Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by yroc92 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

yroc92

Any chance we could check it out?

View on HN

Sure: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/veggie-garden-planner/id132992...

Suggestions are always welcome.

My friend is also working on an Android version, though it doesn't have feature parity (yet).

I'm not into gardening myself, but looking at all of the other comments people responded with I can see that you have done a great job -- and also, you know, the fact that it's been doing so well too ;). Nice work :)

Nice App! Love little niche Apps like this that work well for their sole task.

Shows there is a need for paid Apps!

What a coincidence, you're in the same small town as the company I work for! ;)

Great app btw and congratulations on last year's success :)

The world is a small place! I once worked for a startup, one of our investors was from Herford, apparently got rich off Bitcoin. We visited their coworking space, it was pretty fun.

You're probably talking about Oliver Flaskämper, right? We're renting an office in his coworking space!

Hah, we might have met then!

... and just last week we were thinking about utilizing exactly that co-working space. Small world indeed :)

That's pretty cool! Have you thought about making it into a PWA and ditch the proprietary ios/android ecosystems and just allow anyone with a browser to use it? It doesn't seem like there is much in this app that NEEDS to be a "mobile" specific app. It looks like you could do it all with html/js and some local storage. I'm a big believer in open crossplatform systems, when it's possible. Obviously if you need access to hardware sensors, etc, it wouldn't work very well.

For a big portion of the app, I would agree (arguments about native feel aside).

But well, there is the virtual planner feature that makes heavy use of carefully tuned iOS gesture recognizers for zooming, panning, dragging, tapping and holding, all in combination for a smooth and useable editor on a small screen.

Not that I have actually tried, but I suspect I would have to lay more groundwork to implement the same experience with the browser DOM. This could of course just be a lack of knowledge on my part, but my time is finite :)

Hi, web app dev here. It’s possible to do. Whether it piques your interest or is worth your personal effort to do is of course up to you, but it is doable. Some may scoff, but I’d even say it’s possible to do it elegantly.

Can you give some examples of simple open cross platform systems that make money?

I like my apps to be apps and a lot of the "Apps" that are HTML/js are janky cross platform and are tricky to pay for (vs one touch on ioS)

"Make money" is a misnomer, but successful PWAs tossed around here include Uber, Starbucks, etc...

Sorry - but Uber is very much a app first app. Most people using it are coming through the "proprietary" ecosystem parent wants to get rid of.

I don't use starbucks, but I wouldn't be surprised if it also had a proper app store app and didn't require users to use a web browser to access the app.

If anything - this proves the user preference for apps vs websites.

This is a totally random suggestion but, I used to work with a Marijuana company that wanted something almost exactly like this to track their plants between different strains, lifecycles etc. that were on a grid system. This was a few years ago. You might want to check out that market and might be able to re-use a lot of this feature set?

GROWTRACKER on F-Droid!

That looks really nice! I work for a competing Garden Planner, it's really good to see some more effort put into this space

Very cool. My girlfriend (and probably her father) would love this, but they're both on Android. Any plans to port it?

Didn't link it before, but my friend is on the task: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.bentosoftw...

Really neat! Have you considered a cross platform framework like Flutter or React Native so you could deploy to both?

Looks nice! As someone thinking about building an app, how are you balancing the app's free functionality with paid functionality? That's the tricky thing — you want the free functionality to be useful, but you also want as many people as possible to upgrade.

My girlfriend and I share a couple raised beds at the local community garden. We talked about building a similar app like this together, looks like you beat us to it! Will check it out!

I would use it. My wife would use it. Then I read the comment about being iOS only.

Fingers crossed for the future of your friend's work.

I didn't word my above post clearly, but the Android version is actually already available as I said here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22100642

Most notably though, it doesn't have the virtual planner yet.

My mother will love this. I bet she had no idea she needed it as well!

As a gardener myself... This looks super handy :)

<humour> There’s no ‘e’ is potato</humour>

Dan Quayle has entered the chat.

https://m3u-editor.com/

This does not seem to be it. GP was talking about something to do with gardening.

Edit: I see, you linked without reading what we were talking about, so you linked to the thing OP made, not the thing GP made.

Or they accidentally clicked the wrong level and linked there, since it was a little bit irritating that the OP did not provide a link - I mean I was about to ask for one.

Sry for the confusion my bad, too late to edit unfortunately. As pointed out this is the link to the OP post that was missing initially as well.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com