App Pause – 12 Months Progress Report

How time flies! It has been a year since I published App Pause on the Play Store (May 13 2025). I’m back with the 12-month update.

If you missed the previous ones: 3-month report, 6-month report.

At a Glance (Month 6 vs Month 12)

Metric	Month 6	Month 12	Diff
Total Downloads	2,210	7,980	+ 261%
MAU	487	1,920	+ 294%
DAU	140	856	+ 511%
Revenue (total)	£111	£394	+ 255%
Active Subscribers	9	21	+ 133%
MRR	—	£14	—
Lifetime Purchases	6	18	+ 200%
User Reviews	—	170	—
Avg Rating	—	4.74	—

What Went Well

• Exploring Paid Ads: I started experimenting with paid ads - Reddit and Google. Reddit was expensive compared to Google, so I am now focusing on Google Ads only. I spend around £3 a day and get 7-10 downloads. Still early days. I plan to write a more detailed post once I have more data.

• Surprising Organic Growth: My daily downloads have swelled from 20 per day to 60 per day. Google Ads might have played a role, but I also got lucky a few times. Ascent - an app similar to mine - had a listing issue on the Play Store and I suggested App Pause as an alternative. That alone drove 100 DAU. I also got a surge of users from Brazil and India for a few days - no idea why.

• Revamped the Website: As a longer-term marketing effort, I migrated my old WordPress site to Astro JS. The goal was a faster, better-looking landing page and improved SEO over time. The new site looks really good and I have become more regular at blogging - which turned out to be a nice bonus since I actually enjoy writing.

• Localisation and In-App Language Switcher: I was using Google’s machine translation feature to support multiple languages. A kind user then volunteered to help fine-tune the German translation. That led to properly splitting out string resources, setting up a self-hosted Weblate service for community translations, and eventually building an in-app language switcher. I have noticed many of my users have a non-English device language - so I think it’s working.

• Large Screen Support: A user pointed out they use App Pause on a tablet and it works really well - better than most apps. At that point I hadn’t done anything extra to support large screens; Jetpack Compose just sort of worked. I later decided to properly implement large-screen layouts with panes and nav rails. It took much longer than expected. I haven’t noticed a spike in large screen users yet, so this one might be a slow burn.

• More Device Compatibility: A lot of work this year has gone into edge cases and device quirks that I never anticipated:

  • Discreet-step animation for E-Ink devices (a user flagged that the breathing animation wasn’t working on their E-Ink device - I didn’t even know my app could run on those)
  • Picture-in-Picture erasure support
  • Better multi-window detection and support. Split-windows now finally work! Floating windows still need more work (managing window focus and lifecycle is surprisingly tricky on Android).

What Didn’t Go Well

• MRR is Still Low: I don’t mind too much about this. My focus has been on getting more users and building the foundation of the app - not squeezing revenue. Any gain here has been motivational. Hopefully as the app becomes more useful, this will increase by itself.

• Lack of New Features: I am starting to appreciate the difficulty of Android development more and more. Most of my effort went into handling edge cases and making existing features work across a wider range of devices. It’s harder than it sounds. When I tried to add split-screen support, it turned out I needed to overhaul my whole architecture - and since I already had a bunch of features, even that refactoring took a long time.

• Pause Point - Android 17 Competition: Google announced a new Digital Wellbeing feature in Android 17 called Pause Point, which pauses app launches and forces you to take a break. Sound familiar? App Pause provides a lot more customisation so I am not too worried - but it will likely have some impact on downloads. I am treating it as validation more than anything else. If Google is building this into Android, it confirms that app launch friction genuinely helps reduce screen time.

What’s Next

• Website Blocking: I spent quite a bit of time this past quarter building up my marketing foundation. Now I want to get back to development. Website Blocking has been on the backlog for a while and I have already started on it - the architecture refactoring is done and things are looking good. A focused push should get it shipped within a month (unless I get distracted again).

• Another Round of Marketing: Once Website Blocking is live, I will shift focus back to marketing. Rinse and repeat.

• Smaller Feature Requests: I have a backlog of smaller requests from users that I want to chip away at once the big ticket items are done.

• Improving Monetisation: The first year was mostly a validation phase - I wanted to know if the app was actually useful to people. I am now certain it is. Year two, I want to start thinking more seriously about MRR. I don’t have a concrete plan yet, but improving the monetisation story is on my radar.

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If you use App Pause, I would love to hear what you think. You can reach me at contact@unrushedapps.com or join the Discord server.