I have been working on my own language arts app for k-12 (https://snowdayacademy.com). In my experience, if it's not fun or rewarding, nobody is going to use it. Most of my users are parents that want their kid to get better grades, or the students want a better studying experience. So, for me its a combination of interesting content, UX, and better feedback than doing a worksheet.

I have been testing it with my two daughters and they make it very clear when its to painful to be useful.

The other thing that worked for me was talking to experts, in my case reading specialists.

Gamification helps with growth and engagement but not necessarily learning. I have a feeling that a "calm" app would grow more slowly but if the experience and results are good, you could have more durable and satisfied customers, less churn, etc.

You need to get more specific about your market. General language learning is too broad of a category in order to make informed choices.

Who are your ideal customers -- and how can you serve them best?

"Calm" is not a niche, its a style.

A niche is your position relative to the people you're serving.

Learning apps serve huge varieties of markets, with very different needs. For example, math apps designed to supplement math education in an elementary school environment, versus a language learning app designed for someone traveling to a X country in 3 months...

Your questions should be anchored to very specific audiences that you can actually reach.

I think yes. If you don't create an obvious avenue for the user to infer his development, he won't be able to do it. You have to confuse the audience to bring in the sense of progress. People learn by being challenged, confused, and by building something. Nobody learns by interfacing with an application that promises it. But besides learning nothing, they can feel good about being engaged, by completing tasks, seeing progress bar moving, seeing number go up. Someone that decides to interface with a learning app instead of learning the damn thing is doomed, will never learn anything at all. Just give them a sense of accomplishment so they can feel good about it. Without gamification what would the platform give them? If don't help them cope with their inertia, there really is nothing you could do. Maybe you are equating gamification with dark patterns? Gamification is not necessarily a bad thing. It is a powerful psychological trick. Can definitely be used for good. Working on performance often feels amazing because we can profile, identify clear bottlenecks and work to reduce them. When you manage to make number go down, you have a clear indication something went right. Maybe you didn't absolutely improve de code, but you made it better in a very specific way under a very specific lens. People like it because of this aspect, and it does feel a little bit like a game. There is a clear requirement and a clear specification. The game aspect makes it very enjoyable. I suppose development against a test suite provides a similar experience. Feels good in a game-ish way. Gamification is more related to the feels good than dark patterns, but obviously, the whole industry will ONLY be interested in exploiting practices. There is no incentive to make the user feel good, at all, without being pervasive. If you care about your user, you should design around the user. Inevitably, you will think a bunch about what feels good. If all you care about is the user learning, developing competence, you will offer no platform at all. The platform will tell them to close it and go do the thing. If you want to motivate them, another story. If you want them to feel accomplished, another story. You're building a feels good, want to feel accomplished want to fool myself into learning app.s gamification is the whole point.

Do you want to have hockeystick user growth and a billion dollar IPO in a year? Maybe a bad idea.

Do you want to live off selling the app? Might be hard, not impossible.

Are you building it for fun or to help people? Excellent idea. Sign me up.

Math Academy has some of that but remains a calm and distraction-free learning environment that still actually teaches anyone who shows up to regularly and consistently do the work. Worth checking out.

There are multiple ways to get to engagement of users for outcomes.

If your goal is keeping them spinning, there's ways that were discovered to do that. If you can get people to their outcome in a similar fashion, that might be sufficient.

Instead of calm, you might just be after focus, as in calm focus.

Is your solution about you, or them?

Are the usage statistics you're after based on vanity metrics, or outcome metrics?

I would find how you solve the user's outcome, and then support that journey with the appropriate tools. Tactics will come and go, and users will become immune to them.

Depends.

Do you want to make an app or do you want to float some VC's balance sheet?

If you are avoiding subscriptions, are you doing credit buckets? Up front X months in advance and a reminder to top up?

I find either of these more ethical but it is worth noting that any non-expiring, roll-over credit scheme is going to kill you. All you need is one or two months where you’re focussed on infrastructure instead of fresh content and you will find users get out of the habit of using it up, which can end up with you effectively in debt to your users, who will expect more value the longer they wait.

> I’m starting to wonder if this approach is fundamentally at odds with today’s market.

I don't want to project, but outside of video gaming, I'm seeing people in my personal networks pull back from digital more and more - not because these tools and apps aren't useful, but because they are so hostile.

So you might be ahead of your time. That said, businesses cost money to run so you need to assess your churn if you aren't going to have a subscription model.