The full release

Having worked hard on getting the app ready for the full release, I'm seeing the first finish line coming closer at a rapid pace. It would be an understatement to say that this feeling is good, compared to what it has been the last couple of weeks. I have come to a closing with the scrubs I've had with Apple, and I have now made the decision to focus on the development instead.

The week's progress

This whole week I've worked on getting the version 1.2 ready to production, with this update bringing a lot of upgrades (mostly to the backend), and mostly bug fixes. There is of course also some bad news, but I hope I can fix this quickly! The new features I've done this week is fully implemented In-App Purchases, analytics, support for all languages in the text editor and a delete account button. Let's take a closer look at this!

In-App Purchases

I won't talk too much about this, because I mostly explained this in last week's blog post. But some things I will add to it, is the fact that the price list from Apple has caused me to put a limit to the length of the interviews being transcribed. This is, in my opinion, quite unfortunate, but luckily the cap is at 2.5 hours, which is quite a long interview. But my dream was to bring an uncapped experience to the customers. Most importantly, IAP is now fully implemented on iOS, it doesn't work on Android yet (that's the bad news).

Analytics

As I mentioned in last week's blog post, I'm going to be advertising on SoMe. But when doing this, to be as effective as possible, you need to implement analytics in your app. I really wanted this to be an app without any user tracking, but that's not possible with the budget I have. I'm in need of doing advertising as effective as possible, and analytics is the right way to do this. With analytics I mean two different implementations, my own (with AWS) and Facebook. My own is the implementation I had planned on doing no matter what. This is only used for tracking errors inside the app, and purchases (only how much, not who). My own tracking is not linked to any user. The Facebook implementation, is using Meta's SDK to do analytics, this is purely for advertising purposes. It's linked to the user, but this tracking is only being done if the user agrees to it, when opening the app the first time.

Support for all languages in the text editor

This is a BIG thing for me, but actually quite an easy implementation. Before doing this Speak only supported English (A-Z) and Danish (ÆØÅ). As you could probably see, this is about the letters and special characters. To support all languages, I have found some RegExp (Regular Expression) code that uses all letters in all languages. This of course means that, when I eventually get to it, I can easily expand to every country in the world. With the list of 34 languages supported by AWS, it's all implemented already!

Delete account button

This, along with upgrading the delete recording function, will give all customers complete control over their data. This is an extremely important thing for me to have, and I can already now, assure you that in the next update, I will be expanding this data control feature set! The delete account button will go through all files associated with the user in the cloud, and delete every single one of them. This ensures that when a user want its account to be deleted, all their data is deleted with it. As I said, the fact that the users always have complete control over their data, is extremely important to me. But this also means that if someone deletes their account, their data is lost completely and cannot be recovered.

Bug fixes

This update brings a LOT of bug fixes, a lot of these bugs was introduced with implementing In-App Purchases. But let's quickly take a look at these fixes.

Bugs with switching theme mode: When switching theme from darkmode to lightmode (or the other way), it was quite a janky experience. With the logo not switching and some text being nearly invisible. This has now been fixed, and is a lot better, but there's still one thing that needs fixing. This I fortunately have a fix for coming soon!

A bug when exporting a DOCX-document: This feature simple didn't work on iOS. It was caused by the fact that iOS doesn't support apps placing files outside of their given folders. It's quite unfortunate, but this means that on iOS users won't have a saying in where the documents are exported. On Android they still have a choice!

A bug in the text editing tool: This bug was caused by the missing support for special characters, and the fix also brought the support for every language!

A bug on the confirm login page: On smaller devices this bug caused the page to be pretty much unusable.

What's next?

The plan is of course to continue ironing out the bugs, build new features and beginning the advertising adventure! I'm a person who will never feel like Speak is totally perfect, and this also means that I will always work towards making Speak the best it can be.

I will be continuing to expand the features of Speak, with the coming big feature being that you can share a recording from voice memos directly to Speak. This is of course a feature giving some more convenience to the users, but it's not an easy task I've found! I hope I can do this with the next update.

The main objective of the next update, will be implementing ways to give people a rebate. This feature is meant to give me a boost when coming out on the market. I hope to tell you much more about this in the next week's blog post (there's hopefully some exciting news coming)!

See you again next week!

This week wasn't a long one, but it still brought a lot of great news, at least if I should say so myself! But I don't have much more to say other than wishing you a good weekend, and I can't wait to see you again next week.