Six weeks after launch: what shipped, what I wrote, and what the numbers said
Amana launched on the App Store on 6 August. It draws the sky outside your window — from your time, your location and live weather — and then tries to get you to put the phone down and go look at the real one.
Since then:
Shipping. The app went from 1.0.0 at launch to 1.2.3 (14 September). The biggest changes came from analytics, not from a feature list: onboarding now asks for location with a reason, the paywall shows a real widget preview instead of three lines of text, and the sky shader stopped contradicting the weather outside.
What the numbers said. Measuring honestly meant deleting myself from the data first: excluding simulators, TestFlight and Apple's review device cut my raw counts almost in half. What was left was uncomfortable and useful — 79% of users never granted location, so they saw a default sky instead of their own, and day-2 retention was zero. That is a product problem wearing a marketing problem's clothes, and it set the roadmap.
Writing. Five dev-log articles are live on HackerNoon and a sixth publishes today, all tagged #shipaton: 422 reads and 12 hours 43 minutes of reading time so far. They cover why I abandoned satellite imagery for an on-device sky, three rendering bugs that made the sky lie about the weather, what a month of AI spokespersons actually returned, how an 83-word brief became a Japanese theme song, and how I shot App Store screenshots by moving the simulator instead of waiting for a sunset.
Sound. The app has a theme song, "Sora ni Namae o Tsukeyou" (Let's Give the Sky a Name), generated with Suno and published on YouTube.
Links to the articles are in "Try it out".
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