[the_florist]

https://flowery.app is exclusively a PWA. It was designed from the ground up to prioritize the “Add to Home Screen” experience on iOS. The web is the ideal platform given the app’s emphasis on text and typography, and a native replica would be reinventing the wheel for no tangible benefit to the user.

WebKit and Safari have come a long way. Flowery puts browser engines through their paces with its UI animation, which is smoothest on WebKit. Safari’s OS integration (e.g., elastic scroll, Sonoma’s “Add to Dock”) is more polished than Chrome’s.

It wasn’t a walk in the park though. An early decision, after maddening attempts to circumvent browser quirks five years ago, was to build substitutes for common building blocks of the browser on mobile, notably the virtual keyboard, textboxes, and text selection. This wouldn’t have been possible without web components and Google’s excellent Lit library.

[codazoda]

Thanks for sharing. The app functions really well and is beautiful. It took me quite a while to figure out what it does and I'm still not 100% sure I understand completely. Is the app profitable? How do people find out about it?

[djhn]

I find your experience rather relatable.

I did figure out there is some sort of spaced repetition component to it, but that’s probably because I’m already an Anki user and aware of the concept.

I quite like the eccentricity of it, although I’m sure it could be toned down a notch for wider appeal.

Feature-wise, having thesaurus definitions immediately accessible is very useful.

[the_florist]

Thanks! I take the “eccentric” label as a compliment.

I may have gone overboard with the minimalism. Users had been all the more baffled before I added the tooltips hinting to tap the hearts, so I should probably double down on some sort of tutorial.

[the_florist]

I appreciate the kind words. A lot of painstaking work went into aesthetics.

The Stripe integration launched a few days ago, so the app is very much in the red. Paid advertising since the initial release six months ago has shown promising signs from prospective customers though.