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hitting escape will restore the text to its active editable state

This is the fatal flow of the whole thing, with this it stops being a drop-in replacement.

Safari on iOS supports extensions

iOS has it to some extent, you can enable "Intelligent breakthrough and silencing" in Focus settings, and it should (supposedly) learn which notifications are important for you and which can be skipped.

In practice it doesn't do it very well.

TL;DR you have to be like Duolingo only if you plan to monetize like them.

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I think it totally depends on your goals, let's try breaking down why Duolingo is doing what they're doing, and then we'll try to map it onto your own goals.

So, Duolingo monetises via mostly subscriptions, this means that their sales funnel is something like UA channels -> conversion to install -> conversion to subscription -> conversion to renewal.

Leaving out the first two steps (it's marketing I am not competent enough to discuss them), we arrive at "conversion to subscription". The only thing I'll mention regarding user acquisition is that we have to keep in mind, that users from standard marketing channels are always less motivated/interested in a product, that organic users, who are actively seeking the solution for their so called "pains".

In order to convert a user to a subscriber, one has to have an appealing value proposition, which for Duolingo is something like "learn the language in a really fun and engaging way", they support this proposition by including gamification elements, both mechanical (streaks, lives, mini-games) and narrative (cast of characters).

The perceived value for a user also becomes more apparent the more the user interacts with an app (see metrics like time spent, retention rate, stickiness). Thus, the aforementioned gamification mechanics also serve retention purposes (namely, the main thing - the streak) both between sessions and inside a single session.

So the more a user is with Duolingo, the more value she perceives in it ("sunken cost" fallacy also comes into play here), and the more the probability she will subscribe.

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Now, coming back to your question. From your post I see that you're talking about "today's market" so I assume you want to sell it somehow.

You face a choice:

- Go standard UA route, acquiring users via ads, this will potentially get you a lot of traffic, if you have money to spend. Downside: you have to have A LOT of money to spend in order to make positive ROI, as ad traffic is not as motivated, and you'll have hard time making these people convert to paid users without all that fluff Duolingo is doing. Sure "calm tech" is sort of popular thing nowadays, you can play off of that, but still, you have to convince these people to stay with you, learn the value of your thing and eventually pay for it.

– Target a niche in a non-traditional way, via Reddit (though it is not that non-traditional way nowadays), communities etc. Basically direct sales. This way might get you much more focused audience who will gladly be your paying customers. Those people will NOT need bells and whistles. Downside: you really have to nail the solution for them, or they'll get back to their custom Anki decks.

I love the summary at the top. Cool thing to have.

I share the general sentiment of the post. But I have to say this is one of the multitude posts exactly like that, condemning subscription based model, closed ecosystems etc. without proposing even a theoretical solution.

Yes, things are messed up, FSF is just some fringe radical micro-organisation with no real power, open source movement get EEE'd by the likes of MS, hardware is locked down, your always online games stop working the moment their publishers deem them unprofitable, so what are we doing now?

I suppose it would've been fair if Goodnotes were selling their lifetime licenses with the clear remark that this license is for the current version only.

Of course it's on me, but judging by the title, I've expected some sort of UX deep dive showing how to use liquid glass but make it actually good. Instead it's just a list of accessibility options to turn on.

Fair enough, I somehow imagined a wrong tone of voice in their message, shouldn’t have done that.

Sorry, I don't have capacity for more than a few comments here or a casual chat once in a while.

Unfortunately, I think ads is the most realistic way to go.

Sponsorships and/or donations would be a nice “beer money” bonus.

Subscriptions are PITA and too much hassle unless you’re doing them via some third party and they won’t bring a good amount of money at the “online daily puzzle in a browser” scale.

There are more exotic ways like licensing your puzzles to other sites, like online newspaper puzzle pages, Puzzmo is going in this direction IIRC.

Yes, sorry about that.

I’d love to learn “fame design” though haha

What if i'm handing it to a friend/spouse to play to beat my time?

I generally find it more effective to improve the parts that concern most of the audience, like the timer that is seen by every player. The pass-and-play use case is valid but seems pretty rare.

That just sounds like your idea for a different type of game. I like his current idea for this game.

Yes, it’s a part of giving feedback, the author might not like any of my comments and is free to ignore them, it’s their game. But why do _you_ seem so irritated about it?

If you want a general overview try finding a book called “Fundamentals of Fame Design” by Ernest Adams. It is a sensible intro, after that - just dive into thematic communities and do your own things.

I know nothing about formal game design education sorry.

Some crossword people like having their timers (see NYT Games app for example), but as I’ve mentioned the timers are counting up, not triggering any negative conditions, and can be turned off completely.

Product manager ex. game designer with a number of puzzle/word game in operation here.

- Having a timer (urgency) is usually not a very good idea for thinky games. If you insist on having a timer consider making it count upwards.

- Additionally as other commenters mentioned is the game is a time trial it needs an explicit “Start” button. Also stop the timer when user is not playing e.g. reading the rules.

- There’s no point of having a “Play again” option for a Wordle style daily game, the thinking part is already done, so any replay is just an exercise in dexterity.

- It’s okay to be US-centric actually, doesn’t matter unless you are very serious about monetizing it, and even then being US-centric will work.

- Consider showing rules for first time users before staring the puzzle.

- Consider having some sort of overarching thing in your puzzle, so it’s not just five words on a specific topic to guess, but something more, like a hidden word across all five etc. This makes a delightful discovery moment and sometimes might work as a clue.

For me personally this conclusion doesn't mean much, as the author bases it on his single experience with his app that by his own wasn't really ready for real world.

I believe it does:

"Turns out your product wasn’t ready for all the international users. Or the power users. Or the teens. They want to use your product in all the wrong ways, posting bad and weird things."

It is basically in line with the infamous "You're holding it wrong".

“We're drowning under the weight of clueless product leads, managers, and owners who've never written a line of code, yet they somehow dictate how software should be built.”

We’ve been through that, you leave coders alone without management and the create a new game engine with custom scripting language and state-of-the-art rendering pipeline and no games to go with it and then they get sad

(I’m only half joking to illustrate the point that extreme points of view are often silly)

I really appreciate how straightforward your replies are

Picross is somehow ended up being a trademark of Nintendo iirc