Card Diary – Daily Journal, Mood Tracker & Memoir - Interview with the developer of a fantastic app

Did you have any prior development or coding experience?

I started to develop Card Diary for iOS in Sep 2017, before that I had a few years of Android development experiences and I learned a few weeks for iOS development and then I started to develop Card Diary.

What was the most challenging aspect of developing mobile app?

The most challenging part is making the data to sync with the CloudKit, there are a lot of unknown issues and Apple doesn’t have a very handful solution for syncing Data from cloud to local devices. It took me a few months to make the Cloud Auto Sync feature work more smoothly.

_{Yuan Fu}

My name is Yuan Fu. I’m the developer of Card Diary, currently living in the “Middle-earth” New Zealand. Card Diary has three people in the team, two developers and a Korean designer Unbong Kong, who lives in Seoul, and whom I actually have never met in person :).

I have been having the idea of developing a journal app for a long time. In September 2017, I found the prototype of Card Diary on Dribbble. And immediately fell in love with the design. I contacted the designer Unbong Kong and made a prototype app of the iOS version. He was very impressed, and we decided to work together to make this app come true.

Working with people that you are only able to connect online and speaking with different languages is not easy at first. We both use Google Translation to communicate. Sometimes, it took a long time to understand each other. But after a few weeks later, everything started to go very smooth, a month later, we launched our first version of Card Diary.

The first milestone of Card Diary happened in January 2018, recommended by App Store, we got a huge download number in a single week, by the time we hadn't even provided the in-app purchases.

A quick forward to April 2018, we made the biggest change for Card Diary and launched its Android version.

Name a few of your favorite apps and reason you love them.

Apart from those big apps that made from big companies. For indie developer’s apps, one of my favorites is Picsew, it’s a screenshot editing app, make your screenshots much easier to edit.

How long have you been working on this app?

Card Diary started in Sep 2017 so it’s been almost 3 years. It is available on both Google Play and App Store.

What need of the user did you have in mind when developing this app?

Developing an app that is minimalistic, functional, and most importantly well designed.

In what way do you think your app is better than similar apps on the market? Please describe in detail what innovation you think you bring and what you are proud of in your app.

When compared to other similar apps, Card Diary makes the journaling easier, prettier, and most importantly respects user privacy. Card Diary makes journaling a simple, mindful, and highly rewarding activity. The concept behind Card Diary is simply to use cards to make your own diary. You can write one card for each day.

What are your future plans and expected features of the coming new versions of this app?

The macOS version of the app is coming soon. That’s the biggest plan. Another plan is making Android data sync with iOS data so that the barriers between Android and iOS are reduced since we’re using iCloud for iOS version and Google Drive for Android version cloud data storage.

Assuming new users of your app are reading this page. What do you want to ask them to do (contact you about X, Share the app, etc.)?

I hope that you will enjoy using Card Diary. If Card Diary can help bring you some memories or a slight joy from journaling, that would be my biggest achievement of development Card Diary. You can contact us through our email [email protected]