My side project Visual Timer is already celebrating its 4th birthday in February. Time to take a look at what it has grown to and see what 2020 looked like in numbers.
4.302.166
This is the number of finished timers ⏲ last year.
It’s great to see that a small utility developed by a single person can help a lot of people!
Growth
Compared to 2019 the number of finished timers grew by 60% 🚀
As you can see in the above chart, the pandemic is also visible here. I guess that applies to a lot of software products in the last year.
Also in terms of monthly and weekly users there was a growth of around 20%. ⬆️
The userbase in terms of installs on active devices grew from around 93k (2019) to 129k (2020) . This is an increase of +38% YoY
The majority of the increase is again happening in the 1st lockdown of the pandemic.
Updates
Allthough there were no big feature updates in 2020, still some smaller increments where shipped.
Version 2.4
⌛️ On alarm the timer will show stopwatch for how long the alarm is ringing
🔂 You can select that the alarm sound is played only once
💡 You can set the theme to follow your device’s theme (i.e. Automatic dark/night)
Version 2.5
🕶 Ambient mode: show reduced controls during countdown
Version 2.6
🐛 Fixed donation prompting
📈 Improved rating experience
Insights
📝 Last year there were nearly 200.000 timer presets created (+48% YoY) in the app.
Presets can be created for frequently used timer durations where its possible to specify a timer color and name your timer task. Also presets allow to add app-shortcuts to the homescreen so that you can start the preset timer by a simple tap without ever entering the app itself. Those shortcuts where used over 50k times in 2020.
🗣 Number of ratings increased to 7.609 and currently 3.209 users wrote a review.
This should even get better now with the implemented in-app rating shown above.
App ratings remained stable around 4,7.
Review Highlights
I love the Ambiant Mode. It really helps me focus.
Perfect to show the kids how much time still remains…
Functional, easy, clean, to the point, exactly what I was looking for. THANK YOU for not over-engineering. Just needed a reliable kitchen timer and this does exactly what I want it to.
Just like the “time timer” but better because the time limit can be customized, saved, and the colors changed. NO ADS & FREE. I’m so thankful everyone can have access to this important tool. ❤️❤️❤️
So effective in making kids manage their tasks in time. Perfect
Outlook
In 2020 there were also a lot of feedback ideas submitted.
I try to keep a balance of addressing feedback and adding increments for specific use-cases but still protecting the app experience of getting bloated for the majority of users who do not need to much personalization.