How do solo iOS makers actually measure usage?
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The App Store shows downloads, revenue, crashes. Fine as a pulse check. Not enough if you care what people do inside the app: which paywall they hit, whether they finish a session, whether a feature even got used.
For Briskly I built a small event tracker and a private dashboard for that. It works. I’m just not sure it’s the smartest use of solo time, or if there’s a simpler setup most people use.
If you’re shipping alone (or basically alone): what do you look at week to week? App Store numbers only, a third-party tool, or something you built yourself? What’s the least you need before the metrics actually change what you ship?
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the biggest question is whether people are actually using the feature i worked hardest on. thta's the number i keep checking.
@jessicaflou0 But what tool shows you that? Are you looking a database?
building your own dashboard is cool but i'd always wonder if that time would be better spent improvement the app itself.
@george_rosevear how do you improve it if you can't see which parts are used and which aren't?
i like keeping things simple. if a metric doesn't help me decide what to build next i probably don't need it.
@akhilesh35602 Is there a specific metric you look for?
i've stopped looking at downlaod too much. i'm more interested in whether people open the app again a few days later.
@haider_murtaza3 yea I have a metric on my dashboard to measure "stickiness"
I built my own tracker once. six months later i realized i was spending more time improving analytics than improving the app. did you ever hit that point?
@aleksander_brousseau yea I could see this trap happening with me, although it's nice to see what the most common path is people take on the app Vs looking at a table of data and trying to make sense of it
Buffup.AI
whats one feature you almost removed beacuse the data said nobody cared?
@sansa_grey I don't have enough usage yet to know for sure but I can see a pattern forming, people seem to manually input tasks more than use the AI scan which is interesting!
The build-your-own-dashboard trap is real, I have watched people spend more time on the tracker than the product. The way I have started thinking about it is to pick one behavior that would change what you build next week, not what looks good in a chart. Your AI scan versus manual input finding is actually a great example, that tells you whether the core value proposition is landing or if people default to the safer, more familiar action out of habit rather than trust. I would resist adding more metrics until that one answer gets acted on, since a dashboard with ten numbers you never open is worse than one number you check every Monday.
I still check app store connect way more than my analytics dashboard. old habits.