u/Popular-Pea-6842

A few years ago I launched my first app, Daily Planner Arcush. Starting it was much easier than what I'm dealing with now. The App Store gave it a boost in the first few days, I picked up some ratings, and with basic promotion I got it to the point where it has some users and enough revenue to cover my coffee. Nothing big, but it worked.

Recently I launched a second app, and I was sure it would go better. I know a lot more now and I understand the basics of ASO. Damn i even created nice promo video as you can see:)

But it looks completely different this time. Maybe the category is harder. Maybe it's the flood of AI-generated apps hitting the store. I honestly don't know how much that affects discovery, but it's the only thing that has changed.

The app is called Well, a mood and wellness tracker for iPhone:

- Tracks Mood, Energy and Calmness and combines them into one smoothed score

- Pulls in Apple Health data (recovery, activity) as a secondary signal

- Weekly on-device AI reflections, no chat, and nothing leaves the phone

- Shows how things like coffee, alcohol or workouts relate to your mood and energy

Here's what I'm seeing:

- Conversion is good: [15%]

- Impressions are very low: [50-100]

- I've been doing some small promotion myself, but it doesn't look like enough. And the entire reddit full of those ai slope app promotions

- ASO doesn't help much: the volumes are so small that I can't tell which keywords I could realistically win

Has anyone been through this? What would you recommend: paid ads, a different channel, different positioning, or something else?

About a year and a half ago I started feeling off a lot of the time. Irritable, mostly, sometimes anxious for no clear reason at all, I'd be watching a completely calm scene in a movie and suddenly feel like something was storming inside me. I couldn't point to what was wrong, it just felt bad.

It also felt like it kept getting worse. Bad now, better a month ago, even better before that, like I was sliding downhill toward something I couldn't handle. Eventually I saw a doctor, got diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, started antidepressants. First time dealing with anything like this, and I didn't want to just take a pill and hope, I wanted to actually see what it was doing.

⚙️ Before starting the meds, I set up basic tracking:

• A few check-ins a day: mood, energy, calmness
• Passive data from a WHOOP: recovery, HRV, resting heart rate

Not rigorous science, but way better than trying to remember how I used to feel.

The thing that actually helped most: a few months in, I stopped checking the numbers daily. When I tried to just reflect, gut feeling, comparing now to before, it still felt like I used to be doing better. Then I actually pulled up the old numbers. I was wrong. My past scores were worse than where I was right then.

Turns out reflecting without data flatters the past, since it's already over, and makes the present feel worse, since you're still in it. That's been the single most useful thing I've gotten out of any of this: when anxiety has you convinced you're on a downward slope, your memory of "before" is not a reliable witness.

🎯 What I actually learned:

• Felt like constant decline. The data showed fluctuation, not a straight line down.
• Naming a specific feeling, not just "bad," made it way easier to deal with in the moment.
• Reflection without data quietly rewrites the past as easier than it actually was.
• One day tells you nothing. Only the trend does.

Eventually turned this into an app, Well, since doing all this by hand every day wasn't realistic to keep up with. My own experience with it has been genuinely good, it's helped me a lot. I don't have many users yet, so I don't know how well this holds up for everyone, but if the tracking approach sounds useful, it's on the App Store. Happy to share a few free codes too if anyone wants to try it.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6754943732

Curious if anyone else has caught themselves doing this, assuming things are worse than they actually are, just because right now is the part you're still living through.

I live in Kyiv, and the last few years have been real, not something I can explain away as a rough week or too much stress. At some point I needed something that could actually tell me how I was doing, instead of guessing based on how the day felt.

Most mood trackers either turn into journaling with no structure, or just spit out numbers that don't mean much on their own.

So I came up with a metric, I call it Well State, that takes my daily check-ins (mood, energy, calmness) combining with recovery signals from Apple Health and turns them from raw numbers into something that actually tells me something.

Plus what I now call Reflection Lens, an LLM that stays unbiased, looks at everything, and gives me insights that actually mean something. I built the scoring around actual psychology research on mood and affect, not just a made-up formula, so it'd be evidence-based instead of just another gimmick.

I used it myself for a while with no real interface, and it helped a lot. I'm a Product Designer at a large company, So I used my actual experience and turned it into an app, no vibe-coded bullshit. Also added a couple more features that help you understand the why behind it, and go deeper if you want to.

Just launched 🚀. Would love feedback from other builders, and I've got a few free codes if anyone wants to try it.

iOS only for now, that's the phone I use, so it's what I built for.
App Store: Well App