An alternative could be something like "Make the most of your days".
I find the duolingo course very slow paced, gems and gamifications are just bad.
I built it for myself as I wanted to practice writing in my target languages, while also wanting to learn new words... The idea was that hopefully I would remember the words if I could associate them to my journal for that day.
It's a little clunky, but give it a go if you're interested!
Right now it's a bring-your-own claude token model, but let me know if you're not comfortable with that.
And of course there are competitors, many of them. There are also many free language learning resources. But, you did not said which language you are learning and whether you are beginner or not. And most of free resources are made for specific language.
I'm getting a lot out of Anki with premade decks these days, combined with watching tons of video content.
It's stored in a VPS hosted convex backend. I'm currently building functionality to export data :)
I was also keen to see how the whole system fits into my life before I paid, and since it take 66 days ;) I thought it would be nice to see if it actually worked before I decided to pay. Just a thought. I almost made it all the way through!
Curious how you used AI to migrate the website into an app. Could you share more about that process?
Great job -- shipping something is always exciting and doing so in such a short timeframe is something to be proud of.
This is true for every app with IAP. It’s how I typically decide if I’ll download an app with IAP.
But I'm not even going to bother looking if an app can't clearly advertise its price.
It just feels like a dark pattern, like they're intentionally trying to trick me from the very start.
Maybe the price will turn out to be fine, but it's sure not building trust from the start.
Duolingo is just another mobile game, but pretending to be a learning app.
They are also easy to build - you need one primitive: basic text storage, although scheduled push notifications are great to have. No need to sync stuff, no sharing/permission model, no scale issues you can’t solve with a b-tree SQLite index.
I think another factor is an increase in productivity-lifestyle content influencers, the sort of people who talk about Notion on TikTok. Speaking of Notion there’s like a zillion user-created habit tracker templates for Notion too. I work at Notion but don’t use it daily outside of work.
I agree. I've been tempted lately to write my own local todo + notes + calendar app that fits the way I think about tasks and time. Kind of like developing a software glove for ones mental model. It's no wonder there are so many "gloves" in this space, everyone's model is unique.
100% this. They fall into the same camp as "self-help books", "life coaches", and to certain extent "spiritual gurus".
Usually what happens is a lot of other people in the world also feel the same way as me and if they like how I have approached the app then they would download it and use it and I think that's how you get a lot of different types of habit trackers coming up all the time
It isn’t a bad deal at $30 but it’s just enough for me to go “oh” and not really open the app/push through.
maghfoor•1h ago
Some history: A couple of days ago my app finally got approved and released on app store.
Overall really happy with the release. Now I finally have something that I use every single day. Whereas previously I was using various different apps to journal, track habits, track my weight and manage tasks etc. Now I have all of that in one place.
Initially it was a website that I built for myself but I realised that something like this is better built in an app after speaking with lots of people.
I used Convex dev for my backend and that honestly made the backend part of creating this part very easy because I could just use the same structure I had for the web app. Convex was my choice because even for a website I wanted the data to always be in sync whether I access it on my phone or laptop.
The most annoying part about building an app is having to go through the review process of app store. For a website, I can just make a change and it can be live in less than a minute. But the app store review process alone took me 2 weeks to release this.
Using AI made migrating the website into an app really easy. I had some components like heat-maps and graphs which would have been really difficult to migrate over if I was doing this a couple of years back.
The idea itself actually came from reading lots of productivity books and then stumbling upon an interview from Jim Collins who talks about how he tracks his own life and makes sure it's going in a direction that he wants
pmcarlton•1h ago
maghfoor•1h ago
paulgerhardt•1h ago
Would love to see less front loading on the registration side - I fell off onboarding because I couldn’t get through the 12(!) page questionnaire.
The value proposition is clear, just let me use the app. Notes (my current solution for this) doesn’t make me read summaries of other people’s research every time I open the app :-)
joshuanapoli•1h ago
maghfoor•59m ago
iammjm•29m ago
thefourthchime•24m ago