Yet again, I’m getting to a point where I think the number of projects that I have active, is getting too high. I had similar thoughts last year, when I wrote an article titled “My App Store Clear-out”. I explained how some projects weren’t getting any time, some we’re hard to maintain, and others were just stale.
Back then, I reduced my number of projects to 5:
- Hydrate – A work in progress iOS app to track water intake.
- Qwiki – A small Mac menu bar utility for searching and browsing Wikipedia.
- Pretty Regular Expressions – An app to test regular expressions in a simple UI, for iOS and macOS.
- Tap Gap – A very simple arcade game for iOS, that was made free, as no further work is going to be done on it. But there were still people downloading it.
- Pixels Sticker Pack – An iMessage sticker pack that features a small amount of pixel art.
In the year since I wrote that, I’ve given up on Hydrate, and developed two new applications – Text Case, and SOLID. Text Case being the iOS utility to format text, and SOLID being another utility to create single colour wallpapers on iOS.
That leaves me with this:
- Qwiki
- Pretty Regular Expressions
- Tap Gap
- Pixels Sticker Pack
- Text Case
- SOLID
I’d very much like to get that down 4 or 5, with 5 being an ideal maximum. However, I would like to start a new project next year, so I should restrict myself to 4.
Of course, I will keep on the latest apps, which fills out one half. But there’s tough decisions to be made on the rest. Tap Gap is certain to be pulled, that’s already decided. But the future of Qwiki and Pretty Regular Expressions are currently unknown to me. I like both of them, and I think they’re good apps. But I just need to work out if they are realistically going to get any updates in the future.
So this is where I am right now:
- Text Case
- SOLID
- ?
- ?
- 2019 Project
I don’t want to annoy users by making a product unavailable, or officially cancelling all future updates, but most of them have been growing stale anyway. And I think I’d rather sell a limited amount of products that get regular attention, rather than a whole bunch of them that are near-to-never updated.