AppKickstarterServices
Setup the various services that AppKickstarter leverages.
AppKickstarter relies on different SaaS products for various functionality, such as analytics, error monitoring, releases, etc. Don't worry, these services have very generous free tiers, so you don't pay anything until you actually get a lot of users.
You will need to create accounts with the following services:
Expo Application Services (EAS)
We use the EAS platform to streamline releasing the application. It handles signing the app builds, submitting to the app stores, and optionally building the app executable. If you run into issues building the app locally on your machine, building it on EAS is often a good alternative.
Go to https://expo.dev/signup and sign up for an account.
Log into your EAS account in your terminal:
eas loginPostHog
We use PostHog for product analytics, such as capturing how many users progress through the onboarding funnel, the screens they view, events, etc.
Go to https://posthog.com and sign up for an account.
Create a project.
Once completed, go to your project settings. You can find this by clicking on your project, and then the gear icon beside it.
Go to Project > General, and then scroll down to the Project API key.
We need the Project API key. Make note of this.
(Optional, but recommended) Reverse Proxy
We recommend setting up a reverse proxy in front of your PostHog instance. The reason is because most ad-blockers will block requests to PostHog, as they view it as a tracker. A reverse proxy is just a computer that you send the requests to, and it forwards the request to PostHog.
So instead of the PostHog sending requests to https://us.i.posthog.com, you send it to https://{your domain} instead, so ad-blockers see it as a clean request, and then the reverse proxy forwards it to PostHog.
CloudFlare is a very good platform for hosting the reverse proxy. It has an insane free tier. We will use CloudFlare Workers to do this.
Follow the following steps to configure a reverse proxy using CloudFlare Workers via the official guide from PostHog: https://posthog.com/docs/advanced/proxy/cloudflare
In short, all you have to do is create a CloudFlare Worker, and then copy-paste the provided code into the Worker. Then, update the api_host in the app to point to the domain of the Worker.
Sentry
We use Sentry for error monitoring, which is crucial in giving us visibility into issues or errors that users run into.
Go to https://sentry.io/signup/ and sign up for an account.
Create a project via your Dashboard
Keep note of the following 3 items:
organization slug is available in your Organization settings tab
project name is available in your project's Settings > Projects tab (find it in the list)
DSN is available in your project's Settings > Projects > Project name > Under SDK Setup section > Client Keys (DSN) tab
Superwall
We use Superwall to create & A/B test paywalls, as well as handle payments for subscriptions, in-app purchases, etc.