Show HN: Daily writing app built using SwiftUI, and Swift UI

Show HN: Daily writing app built using SwiftUI, and Swift UI(apps.apple.com)

3 points by rlindsey123 5 years ago | 3 comments

Hey HN, Ryan here - I started Daily Prompt off as a side project to learn how to code - I found Swift to be a great language to get start with. It’s an iOS app where every day, users receive a new writing prompt to spark their imagination and to get them writing. You can share your writing with the community, and give each other feedback.

Fast forward 2 years from this being a side project - it now has over 20k overs and I quit my job a few months ago to work on it full time. Apple featured it as App Of The Day in the UK last year which was a nice point of validation.

Not going to lie, when SwiftUI was brought out I got really excited and jumped into using it right away. Big mistake and headaches, although now it has grown up a lot and there’s a lot fewer bugs and seemingly random behaviour!

Backend wise, I’m using the Firebase platform. Specifically, Auth, Firestore, Functions (written in Javascript), Storage, Crashlytics, Remote Config, Analytics, and A/B testing. For a ‘newbie’ like me it has been a godsend and the pricing so far has worked out really well. Revenue last month was over $2k and Firebase costs were around $3.00

The apps free to use, so feel free to check it out. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

rajnathani 5 years ago | |

Congratulations on your solo success. $2K in monthly revenue is great (so far)!

Developer question: Is Swift UI mature enough at this point? Where do you feel it needs improvement when it comes to developer experience?

rlindsey123 5 years ago | | |

Thanks so much! Yeah it's not much yet hopefully it continues to trends upwards. There's still lots of improvements to be made to SwiftUI, and a lot of it still requires using UIKit. So it's definitely still early, but even with a lot of the quirks I still find the coding time a lot quicker than just plain Swift. I'd say it's a good time to start getting to grips with it, where it truly excels right now is in reusable views. In terms of developer experience, there's a lot of work needed to be done to build out the amount of API's; you'd be amazed at how hard sometimes the most simeple task can be. Second part would be Xcode errors. They suck and make debugging an absolute pain. A lot of the time the error is vague or even missing the problem. Lastly, backwards compatability is an issue. Some of the fixes they are making for it are only available on iOS 14> such as StateObject, so things like that make it annoying. All in all though, I'm still a fan and slowly beginning to move to SwiftUI!