September 2021 Updates

Posted on 15 October, 2021

Hello, friends!

If you’ve been reading these regularly, you might have noticed that there was no first-Wednesday-of-the-month post last week, nor was there a mid-month update in September. There are two reasons for that.

First, there hasn’t been much to report. September was pretty quiet, aside from releasing a very early, mostly-incomplete version of Per’s redesign to internal testers.

Second, I’ve decided it makes sense to send out just one update a month. Most of my time goes towards consulting work (gotta pay the bills, after all!), with only a couple of hours a week set aside for working on my own apps, dealing with Business Stuff™, and writing these updates—so from now on, I’ll be writing a single update on the 15^th of every month.

And hey, today is the 15th, so here you go!

September In Review

Thought Detox v2021.05 was released on September 3^rd, and the update focused mainly on translating the app to French and making a few minor design changes. The app’s “Back To School” sale continued from the end of August through to the 12^th of September, but it didn’t really generate any sales.

Here’s what the download numbers looked like for September:

Per: 3 downloads (no change)
Thought Detox: 0 downloads (-100% ▽)

Revenues and proceeds on sales are estimates based on the information I get from Apple, in US Dollars.

App Sales (what customers paid Apple): USD$0.00
App Proceeds (what Apple pays me): USD$0.00

Now that consulting income is making the business profitable, I’ve decided against continuing to include monthly expenses in these updates — frankly, for expenses like software, it can be a bit tricky to determine if it should count against app revenues or consulting fees, so it doesn’t really add value to include it.

App Updates

Thought Detox

There’s not a whole lot going on with Thought Detox lately. Sales are pretty low, but then I haven’t been doing much to market the app at all, so that’s not entirely unexpected. I still want to bring the app to iPad (and maybe even macOS), but I’m setting it aside temporarily to work on Per.

If you need a private place to work through negative thoughts, consider getting Thought Detox on the App Store.

Per

The redesign of Per is, as I mentioned above, underway. The designer I’m working with has some really solid ideas on product features, and I’m loving the new look we’re bringing to an app that:

hasn’t had an update in over five years, and
didn’t look all that great to begin with.

The new version of Per will be a free upgrade with an IAP purchase to unlock some new, premium features. I don’t really have a timeline for it, but I’ll be sharing more here and on the Dropped Bits Twitter feed as progress is made.

In the meanwhile, you can download the original version on the App Store.

One More Thing

The Dropped Bits website needs some love, especially the blog. For now I’ll be making a couple of little fixes for visual and navigation bugs, and eventually probably re-write the thing — or perhaps just move it (back) over to a hosting platform.

Anyhow, if anything breaks, do let me know!