Loving your game! Thanks for making it :)

Based on the polish of Wordle alone, clearly the OP did.

These are both copies of TV game called “lingo” which apparently first aired in 1987. All I know is that it was quite popular in France where it was called “Motus”

$3 is twelve plays at a 25¢ arcade game.

Yeah, buying a newspaper with a crossword on the last page is (well, used to) be way cheaper. But think of ecology! Ditching printing the news on paper in exchange for spending more electricity on charging your phones probably helped it. Maybe. Did it?

It uses the scrabble dictionary (SOWPODS, as you mention) -- if it is a playable five-letter word in scrabble, then it is playable here.

Technology-wise, I wanted to try out two things that I hadn't tried before for this project.

One was to use Expo to release on web and mobile at the same time. I've used React Native quite a bit in a professional capacity, so I wanted to check out the Expo landscape. I discovered that the web part (react native web) didn't quite deliver on what I was looking for, so I scrapped it and ported to Vite/react-ts and dropped native completely.

The other was to see if I could find a low-friction way of setting up subscriptions for a static web frontend with no first party backend. That is the reason why there is a premium subscription tier for a small weekend game like this. Turns out that this was pretty straight forward with Gumroad! In the end, I was pretty happy with the way the flow turned out (except that Apple Pay isn't supported without stepping out of the flow and heading to Gumroad directly).

That's for the stats feature that shows you e.g. your most guessed word, etc. It's all calculatated client-side. In fact, there is no backend at all!

I have an iOS game based on the same root game but with a different spin — let me know if you'd be willing to be a beta tester.

I just finished playing it on my ipad. Worked flawlessly.