Saying goodbye to Sleepy Eyes, my white noise app
During the weekend I took the decision to remove Sleepy Eyes from the Apple App Store.
Sleepy Eyes has been a great little app that I used a lot when I developed it. With our daughter being a newborn at the time, I wanted to create a white noise app to help her sleep.
Unfortunately it didn't work on her... it's just the way she is. Fortunately it worked very well on myself. So many times did I fall asleep whilst testing the timer functionality. It was fun.
I wanted to learn iOS development, so I sat down and learned Objective-C... and then... Swift was announced. I immediately jumped onboard with it and loved it! The early days of Swift were amazing and I think it's only gotten worse over the years (too complicated in my eyes). I maintained the app with each Swift release until a few years ago.
For the live of me I wanted to update the app as I went, and to this day I still work on a small update that has been sitting at the back of my mind for years.
Unfortunately, it's an iOS only affair... which I'm not too interested in anymore - I'd rather make it cross platform and concentrate on that.
Sleepy Eyes made some money on the way... however in the early days I spent a lot of money on advertisement on Twitter and also Apple Search Ads. I've never broken even from that even after many years! It was a paid up front app...
The app itself has many long time users, to this day! With 5/5 star reviews.
However, it's time to let it go and concentrate on something else. I do want to revisit it, but with another name and cross platform. I'm a huge fan for white noise apps and I see myself creating another at some point.
With new versions of iOS coming out, and with me not maintaining it, it is best I don't sell it under false pretences that it will continue to be updated. I tried... but it just didn't work out.
I want to give a huge thanks to my old friend Tom who sat with me in Jersey where we talked about it and he went off to design the sound icons and general look and feel. I never felt such great energy than woking with him on a project.
Thank you Tom and everyone who has used the app throughout the years.