This is a productivity app, and productivity apps are a real hard sell on mobile. Think about it, you're asking someone to embed a particular piece of software directly into their life. It has to provide so much value over not having any app that they have to remember to use to make using it a no-brainer.

Your app isn't really competing against other productivity apps, it's competing against the fact that an app is not going to be most people's best approach for improving their lives. The process of integrating a tool with life is not fun, it takes work and there's only so much that things like reminders can do for you.

I use two productivity apps on my phone. Reminders and the one I'm building. It's an ongoing experiment in how one can use software to improve life. Right now the only thing I've managed to integrate is spending tracking, and even that took months of back and forth consideration. Do I want to tag individual expenditures? How do I want to categorize them? How do I want to add an expenditure to a category? What should I call the act of spending something and what should I call the category? How do I want my reports to look like? Do I want reports in the database, or should they be generated dynamically? How should I represent common transactions that I do every day in a way that doesn't clutter up the main interface?

The whole exercise has left me unenthused about productivity software as a viable product category. Adding an expenditure now is easy as pie, for me, and only me. All of the work I had to do to figure out how I spend money and how I should build an app to manage it essentially has to be redone for every single person who wants to use software to help them manage their life. The domain seems simple, but it's actually incredibly complicated, because it's different for everyone.

You touch another important issue here.

>>> Do I want to tag individual expenditures? How do I want to categorize them?

Friction.

There are a lot of apps that might be useful but the friction is so high (a lot of manual entry, etc) that it might overwhelm the value provided. Ideally, you want the app to 'just work' and that's the hard part.

> There are a lot of apps that might be useful but the friction is so high (a lot of manual entry, etc) that it might overwhelm the value provided.

It was an act of faith for me to structure the app around manual entry of transactions. I thought for sure that I'd wind up abandoning it after a few months. Didn't happen, I'm still using it, but I remember for a few weeks struggling to eliminate the friction, and I still haven't gotten rid of all of it. That would require implementing some kind of custom keyboard, as well as the aforementioned interface to put in common transactions that have the same amount each time.

There needs to be a streamlined interface for adding these common transactions, because I might have to do it a few times a month.

I'm repeating this entire process for a to-do manager, as Reminders just doesn't eliminate enough friction for all use cases. Now I need to figure out how to get transactions to live on the same page as my agenda.

When I'm finally done with this three years from now, I'll need to write a book and do a bunch of YouTube videos to teach people how to use it productively, either that or I'll need to spend just as much time making the interface discoverable.

What other people will need out of a dashboard is bound to be completely different than what I need out of it. I have a list of transactions for this week, broken down by day, someone else might need the whole month, broken down by category. I don't have automatic recurring transactions show up, someone else might want those. Each of these requires significant design work.

I have tried at various points to interest someone else in helping me develop it. Ha. Ha. Ha. Nobody cares.

I developed a mobile manual entry personal finance tracking application as well, stuck with it for two years, but I'm back to manual entry using Ledger because of the pain in the ass it is to enter data on mobile, whereas I can use automation to import my various bank accounts data (e.g. https://github.com/cantino/reckon) with Ledger.

The reporting on the data is the gold, for me, the mobile app didn't really add that much value, so I just gave up.