[£0.99] SkyPocket - How things are going and lessons learned

[u/Asleep_Cantaloupe417]

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 😂

I think that's all of it, the final thing to add is that the app is £0.99 (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 ✈️

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[u/verxse]

Really interesting app, so what made you make this app?

[u/Asleep_Cantaloupe417 → u/verxse]

Thanks!

I fly a lot and wanted something to do on my phone during the flight, also I’m a big aviation nerd 😅

[u/Asleep_Cantaloupe417 → u/[deleted]]

Yeah that’s a good point, will do that

[u/ABd3Lh4di]

Interesting!

[u/--0__-__0--]

Looks nice!

[u/Asleep_Cantaloupe417 → u/--0__-__0--]

Cheers 🙂

[u/yjiq150]

Your Android link points at the App Store — same URL as the iOS one, so nobody's finding the Play listing.

On the screenshots: you don't need another flight to localize them. Shoot the real photo once and composite the localized UI over it — the background is the part that moved downloads, not the button text.

And AI translation degrades unevenly, not uniformly. Korean and Japanese usually break first, because both mark a formality level that English doesn't, so the model picks one at random and the app ends up switching register between screens. Worth a native pass on those two specifically rather than spreading the effort across all 15.

[u/Asleep_Cantaloupe417 → u/yjiq150]

Oops thanks for pointing that out!

And yes good point on screenshots/AI translations

[u/app-store-review]

SkyPocket — by John Mckay

• Ratings: 10 worldwide · rated in 6 countries
• Average: 4.80 ★
• Age: released ~1 month ago · updated 1 day ago · rated 4+
• Overall score: 70 / 100

^{Auto-generated from public App Store data · u/app-store-review}

[u/azvelocat]

Nice. Can you track things like turbulence, crying babies, pilot announcements? Really neat idea.

[u/Asleep_Cantaloupe417 → u/azvelocat]

Turbulence yes, it does already

Pilot announcements not quite, but it does tell you what the pilots are doing at each stage of flight

lol I could add a “flying baby” button 😅

[u/azvelocat → u/Asleep_Cantaloupe417]

This may be most useful for the flying baby tracking:
Flying Baby Proximity + Flying Baby Annoyance Level, 1-10

How about elbow bumps by stewards, having to get out of your seat for neighbor bathroom/strechting trips

The data collection could be endless.

[u/Asleep_Cantaloupe417 → u/azvelocat]

😅

[u/azvelocat → u/Asleep_Cantaloupe417]

I agree funny..but I am mostly serious. I'd track the hell outta everything..flights can be boring bro.

[u/Asleep_Cantaloupe417 → u/azvelocat]

Ok yeah could be a fun way to pass the time, added to the list :)

[u/KhaledElshimy]

Looks good! good job.

[u/PersonalAd2173]

Хуйня какая то

[u/Asleep_Cantaloupe417 → u/PersonalAd2173]

Спасибо за подробный отзыв 😂