Despite the discontinuation of the third-party Reddit app, Apollo, developer Christian Selig has not halted his iOS app development efforts. Instead, he has shifted his focus to a new app derived from Apollo, known as Pixel Pals. Pixel Pals introduces adorable virtual pets that inhabit your iPhone’s Dynamic Island, the black bar encircling the camera hardware at the screen’s top. Yet, Pixel Pals offers more than mere virtual pet entertainment. The app has been progressively unveiling a diverse range of iOS widgets, encompassing interactive games, a playable fidget spinner, transparent widgets for customizing your iPhone, and more.
Today, Selig is introducing another addition to this list – a language-learning widget that displays vocabulary from various languages directly on your Home Screen.
Upon its launch, this widget supports languages such as French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, German, Arabic, Korean, Hindi, and even…Canadian? The latter teaches you Canadian slang and common words, infused with a touch of humor. For example, it playfully translates “sorry” as “hello.”
While the language learning widget could have been released as a standalone app, given its divergence from virtual pets and games, many of these widgets could have existed as separate, dedicated apps. However, Selig clarified in a post on X that he derived joy from creating interactive widgets within Pixel Pals, hence incorporating this latest feature. This approach allows users to access all the widgets with a single download.
This concept not only serves as a way to delight app users with additional features but also presents an intriguing and relatively successful tactic for attracting iOS subscriptions. With the release of Pixel Pals 2.0 last month, which introduced more social networking aspects for the pixelated pets, users were given the option to upgrade for $1.99 per month or $14.99 per year to unlock more pets and additional features.
Alongside the interactive widgets, such as those for virtual pets and interactive games, the app includes its unique versions of standard iOS widgets like the calendar, clock, battery percentage, time, countdown, weather, forecasts, and quotes widgets, available in various sizes and often featuring the virtual pets. Some unconventional variations are also present, such as a “magic clock” that spells out the time in a hidden word scramble, an “emoji clock” that represents time using emojis, and a friendly “Jarvis” widget that combines a greeting with the date and time and various metrics like battery percentage and storage space.
The strategy of bundling widgets into an all-in-one app seems to be effective. Although Pixel Pals is just a year old, Selig reports that the app currently boasts nearly 50,000 subscribers. While details like the ratio between monthly and yearly subscribers and the churn rate may vary, this remains a substantial source of income for an independent developer.
