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The closure of the third-party Reddit app, Apollo, hasn’t stopped developer Christian Selig from continuing to publish iOS apps. Instead, he’s moved on to an Apollo spin-off app called Pixel Pals, which places cute little virtual pets on top of your iPhone’s Dynamic Island — that is, the black bar at the top of the screen around the camera hardware. But Pixel Pals is shaping up to be much more than a virtual pet toy. The app is also offering a diverse collection of iOS widgets, ranging from interactive games to playable fidget spinners to transparent widgets for iPhone customization and more.
Today, Selig is adding another to the list – a language-learning widget that puts the vocabulary of different languages on your home screen.
At launch, the widget supports French, Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, German, Arabic, Korean, Hindi, and…Canadian? The latter will teach you Canadian slang and common words with a bit of humor. For example, “Sorry” means “Hello,” the widget informs you.
The language learning widget could have been bundled as a separate app, as it has nothing to do with virtual pets or games. In fact, many widgets could be separated from the main app into their own dedicated apps. But as Selig explained in a post on X, he was enjoying the interactive widgets in Pixel Pulse, so he added the latest feature there. This way, users can get all the widgets in a single download, he said.
The idea isn’t just a way for Selig to delight users of its apps with extra goodies — it’s also an interesting and fairly successful strategy to entice iOS subscriptions. With the release of Pixel Pals 2.0 last month, which added more social networking features for pixelated pets, users can also choose to upgrade to unlock more pets and other features for $1.99 per month or $14.99 per year. Can.
Along with interactive widgets – like ones for your virtual pets and interactive games – the app includes its own versions of standard iOS widgets, like calendar, clock, battery percentage, time, countdown, weather, forecast and quote widgets in different sizes that This often also includes virtual pets. These also have bizarre forms, such as a “magical clock” that says “it’s five to four”, for example, a hidden word scrambled; an “emoji clock” that shows the time using different emojis to create numbers; and a friendly “Jarvis” widget that includes the date and time as well as greetings and various metrics such as battery percentage and storage space.
The strategy of bundling widgets into an all-in-one app seems to be working. Although Pixel Pals is only a year old, Selig says the app currently has just under 50,000 subscribers. Although details like the split between monthly and annual subscribers and churn rates will vary, this is still a healthy income for an indie developer.
The Language widget is included with the updated version of the iOS app today.
