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Session

Session

Pomodoro Focus Timer

Session
    "Session is actually my first iOS & macOS app. It becoming a business is purely accident."— Philip Young
  • What is Session?

    Session, an app that helps you to stay focused by blocking distracting web, apps, and Slack, and be more reflective of what you've worked on.

    Session is designed for creative workers that need deep focus (like software engineer, designer, writer, video editor, etc).

  • Who is behind Session? Tell us a little bit about yourself.

    I'm Philip, a designer, and developer based in Jakarta, Indonesia. I've been working on websites since 2016 and recently worked on native apps. Session is actually my first iOS & macOS app. It becoming a business is purely accident.

  • Why did you build Session? How did you come up with the idea?

    There are two reasons why I made Session: First, It's to solve my own problem:

    I don't have a boss (work as a contractor), so I have to motivate myself every day by eliminating distracting websites and I want to know how long I've worked on today.

    Second, I used to work on making web applications, wanted to learn and make a native application (Mac and iOS), so initially, it was a side project for me.

  • Do you want to share some numbers? Downloads, Users, MMR, whatever works for you!

    About 6K downloads per month now, about 3K people used it daily on weekdays (half of that in weekend). I stopped sharing MRR about a year ago (because it's not giving any value?). Last time it was probably $7K or $8K in monthly revenue?

  • Why Swift? What made you choose it for your project?

    Purely accident! I want to learn make native apps.

  • What do you dislike about Swift? Would you choose a different framework if you had to start over?

    Xcode is shit. Upgrading XCode can break the whole app on specific iOS versions. Also I was unfamiliar with type safe language at the time and really hated it.

    Now I have love-hate relationship with this language because it's not as flexible as javascript (many coding pattern I used in JS is impossible on Swift), but love it for the safety.

    • This Q&A was published on May 2023.