Justin’s Blog

Chronologist is my first iOS and Android app, and today I’m releasing it into open beta.

Chronologist is my first “big project” as an indie dev, and something I’ve been working on a while. The central idea of Chonologist is quick capture of your life events for later review. It feels a little bit like a social media feed, but just for you pesonally. The original idea came from my wife discussing wanting an easier way to remember things that she wanted to backfill into her planner/scrapbooks later.

And while I launched UTC Complications for Apple Watch a few months ago, I always knew that was a niche project and Chronologist is a product that I hope can have relatively wide appeal. As such, it’s also my first foray into the modern mobile business model. It’s a free app to download and use with a single banner ad placed in the main view. This ad can be removed for a one-time purchase, or with a modest subscription that also enables cloud backup and sync (USD $1.99/month or $19.99/year). Originally, I was planning to release version 1.0 of Chronologist without the backup/sync functionality, but in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, I talked myself into taking on that much bigger task. Will it pay off? We’ll see!

Starting today, Chronologist is available for testing on iOS and iPadOS devices running iOS 11.0 or newer on TestFlight, and for Android devices running Android 9 or newer on Google Play. Please try it out and let me know what you think (I’ve set up a special email address beta@chronologist.app, or you can reach me any other way you normally would.