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Thoughts 1.7 gains customizable Daily Reminder Notifications

In the most recent Thoughts - Quotes Manager update I have added Daily Reminders. It's a new way to help users remember what inspires them by receiving daily notifications with Inspirations from their Library. This was one of the most requested features because it makes the quotes & thoughts saved in the app more accessible and helps create more points of connection during the day-to-day life. In this post I share some insights into the design and development of this release.

Highly Customizable Notifications

Sending notifications from an app is always critical and some sort of a double-edged sword. It can drastically enhance the user experience by receiving relevant information without having to open the app, but can also quickly feel like an unwanted distraction. To make the Daily Reminders truly meaningful and fit the users needs, I've focused on configurability, because a one-size-fits-all solution isn't feasible for the diverse use cases of this features. Therefore a large part of the work on this feature went into getting the settings right.

Thoughts offers diverse options to customize the Daily Reminders. Users can set the time for the notification, apply a filter for which Inspirations to include and choose between four different notification styles, see Figure 1. The available filter options can be seen in Figure 2. If filter by Collection or Tag was selected, another row called Content filter appears in the settings, allowing users to specify which Collection or Tag to filter by, see Figure 3. For other filters this row is hidden to focus on the relevant UI elements.

Another goal was to always ensure the users are aware of the effect of their changes. Therefore I've created a live notification preview that shows what the current configuration will look like, helping users making informed choices. Thoughts allows storing Quotes (authored by someone else) and (your) Thoughts, which influences how the Daily Reminder notifications appear. To accommodate this, users can toggle between a Quote and a Thought preview in the lower section.

Covering it all: States and Edge-Cases

Especially interfaces for settings need to address edge-cases and handle issues in a way that is understandable and helps users resolve them. For this feature, there are quite a lot of edge cases and possible issues to consider. Let's take a quick look at the three most relevant.

First of all, an app can only send notifications if the user granted an app the permission to do so, and this permission can be revoked at any time. Figure 3 shows that Thoughts detects revoked permissions, informs the user and directly links to the settings to allow for quick adjustments. The goal was to ensure the user understands that without the permission, the app is not able to send notifications, so the general Notifications toggle is turned off, even if notifications were previously configured.

Second, a high degree of customizability brings some complexity with it. Users might set a filter that does not match any stored Inspiration in the Library, or set a filter for Collection or Tag without specifying the specific Collection or Tag to filter for. Thoughts handels this by presenting a prominent warning, that in the current state, Daily Reminder notifications cannot be send. Figure 5 shows the case of a missing Tag filter. The app displays an exclamation mark directly next to the row Content filter with the issue, helping the user figure out why this issue happens and where to fix it.

Third, users can tap a Daily Reminder notification to see the full Inspiration in the app. However, in some rare cases, a user might receive a notification with an Inspiration that is not available on a device, so in Thoughts 1.7 there is a new view that informs users about that state, explains why it might have happened and how to proceed, see Figure 6. This is necessary because Thoughts offers iCloud sync and due to network connection issues, Inspirations might not be fully synced or an Inspiration might have been deleted when a Daily Reminder with this Inspiration is send. Those are rare edge-cases, but it's better to expect the unexpected.

Thoughts Pro

By now, you’ve probably gotten a sense that building an app and even a seemingly simple feature like this is a lot of work and involves more considerations than it might be obvious on first sight. Therefore, to make it sustainable to put in the work, I need to earn money with the app. Thoughts is free to use with most of it's features, like advanced library management, widgets, an Apple Watch app etc, but the main limitation is, that users can only save 20 Inspiration in the app for free. Earning money is always an exchange of value, so I tried to provide a fair value exchange offer: I want to let people try the app at their own pace for free and once they make use of the app and start to grow their library, they have to choose one of the Thoughts Pro option to contribute to the development. In the app market, this is a pretty passive monetization strategy that I deliberately choose, because as an Indie Developer, I have the freedom to build apps I want to use myself and am not entitled to satisfy growth expectations of investors.

Basic Daily Reminders are available in the free plan, again to let users try it and see if it's something for them, but for customizations Thoughts Pro is required. Therefore I needed to clearly indicate that customizations require Thoughts Pro, see Figure 7. I've also added Customizable Daily Reminders to the paywall of the app, both for transparency and to better showcase the benefits of Thoughts Pro (coming in Thoughts 1.7.1), see Figure 8.

Try those features yourself in Thoughts — Quotes Manager.

Thoughts 1.7 Change-Log:

Full Release Notes
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14. May 2025