u/suniltarge

Context: I make an iOS app called Tempus Fugit. Real swinging pendulum you can grab and flick with your finger, Pomodoro timer, blocks your distracting apps during work intervals, Picture in Picture so the clock floats over other apps, a pile of dials and customization.

For two months after launch the App Store impressions chart was a flat line. Around 200 a day. Nobody was finding it.

What I actually did:

Three TikToks a day, every day, for a month. Roughly 90 videos. Zero production. Two formats only:

A screen recording of one single feature. Not a tour, not "here are all the things," just one thing doing its thing for 15 seconds.

Or the clock running on my actual desk, filmed on a second phone. This one mattered more than I expected. It's a clock, so seeing it sit in a real room does something a screen recording can't.

Most videos land ~500 to ~600 views. Not one of them went viral yet. No follower spike, no comment section, nothing you'd screenshot. I want to be clear about that because it's the whole point of the post.

Then I wrote up what was working and posted it here on Reddit as well and got 10K views, 177 comments, 50+ upvotes (was most engaged post)

The part I didn't plan

I never shared a app download URL. Not in a video, not in a bio push, not in a comment, not on Reddit. It wasn't a strategy, I just didn't get around to it.

So people watched a clip of a pendulum swinging, went to the App Store, and typed the app name in from memory. Every install came through search.

The result: 33K impressions over 90 days, and most of that is the last three weeks. Peak day was about 1.7K. $0 on ads. A handful of Pro conversions started showing up in the back half.

What I think is actually going on

500 views of something a person genuinely wants beats 50,000 views of something they scroll past. My videos are small, but a pendulum clock is a thing you want or it isn't, and the ones who want it are motivated enough to go type a name into search. That's a much higher-intent action than tapping a link, and I suspect it's why the search impressions moved instead of just the tap-throughs.

The volume is doing the work, not any individual video. Three a day means 90 shots at the algorithm finding the right person.

Two decisions I'd repeat

About 90% of the app is free. Pro is a nice-to-have and not a wall, and I think that's why the reviews are five stars instead of billing complaints. A one-star for a paywall costs more than the paywall makes.

I built accessibility in properly. VoiceOver, Dynamic Type, Reduce Motion, a dyslexia-friendly reading font option. Apple pushes this every WWDC. Users mention it unprompted.

What I'm not claiming

One month, one app, one category. I can't separate the TikTok effect from the Reddit post, and the App Store's own search ranking probably shifted underneath all of it. Take it as one data point.

Happy to answer anything about this tiny growth.

hello, solo dev here 👋 I've been building Tempus Fugit, a pendulum clock app that turns any iPhone into a calm desk clock.

What it does:
- A real swinging pendulum you can tap and drag (it flings and settles like the real thing)
- Ticks + chimes on the hour
- Multiple hand-crafted dials/skins, widgets, and a StandBy mode
- A focus/Pomodoro timer and ambient sounds (rain, fireplace, café) if you want a work vibe
- It's free on app store. Would love honest feedback, what makes you keep it on your desk vs delete it in 5 seconds?

🔗 https://apps.apple.com/app/id6770431075

I’m a solo iOS dev with a marketing budget of exactly $0.

For the last month, I posted 3 TikToks a day about my app. Here’s what happened to my App Store impressions.

The numbers:
From Jul 6 to Aug 4, impressions sat around 280 a day for the first three weeks. Then they started climbing on Jul 27. By Aug 4, they were around 1,100 for the day, with 9.03K impressions over the whole period.

These aren’t huge numbers, and I want to be clear about that. This isn’t a “100k downloads” story. Downloads are still modest. But after staring at a completely flat graph for weeks, seeing it finally bend upward felt like a real signal.

The part that surprised me
I never used a link.
link in my bio. No link in captions. No smart links. Nothing.

No

If someone wanted the app, they had to open the App Store and search for it. Thankfully, my app has an unusual name, so it’s easy to find.

That made me realize a memorable name isn’t just branding. It can also make discovery much easier. If my app had been called something like “Focus Timer Pro,” I doubt this would’ve worked.

What I’d tell someone starting today
None of my videos went viral. The best ones only reached a ~600 views.

This was just consistency. Around 90 videos over a month. The graph didn’t move until about three weeks in. If I’d stopped after two weeks, I would’ve said TikTok doesn’t work.

I also think showing the product matters more than showing yourself. Every video was just a screen recording or shoot by another phone under 20 seconds. My app is visually distinctive, which probably helps.

Three posts a day is about the most I can keep up with while still building the app.

One important caveat
This is correlation, not proof.

I can’t attribute the increase directly because I never used tracking links. All I can say is that nothing else changed during that period. Just few feature launch, but no price change, no press coverage.

That's it. happy to answer your question if any.

A while back I designed and shipped a little iOS clock called Tempus Fugit: Pendulum Clock, a skeuomorphic pendulum clock with a swinging bob, and a few dial styles.

Recently, I was watching a YT video that kept playing in a floating PiP window while I did other stuff, and it hit me: what if the pendulum clock could float like that too? A tiny always-on-top dial, still ticking, pendulum still swinging, sitting in the corner while you work.

So I built it. The whole dial and pendulum now render into a floating PiP window that stays up over other apps.

I’d genuinely love this sub’s honest take:

• Does a floating pendulum clock feel useful, or just a novelty?
• How does the dial read at that small size, in terms of hierarchy, legibility, and the bezel?
• Does anything about the skeuomorphic direction feel dated, or does it come across as charming?

Not trying to sell anything. I just care a lot about the craft, and this community always gives thoughtful feedback. Thanks in advance.

Why I built it

Credit first: 2048 is Gabriele Cirulli’s. He built and released it free and open source, and was upfront that it was inspired by Threes! and 1024. He chose not to monetize it. Versions like mine only exist because of that decision, and I don’t take it for granted.

So why build another? Because I kept bouncing off the ones on the App Store, buried in ads, or just clunky. I wanted something slicker, and something where a long run didn’t die to one careless swipe.

That’s my actual gripe with the original. It punishes accidents the same way it punishes bad decisions. Thirty minutes of good play, one mis-swipe, run over. That’s frustrating, not difficult.

What I changed

Undo ↩️. Take back your last move. Sounds trivial, but it changes how the game feels. You stop playing scared and start experimenting.

Swap 🔁. Trade the position of any two tiles, without using a move. Different problem. Sometimes you’re not stuck because you played badly, you’re stuck because a big tile stranded itself between two that should merge. The board is dead by geometry, not by skill.

The constraint I set myself: Swap can’t create value, only fix order. It never makes a bigger tile, it just moves what’s already there. You start with one, earn another at each new 256, 512, 1024, and 2048, and can hold three. That keeps it a scarce decision, not a get-out-of-jail button.

Same idea behind both. Keep the difficulty, remove the moments that feel unfair.

13.8K downloads, no ad spend

What I think actually moved the needle:

• Localized to 38 languages. Highest leverage thing by far. You surface in stores you’d never otherwise rank in.
• Shipped constantly. 2.0 to 2.4 in about three months. Every update is another shot at featuring and a keyword re-index.
• Kept it genuinely free. Ads plus a one-time remove ads purchase. No energy timers. 2048 players bounce instantly from anything predatory.
• Chased long-tail keywords instead of fighting for “2048,” which I have no chance at.

Ongoing update v2.5 (Waiting for review state now) is a full accessibility pass, Dynamic Type, Increase Contrast, Reduce Motion, and follows your system light/dark setting. Partly because it’s the right thing to do, partly because almost no puzzle game bothers, and it’s a real differentiator.

Happy to answer anything on ASO, localization, or the App Store side.

I’ve been playing for the past four days, dedicating 20-30 minutes each day. I’ve already generated this tile, and I still have three swaps left. I’m confident that I can achieve a score of 1M very soon.

Shin Ramyun is easily available here in Taiwan 🇹🇼 but I wanted to eat Maggie style ramyun so I mixed broccoli 🥦, I also wanted to garnish it with coriander but it wasn’t available 😂

Sorry if anyone get offended since I completely changed original shin ramyun

TL;DR:

Tiny iOS 2048 game, almost no download velocity, zero ad spend. I rewrote the title/subtitle as keyword real estate and localized the listing across ~40 locales. It now ranks #2 for "2048 classic" in the US, UK & Australia (refer screenshot). Full method below + the parts I haven't cracked.

Starting point

• iOS, casual/puzzle. 2048 is one of the most cloned categories on the store, up against Ketchapp's original and thousands of clones.
• No budget, negligible install velocity. Metadata was the only lever I actually controlled.

What I changed (the how)

1. Title as keyword slots, not a brand → "2048 Classic: Number Puzzle". "2048", "2048 classic" and "number puzzle" are all indexable, and it still reads like a name.
2. Subtitle as a second keyword line + a real phrase → "Three boards. Endless merging." Both fragments rank now, and they describe an actual differentiator instead of stuffing.
3. Cleaned the keyword field instead of maxing it → cut anything already in the title/subtitle (duplication = wasted characters) and dropped high-difficulty generics I had no shot at. Filled the 100 chars with lower-difficulty, still-relevant terms picked off difficulty/popularity data, not vibes.
4. Localized for real (not machine-translated) across ~40 locales, each with a natively-phrased subtitle. Biggest surprise: a good local tagline unlocked low-competition local terms, and several hit #1 in smaller stores almost immediately.
5. Kept it tidy → nothing repeated across title/subtitle/field.

Results

• #2 ranking for "2048 classic" in major countries like US / UK / AU and up in the other App store countries as well. (refer screenshot).
• Multiple localized subtitle phrases at #1 in smaller markets.
• All from metadata → no ads, nothing off-store.

Honest caveats (where I'd love this sub's take)

• Ranking is not installs. "2048 classic" is far lower-volume than bare "2048", where I'm still buried. This is a position win, not a traffic story yet.
• Not sure how durable a #2 is with almost no download signal behind it, does it decay the moment a competitor with velocity targets the same phrase?
• Localization clearly helped me rank in small stores; no read yet on whether those markets convert.

Q for you all: on a saturated head term like "2048", is there any realistic metadata-only path upward, or is that purely a velocity game past a point? And for tiny apps → do you spread across easy long-tail in many locales, or go all-in on one high-volume term?

Happy to go deeper on any step in the comments.

My daughter (she's 2) gets completely hypnotized by the swinging pendulum clock at her grandparents' place. We don't have one at home, so being a developer with questionable priorities, I built one for my phone instead of just buying a clock.

It's called Tempus Fugit, and the part I'm weirdly proud of: the pendulum is real. You flick the bob with your finger and it actually swings, real momentum and slow decay, then settles on its own. She flicks it. I flick it more than a grown adult should. (video attched)

What it is: a pendulum clock for your iPhone that grew into a calm little focus tool.

What makes it different from the 100 other clock apps:

• The pendulum is interactive, not a looping animation. You can actually grab it.
• 16 hand-drawn dial faces (brass, noir, art deco, a few I'm too attached to)
• Works in StandBy, so it becomes a real desk clock while charging
• A built-in Pomodoro where the whole clock turns into your focus session, live on the Lock Screen and Dynamic Island, with a soft bell at each break. No streaks, no guilt, no gamified nonsense.

Cost (being upfront): free to download, and the core is genuinely free. The first dial and the focus timer never sit behind a paywall. If you want the full set (all 16 dial skins plus extras), there's a Pro unlock: $9.99/year, or a one-time lifetime for $14.99 (normally $29.99, so 50% off) if you hate subscriptions as much as I do.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tempus-fugit-pendulum-clock/id6770431075

I'm a solo dev and this has been my after-bedtime project. Honestly more curious about feedback than installs right now. What would actually make you keep a clock app on your phone? And does anyone else's kid do the pendulum-staring thing, or is that just mine?

---A bit about me, for transparency (the sub asks for it):

I'm Sunil Targe, a solo iOS developer. You can find me here:

• Portfolio: https://suniltarge.com
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suniltarge
• X: https://x.com/TargeSunil

Legal, if you want to vet it before installing:

• Privacy Policy: https://suniltarge.com/pendulum/privacy.html
• Terms of Service: https://suniltarge.com/pendulum/terms.html

We don't have a real pendulum clock at home, but my daughter (she's 2) is obsessed with the swinging one at her grandparents'. She just stands there, mesmerized, reaching for it.

So I built one for my phone that she can grab. It's called “Tempus Fugit: pendulum clock” where the pendulum is real. You flick the bob with your finger and it actually swings, then settles on its own.

She flicks it. I flick it more than I'd like to admit.
Somewhere along the way it grew up: 16 hand-designed dial faces, a soft hourly bell, StandBy support, and a built-in Pomodoro where the whole clock becomes your focus timer.

I'm a solo dev and this has been my late-night thing after she's asleep. Not selling anything just wanted to show the swing, because a screenshot doesn't do it justice.

I spotted this in Taipei and I'm very curious because I've never seen anything like it before. It has a ton of legs and was running very fast!
also, is it harmful/venomous?

UPDATE: Thanks everyone for the super quick replies! It looks like it’s a centipede (Scolopendra), which is apparently common here in Taiwan. I'm very glad I didn't try to touch it since I learned they can have a nasty, venomous bite! I'll definitely be giving them plenty of space from now on. Appreciate the help!

My niece made this for us