Build and launched my first production app with expo - PeerPause
Hi! I'm happy to share that I recently launched my first app on the app store. I've been developing it for about 6 months - on and off in the afternoons and weekends, after my full time SW job
The app is called PeerPause. It's a screen time control app with a social twist: instead of relying on pure self control, you rely on a Time Buddy. You can set time limits for apps, and when you reach those limits, in order to keep using it you have to ask your time buddy for a time extension. He can choose to deny or approve your requests.
It's my first experience with mobile app development - my background being more focused on web development. But coming from a JS dev stack (React, Node, etc.) it was quite easy to get up to speed with react native and expo.
The trickiest part was dealing with the native iOS screen time APIs. I used the react-native-device-activity but also had to write some custom native swift modules for my particular use case. Other than that things went pretty smooth. Of course, the apple review process was a bit tedious - especially for someone doing it for the first time, but still I wouldn't complain about that, it took me maybe 2-3 submits until it got approved (about 4-5 days)
Next steps:
- i'm focusing on bug fixing, polishing UIs and getting early feedback from users
- ASO: not much traffic right now as it's been 2 days since i launched it, but I'll have to keep working on improving the app store listing and optimizing it
- onboarding optimization - i'll maybe try to do some experiments, see where users drop off in order to improve conversion as much as possible
- start marketing: hardest part starts now - i'll start with TikTok and Instagram as that's where my main userbase would be and the target audience for the app
here's the app link:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/peerpause-screen-time-control/id6754638744
I'm open to your feedback and would welcome any constructive criticism you might have:D I'm also planning on sharing more progress on how the app is going in the future