Introducing The Daily App

Over the past few weeks I’ve been hard at work, preparing to launch The Daily App, a new website which will feature one great app, every day.

I’ll be covering apps for your iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and Apple TV. Additionally, the apps I feature will be wide and varied; one day you might see a news app, another day you might see a specialized utility and on another day you’ll see a game.

In preparation for today’s launch, I’ve actually been featuring an app every day since October 26, so head over to The Daily App to check them out.

Subscribe to The Daily App

In addition to The Daily App’s website, you can also get all of the app recommendations via Twitter (@_thedailyapp), Facebook, daily or weekly email newsletters, or RSS.

Upvote us on Product Hunt!

If you like what you see with The Daily App, I would really appreciate it if you took a moment to vote for The Daily App on Product Hunt.

P.S. It’s actually my birthday today (Nov 6), so you can think of it as a birthday present to me! ;)

Why make The Daily App?

I’m launching The Daily App for two key reasons. Firstly, I want to highlight some of the truly great apps that are made from indie developers, such as Metapho. There are millions of apps available on the App Store, and I want to help surface some of the great apps, particularly those that may be lesser known. Secondly, it’s an opportunity for me to spend more time searching for and trying out new apps. It’s something I enjoy doing, but it’ll also mean that I can offer better app reviews and collections for MacStories and the Club MacStories newsletter — which if you didn’t know, I also contribute to.

What The Daily App isn’t

The Daily App is focusing solely on Apple platforms for the time being (sorry!). But we’re also limiting our descriptions so that they fit inside a Tweet. So if you’re looking for more in depth reviews and collections of apps, I’d recommend you check out MacStories, Beautiful Pixels, The Sweet Setup, The App Factor, iMore and App Advice.

What didn’t make it

The core idea of The Daily App is that I encourage people to try new apps all the time, which I hope to do by featuring one great app, every day. To help encourage that, I’m letting people subscribe to The Daily App in a bunch of different ways, as outlined above. But I initially planned to go even further, with an Instagram and Snapchat account. I thought it would be fun and unique to also offer app recommendations via these services, but ultimately I decided against it. The key reason was that neither service has an easy way for me to link to the apps I feature. This is problematic in that it adds significant friction, reducing the chance that someone will bother to find and download an app—and it also means I’m less likely to earn any affiliate link revenue. Affiliate link revenue isn’t hugely important to me, but it is certainly still a factor I considered (I’d like to run this website at break-even). An additional problem with Snapchat was that it’s iOS photo extension doesn’t enable you to send snaps to your ‘Story’, only to individual people.

Credits

My thanks to Daniel “Jelly” Farrelly for his great work in the development of The Daily App’s website. If you have any web or iOS development needs, be sure to consider him.

Thanks also to the following people for their early feedback and comments: Zach Kahn, Chris Herbert, John Voorhees, Robb Lewis, Bradley Chambers and Anthony Agius.

If you have any thoughts, suggestions or criticisms, I’d love to hear about them. You can tweet them to me @greyham on Twitter, or email them to graham@thedailyapp.net.