Issue #49: Juno by Alex Staravoitau

By Aryaman Sharda in Developer Tools — Apr 16, 2024

Today, we're looking at Juno by Alex Staravoitau.

Juno offers a comprehensive Python development environment for both iPad and iPhone, designed to meet all your coding needs.

It features intelligent code completion and a full terminal emulator console, ensuring a smooth and efficient coding experience.

Intelligent code completion lets you code like a Pro.

Juno supports all source code formats, including Python scripts (.py) and Jupyter notebooks (.ipynb)— a document format focused on applying Python to data analysis and computational science.

Access all Jupyter features in a modern notebook editor.

Leverage the power of industry-standard Python libraries like SciPy, Scikit-learn, and Pandas, and easily install pure Python packages using Juno's user-friendly package manager.

Juno lets you easily browse Jupyter notebooks complete with beautifully rendered previews and syntax highlighting.

Juno also leverages all modern document editing features in iOS / iPadOS, makes full use of your keyboard and trackpad, and fully embraces the multi-tasking and multi-window capabilities of your iPad.

Available for iOS and iPadOS.

A quick thank you to WrapFast for supporting this issue of Indie Watch!

Can you tell us a little bit about yourselves?

I'm Alex, a software engineer and an indie app developer.

I've been doing software development for a while now—since 2008—and working as an indie full-time for the last 3 years or so.

How did you come up with the idea?

It kinda evolved naturally, I suppose! I've been doing iOS development pretty much exclusively since 2010, and in 2016 I also got into Python and ML.

Jupyter was (and still is) a very popular tool for running experiments and prototyping, offering a Python playground of sorts. Most importantly, it is backend-agnostic, so you can easily use some powerful computing machine as a backend, connecting to it remotely.

There wasn't a good way to use Jupyter on iPad or iPhone at the time, and since native iOS apps were my speciality, I've hacked together a quick prototype of a Jupyter client for iOS—and that's how Juno came to be and hit the App Store in 2017.

It evolved a lot since then: Juno is now a full-fledged Python development environment that runs code locally on your iPhone or iPad, letting you work not just with Jupyter notebooks, but with Python sources, too (among a few other things!).

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How did you market the app as an indie developer?

Unfortunately, I'm not very good at marketing my apps! My talents lie more on the engineering side of things, I suppose.

Whenever I make a release or a big update, I reach out to online outlets that covered my apps previously (which works sometimes and occasionally gets me featured), and submit a standard App Store feature form (not sure if this have ever worked, honestly)—but that's pretty much it.

What’s your app design and development workflow like?

I'm tempted to say it's pure chaos, but there is some system to it. I tend to have many more things planned for my apps than I can ever realistically implement—so it's always a question of prioritising what I'll be working on next.

I believe that talking to your users is the single best way to sort out your priorities. I take customer support very seriously, and have had literally thousands of conversations with the users of my apps over the years—this definitely gives you a feel for what's important and what you should focus on next.

Any advice on monetizing your app and improving conversions?

I don't think I'm qualified to give advice on this, I'm afraid!

I have recently converted Juno to a freemium model, and it is too early to say whether this was a good decision. Juno has always been a relatively expensive app, which you had to pay for upfront—intuitively, paying for it felt like a big decision based on very little data.

Instead of just adding a trial for the app, I've decided to offer several genuinely useful features for free (e.g. notebook previews)—in hope that this would get Juno into the hands of more people, get them to use it and rely on it more, ultimately making them more comfortable paying for premium features when and if they need them.

I'm very curious myself whether this is going to improve conversions or not!

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