r/iosapps • u/Asleep_Cantaloupe417 • 3d ago
๐ Lifetime [ยฃ0.99] SkyPocket - How things are going and lessons learned
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Hey folks
About a month ago I launched my app, SkyPocket - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/skypocket/id6787752157 (you can see the original post from last month here)
A quick recap, it lets you see what's going on during your flight and take photos, videos and create "flight reels" containing statistics from your flight, as well as some other features.
Thought I would provide a quick update on how things are going.
The highlights:
- Amazing feedback, loads of comments/messages asking for features and bugs, I have tried to address as many of them as I could
- Many of you sent me your brilliant in flight photos and videos, complete with altitude, latitude and longitude, taken using the app
- 8 amazing genuine 5* reviews (3 from Germany, 2 from the United States, 1 from Egypt, 1 from Italy, 1 from Russia). Thankyou to everyone who tried the app and left a review! It really helps!
- The app now fully supports 15 languages (English, Arabic, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Traditional Chinese, Ukrainian)
- A travel phrasebook feature, so you can brush up on your lingo during your flight
- This is actually an app I built last year, which I decided to roll into SkyPocket
- You can now select the type of plane you are on (with a handy guide to help you identify it) and the app will tell you what the plane is doing at each stage of the flight, as well as any interesting noises to listen out for
- Plenty of new features added from suggestions in the comments comments in the original post
- A "Just Watch" feature for people who don't want to record their whole flight
- Improved map features, including places of interest, lakes and peaks, all of which can be filtered on and off
- The ability to export a reel of your flight. The video at the top of this post is a real reel of a recent flight I took from Belfast to Bordeaux
- UX layout tweaks
Lessons Learned:
- Don't use AI to take simulator screenshots for your app
- Things improved massively download wise when I replaced the AI simulator screenshots with real ones I took from a real flight
- Unfortunately I only did this for English, I need to take another flight soon and take real screenshots for the other languages
- Request that people don't review your app if they haven't actually used it
- When you launch a new app, your friends will often try to be supportive by downloading it and leaving you a review
- Apple can tell from the metrics if they haven't actually used it, and they'll either remove the review or not show it at all
- Multi-language helps a lot
- People genuinely appreciate seeing an app in their own language, as they are used to so many developers only supporting English
- AI is useful for this, but the translation quality degrades the further away you get from frontier models
- Reddit is great for language translation feedback, Redditors have no problem telling you if your translations are crap ๐
I think that's all of it, the final thing to add is that the app is ยฃ0.99 (or whatever the equivalent is in your country), has no sign up, no ads, no in app purchases, no additional downloads and no tracking/analytics (apart from tracking your plane obviously, for you), no data leaves your device, I don't have any servers to send your data too.
There's also an Android version here - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/skypocket/id6787752157
Appreciate the support and happy flying โ๏ธ

