Monetizing The Congress Tracker

It’s been a few weeks since I’ve had a chance to write anything for this newsletter and to you readers, I do apologize for that. I’ve had a lot going on recently but I plan to get back to consistent weekly issues soon!

One of the things I’ve been spending time on recently is my upcoming release of Congress Vote Tracker 2.0. Version 2.0 is going to add some premium features to the app and will mark the pivot point of me trying to monetize the app.

When trying to think of premium features, I did my best to choose things that upgrade the experience users have, rather than paywalling use of the basic functionality of the app.

I landed on these core features for version 2:

Custom App Icons

These are pretty self explanatory; everyone loves alternate icons to pick from. This is one of my favorite premium features of an app and I love the icons I’ve added. It’s a bonus that they were all designed by my wife! My personal favorite is the neon dark logo.

Bill Tracking

This is a simple implementation of a “favoriting” feature for Bills in Congress. It’s useful when you want to keep track of a piece of legislature as it makes its way through the system. I built this using Core Data and in the future I plan to add iCloud syncing.

My Members

The My Members feature allows users to set a state in the settings. The app will then show voting results from congress members representing that state more prominently throughout the app. Users will get a dedicated list in the Members tab and members from this state will be shown first in vote listings.

Overall I’m pretty happy with this first set of premium features. I think they’re enough to be worth upgrading for users who use the app each week and have an interest in politics.

In the near future I’ve got plans to update the widgets and add more sophisticated notifications to the app.

If you’re interested in checking out the app, I’m currently offering a one week free trial on a yearly subscription for $19.99.

If you enjoy the app, I’d love a review and if you don’t, I would love to hear what I can change! You can send feedback to [email protected].

Now lets get to the fun stuff!

Swift Bites

Juanjo Valiño tweeted a super striaght-forward guide to creating video App Previews for the App Store. If you’ve ever tried to make one of these, you know it can be a pain to get the sizing and resolution right for what Apple wants. Check out their tweet and upgrade your store page!

The folks at Swift Anytime (creators of Cracking the iOS Interview) have a new course coming up that helps prepare mobile devs for the system design portion of interviews. It’s hard to find resources out there for system design that are specific to mobile development, so be sure to check this out!

The course is available for pre-order here

If you’ve released an app on your own in the last few years you’ve likely used Apple’s SF Symbols library to easily add HIG-friendly icons to your app. Recently I saw a tweet from Axel Le Pennec showing how to combine these icons directly in the Mac app. 🤯 This definitely increases how usable this icon set from Apple is.

As an indie dev who is not very design-wise, I try to get all the help I can from awesome design tools out there. I recently came across shots.so on Twitter and was really impressed how much this site does for you. If you’re looking to make some marketing images or even App Store screenshots, you should check this site out!

(I used this to make the screenshot above 😉)

That’s all for this week! Thanks for reading, and if you loved the newsletter today, I would love it if you would give it a share somewhere!

Happy coding!

Morgan Zellers

P.S. If you have any suggestions, topics you'd like me to cover, or an app to share, please reach out! I truly value feedback and want to make Swift Sprints an engaging and valuable resource for the Apple developer community.