23. February 2024

Being grateful

Releasing my new app Next Size

It is a special day for me. – Next Size is a great app that let you forecast clothing sizes of your children. But I somehow lied to you because it is not a new app, at least not all of it. As the AppStore ages so do many applications in it and some just disappear. Sometimes because of lack of time or money, sometimes just because it wasn't the right time or the right time to start a project like that. So I'm very glad that a good friend of mine, Tim, gave me the opportunity to take care of his app. It was called "What fits when?" back in the days and he put so much care and love for details in to this project that it was making me sad that it never took off. I think it wasn't the lack of success, but personal reasons to leave not only the app itself, but the whole world of indie developers and app development behind. Sometimes things have to change. When I showed interest to continue his app project he was very open to the idea and finally just decided that I should continue his work.

This is the reason why it is a special day for me. I was able to take over his project, gave it a new name, designed a new icon and startet developing my vision of its future. I have to thank Tim for his trust and generosity. It is a great opportunity to build on his foundation and securing just another great app from disappearing from the AppStore.

Here it is: the Next Size app for forecasting the clothing sizes of your children. It is easy to use and gives a great overview over the current and upcoming clothing sizes of your kids. Just add your child, its birthday and body height (all data is only stored locally). Next Size will create a card showing you the current clothing size and its forecast. Updating the body height of your child will increase the accuracy of the forecast and is done fast and easily. Also available are different common clothing metrics for the EU, UK, US and Japan. All clothing brands have their own patterns and size charts, but within this range the prediction should be very useful anyhow.

How is the clothing size estimation working? The growth rate calculation is based on the WHO Child Growth tables that contains statistical data for the whole human population. This for one part is the reason why only female and male options are available and why the accuracy is decreasing for older body height measurements. Just make sure to update the body height from time to time.

This is the first app release that I did not miss to promote, I was about 10 years younger when I released my other two apps Auricula and Filmlog. Back then I wasn't confident enough and did miss out on that opportunity. This time I wrote this blog post, made social media posts on Mastodon, Linkedin and launched the app on Product Hunt, where I invite you to give it an upvote.

If you want to follow my journey as an indie developer make sure to subscribe to my Indie Developer Projects Insight Newsletter.

And last but not least please download and checkout Next Size – I'm eager to receive all of your feedback and steadily release updates to it. Writing app reviews on the AppStore is maybe one of the most powerful options, if you want to support Next Size and my work.

I'm very excited about the upcoming days and the future of Next Size. Thank you, Tim!