Crouton turns 4 this month! It’s been a hot minute since I wrote about how things are going, so thought this was a good chance to check in.
In many ways I feel like Crouton has come into its own in the last year. When I was thinking about writing this update I went back through my camera roll and looked at all the new things that were added since the little guy turned three. The biggest of course being timer support, but there are a lot of smaller things sprinkled in there like metric conversion and notes in the meal plan. All of these changes I think (and hope) have Crouton feeling like a proper well rounded product, rather than a little hobby I tinker with in my spare time. Although it still very much is that.
A couple of highlights from the last year:
Live Activity Feature
I launched timer support in Crouton about a month before Live Activities were added by Apple, after working on and off on the feature for almost two years, it ended up being very fortuitous timing. It was a bit of a journey building for Live Activities as the API isn’t a perfect fit for timers, but I was quite happy with what I ended up with as a first version. Unexpectedly it ended up getting a prominent position in Apple’s Live Activity promotional content on the App Store, which then also caused it to get picked up by a number of websites writing about the new feature as well. It was a crazy few weeks and resulted in a snowball effect on Crouton’s downloads that lasted for a few months!
WWDC
I was fortunate enough to attend WWDC this year for the first time. It was a great opportunity to meet a lot of developers I’d gotten friendly with on the World Wide Web. One thing I wasn’t really prepared for was the feeling when people knew what Crouton without me needing to explain it to them. Coming from a small ish town in NZ I’m a relative nobody so this was quite an experience! When developing an app it’s easy to feel like you’re just working away on your own and see users as abstract numbers. So chatting with real people that actually use it was very cool.
App of the Day
On June 14 Crouton was App of the Day in the US App Store! Matthew Skiles saved me from having to download photoshop and designed me a lovely piece of artwork for the feature. This was a highlight of the year for sure.
Vision Pro
I bet I’ll have more to say on this next year when Crouton turns 5, but I’m having a lot of fun transitioning Crouton into the world of spatial computing. This is the first time I’ve been a developer at the start of a new platform so I’m excited (understatement) about the possibilities and aiming to be one of the first apps on the platform.
Building Crouton is a rollercoaster. I have a full-time job as an iOS developer, so my time to spend on it is fairly limited. This means my goals are in constant flux. Oscillating between wanting to work on it full time or perhaps just selling out and pivoting to something simple like an artisanal chutney business. All in all though I’m hyped about the ideas and features I have in mind that are still to come. I’d love to get to a place where I can dive in properly and work on Crouton full time.
It wouldn’t be an app update post without at least one metric. Here’s one I’m a little staggered by. In the last 365 days over 230,000 recipes have been saved with Crouton. That’s wild.
I started Crouton as a simple app to help me with my weekly meal planing and it’s grown into something that people use all around the world. That might be you, or it might not be, in which case, can I interest you in some chutney?
Happy cooking!
Cheers
Devin