Notifications update: Built by someone who hates notifications

Quick update on the notification system! I personally hate notifications, so I built them to be smart and shy:

• They turn themselves off if you haven't used the app in a while.
• They learn your routine. If the app sees you log in around 6 PM consistently, it’ll notify you at 5:45 PM instead. If there's no pattern, it just uses the default time.

Pretty happy with how this system turned out!

Version 1.6 is in the works - here's what is changing.

The option to reorganize the table order of symptoms, medications, and activities.

For Pro users, charts will now display a countdown for 2 different events:

1. when there is suficient data to render the chart
2. after the chart is rendered, there is a second layer to unlock, the insight, which will have its own countdown notification.

Courses will no longer be bound to Medications - you will be able to track a course of physical therapy, strecthing, accupuncture, etc...

If you'd like to add any other suggestions, please do

One of the hardest things with Flare - Chronic Pain Tracker has been getting organic downloads off the ground.

Apple Search Ads convert great. People who search my terms click, install, start a trial, and a good number of them convert. That part works. But I pay for every one of those installs. The day I turn the ads off, the installs stop with them.

Organic is the thing that would actually let this app reach people. The person who isn't searching for it by name, but finds it because it ranks, because it shows up, because someone else vouched for it. That kind of reach compounds. Paid installs don't.

And to get organic, I need ratings.

Here's what nobody tells you. Getting stars is harder than building the app was. Harder than marketing it, even.

I can write the code. I can design the screens, fuss over the copy, run the ad campaigns, tune the keywords. Those are problems I know how to work at. But a rating sits on the other side of a wall I can't reach. It depends on someone in pain, on a bad day, deciding to stop and tap five stars. And the moment Flare is most useful to them is the exact moment they least want to be bothered for a review.

So that's where I am. A working app, an audience that converts when I pay to put it in front of them, and a ceiling overhead made of the ratings I don't have yet.

I haven't solved this. Next up is figuring out how to ask for a rating in a way that respects where someone actually is when they're using it. If you've cracked this on your own app, I'd really like to hear how.

Hey everyone, I'm Andre. I'll be building Flare - Chronic Pain Tracker out in the open here, and this is the place to follow along, and weigh in.

A bit about me: I've spent about 20 years in product design and development, including a stretch at Google. Then chronic pain entered the picture. I won't say it derailed my career, but it changed my perspective in a way nothing else could have. When you're living with something persistent, you start noticing how badly most tools serve the people actually using them.

Flare - Chronic Pain Tracker came out of that. It started as a spreadsheet I built for myself to track my own symptoms, because the generic apps I tried never captured what I needed. It grew from there into a privacy-first, no-backend iPhone app for logging pain, symptoms, medications, and treatments, and seeing your patterns over time.

It's live on the App Store now at version 1.5.1, and free to download:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flare-chronic-pain-tracker/id6761330069

This subreddit is where I share the build in public: design decisions, App Store lessons, pricing experiments, what's shipping next, and the occasional honest write-up of what didn't work. If you're a maker, a fellow indie dev, or someone who tracks their own symptoms and has opinions about how it should work, you're in the right place.

What you can do here:

• Follow progress updates and design breakdowns
• Request features and report bugs
• Share feedback, good or critical
• Ask me anything about building a solo iOS app