Finish 3.0 Makes All Of The App’s Premium Features Free

finish-app

Apple Design Award-winning slacker-productivity app Finish is announcing its biggest update in a year today with the release of version 3.0 on the App Store.

The biggest change isn’t the introduction of any major feature in particular; instead, Finish designer Ryan Orbuch tells me that the update is all about opening up the app’s premium feature set for its entire user base.

In a phone call, Orbuch told TechCrunch that his app’s target market of procrastinating teenagers just doesn’t pay for things on the App Store. Rather than locking what he considered to be some of the app’s key features (adding more than 10 tasks, letting you set specific times for when tasks had to be completed, and an optional “bother me” notification every hour when key tasks became overdue) behind a paywall, Orbuch decided to open them up to everyone who could benefit.

The specific timing of the release is based in part on technical issues, however. There were some bugs in Finish behind the scenes that were exposed to users under iOS 8. Most of these didn’t break anything major, but one feature key to monetizing the app without in-app purchases, rewards from Kiip, was impacted.

Those rewards had been in the app for much of 2014, but had to be removed entirely after users who updated to iOS 8 noticed issues with them. Orbuch has spent the last few months working on getting them back into the app and fixing the other problems exposed. Users of Finish 3.0 will receive “rewards” (basically, ads that they won’t hate completely) “one-out-of-three-ish” times they complete a task in the app.

While we were talking about Finish, Orbuch and I got sidetracked about something else he’s working on for middle- and high-school students: a peer-to-peer learning app. He’s been thinking about education for a long time, and now has a co-founder and funding (raised in a small angel round) for the idea he’s been kicking around for a few years now. He wasn’t able to give many details at this time other than noting that he’s looking to hire iOS and backend developers.