CouchQuiz on the Apple TV App Store”.

Sales throughout December remained steady and not too dissimilar from November. On the 25th and 31st I decided to make CouchQuiz free, which bumped up proceeds during the proceeding few days. With 262 units downloaded, CouchQuiz hit $91 proceeds for the month with $24 of that made between the 25th and 27th.

![December 2015](/images/blog/couchquiz-feb-16/december-2015.png)

### Early 2016 Sales
In January like the previous 2 months, sales of CouchQuiz remained pretty steady hitting $94 in proceeds with 121 units.

![January 2016](/images/blog/couchquiz-feb-16/january-2016.png)

February looks to be quite a lot slower for sales of CouchQuiz. Currently at 39 units and just under $30 proceeds. Partly down to a few days off the App Store due to an expired contract, less updates to the app through the start of the month and being made free for Chinese New Year.

### Apple TV Tech Talk Advice
I was lucky enough to get to head to Infinite Loop for the Apple TV Tech Talks. There I took advantage of the various Apple staff on hand to ask them a bunch of questions and to get their thoughts on CouchQuiz so far. Even taking along my Dev Kit to plug in and show off to their designers.

If you get the chance to head to a Tech Talk or chat to anyone involved with Apple TV and tvOS then I totally recommend asking them their thoughts about your app/project.
It was super useful and got some great pointers to improve the App Store listing by making use of the 5 screenshots limit, ensuring everything is correct in the screenshots (no spelling mistakes!) and picking out keywords and adjustments to the App Store title.

On the design side I walked away with a few sketches to think about to improve the layout and readability of the app from a distance. Along with some improvements to the topic selection screen, which was great timing ahead of more topics being introduced throughout December and January. The initial version would only show 5 topics on the screen at once, switching it out for a grid layout allows for all current topics on one screen.

![Original Menu](/images/blog/couchquiz-feb-16/menu-1.png)

![New Menu](/images/blog/couchquiz-feb-16/menu-2.png)

### Listen out and ask for feedback
I’ve been proactively asking for suggestions and feedback from people I know who have downloaded CouchQuiz along with asking for it from Twitter and Facebook. While it’s sometimes tough to hear it’s super useful to help you improve your app.

A few people reported having issues with connecting older devices to CouchQuiz. They would show connected and quickly disconnect within a few seconds. I had only ever come across this once and wasn’t able to replicate it 100% of the time. I have been working on switching out the networking code to make the Companion app behave like an MFi hardware controller, which seems to be more robust and also has extra benefits like increasing the player limit. This is currently my main focus to get out in the coming week or two to solve the issues with disconnects on older hardware.

![Testing CouchQuiz out with ALL the devices!](/images/blog/couchquiz-feb-16/testing.jpeg)

### Promoting
As I mentioned earlier I posted CouchQuiz on Product Hunt, I also posted it on various forums and subreddits with some Promo Codes to get some early feedback.

Along with that, I have posted to Instagram, Twitter and Facebook since launching. On Twitter and Instagram I have kept up to date with various search terms to like, mention and follow people who mention Apple TV. Unfortunately I’m not too sure how effective it is however I’d like to thing it’s triggered a few downloads, especially through my liking spree of “Got a new Apple TV” posts on Christmas Day.

Apple have recently announced that the Apple TV App Store now supports App Preview videos. I’ve put one together this week and submitted it with the latest update to CouchQuiz.

### Closing
As with every side project I’ve started, it’s always about learning and trying something new. CouchQuiz is my project to learn more about tvOS and it’s been a blast so far and I can’t wait to get v3.0 out in the next week or two.

If you’re interested in future CouchQuiz updates, you can follow me on Medium or Twitter. Of course check out CouchQuiz if you have an Apple TV, would love to hear any feedback!

CouchQuiz — Side Project Story, Sales Figures & Thoughts from 100 Days in the Apple TV App Store


*There has been many iterations since 2013, download Buffer on iOS to check out where we are currently.*

With the latest version of the Buffer iPhone app hitting the App Store it brings with it the ability to change each profiles schedule from right within the app. You no longer have to go to the web app to tweak the times within your schedules.

For a long time it has been one of the most requested features we’ve had from the very first version of the iPhone app and i’m personally excited like we all are at Buffer to finally have this in everyones hands.

#### Change Schedule functionality on web

The UI for changing schedules within the web app contains the following elements allowing the user to make changes to their schedule for each of their profiles.

– Buttons to toggle days off and on.
– Ability to add a time to a schedule.
– Ability to remove a time from a schedule.
– Ability to edit an existing time within a schedule.
– Navigation to switch between multiple schedules.
– Button to add a new Schedule to a profile.
– Option to delete a whole schedule apart from the first one.

![Web](/images/blog/buffer-schedule-iteration/Web.png)


That’s quite a lot of elements and functionality to fit onto a iPhone screen and not only that the web app saves the schedule after a short period of time after a change is made. For iPhone we’d want a “Save” button somewhere just to add to that list.

#### Many iterations

Due to the number of elements required to change schedules within Buffer it’s taken a while and more than a couple of iterations of it to get it to this point. A point where we feel it works well and compares to the web app version. Not to say that either the web app or the iPhone version is perfect.

I’ve picked out a couple of iterations throughout the development of the Change Schedules functionality, I see these as the defining iterations that moulded it into what you see now in v2.5 of our app.

#### Iteration 1

I actually started playing around with adding this functionality back when I was freelancing for Buffer and working on version 1 of the app back in 2011.

Version 1 had a single table which had each schedule visible as a section with the schedule title displayed in the section heading. This was great for seeing everything on a single view but made adding & editing times tricky. Editing the schedule to amend days wasn’t intuative and would send the user to a brand new view to pick the days.

Profile selection throughout version 1 was done by swiping the views from left to right to navigation between the profiles. This was ok when you have a couple of profiles but when you had more than 3 or 4 then it become slow and tiresome.


![Iteration 1](/images/blog/buffer-schedule-iteration/Iteration1.jpg)

#### Iteration 2

Profile selection was an issue and caused confusion so we introduced a screen to allow the user to select the profile they wanted to tweak the schedule for.

Selecting the profile would reveal the schedule of that profile within a new view much like iteration one without the odd swiping navigation.

![Iteration 2](/images/blog/buffer-schedule-iteration/Iteration2.png)

#### Iteration 3

We then started to move our focus onto Version 2 of the app with the help of Luke Beard to bring the design of web and iPhone in line with one another. Changing Schedules wasn’t high priority as we focused on improving existing functionality and introducing the ability to connect profiles via the app, which back then was much needed.

Change Schedules sort of become a fallback “hobby” task that i’d dip into when I had some free time aside from other feature additions and bug fixes. The first iteration that sat within Version 2’s design closely resembled iteration 2 with a new lick of paint.

Adding new patterns or days was all done through a separate view, much like the iterations before.

![Iteration 3](/images/blog/buffer-schedule-iteration/Iteration3.png)

#### Iteration 4

Day selection was something that was slowing editing and creating new schedules down. I toyed around with the idea with having buttons to toggle days off and on within the view for a while and suddenly on a train I did some maths and cracked on with designing something that resembles whats in the app today.

The iPhone screen is 320 pts wide and Apple recommend that buttons are no smaller than 44 pts x 44 pts in size. 320 pts / 7 days equals 45.71 so we could fit all of the days alongside each other without to much of an issue with taps being missed by iOS.

We also introduced arrows to flick between schedules rather than showing them all within the same table. This was partly inspired by iOS 6’s Calendar app allowing you to switch between days with ease using two buttons alongside the date.

Profile selection was still done by a separate view and it was accessible from Settings through a “Change Schedules” button.

![Iteration 4](/images/blog/buffer-schedule-iteration/Iteration4.jpg)

#### Final Iteration

We felt that the design was coming together and it was nearly ready to push to our iPhone app users. One thing we had played around with quite a bit was the location where users could find the Change Schedules functionality.

The web app shows 3 main tabs Buffer, Analytics and Schedule so after trying a couple of different locations for the Change Schedules functionality we decided we should have it sit within the bottom Tab Bar. This also meant we could use the same profile selection we use throughout the app in the side menu.

Once we had moved it into the tab bar it we found it made complete sense and it reflected the exact options we have within the web app.

![Iteration 5](/images/blog/buffer-schedule-iteration/Iteration5.png)

#### Next steps…

We’re continuing to work on the most requested features our users have but we’ll be keeping an eye out for feedback about changing schedules within the iPhone app to make any improvements to make the process even easier.

If you have any thoughts on how we can make it better or you have any specific questions feel free to post them in the comments or drop me an email via my contact form. Iâ€™ll be happy to answer any questions you have.

Andy<Dev>

Hey, I'm Andy.

Featured Project

Alpenglow

From the blog...

Alpenglow - Hitting 100 Subscribers