This is exactly how it is unfortunately, been there several times myself. Testing early on with real users is really important, it's always a great surprise how blind you've become during the development and can't just see the problems until it's too late. Hacking together little tooltips does not fix anything, trendy slides with a skip button = skip, wall of text with a close button = close. Many games does onboarding very well, learn while you do meaningful actions is the best way but this also really hard to do and often seen as unnecessary step which just takes time from developing "real" features. As you said onboarding has to be in the core of the product and it should hold users hand as long as possible, nothing is more horrible than a user who feels stupid because he can not understand what to do next.

Facebook ads is a powerful tool if tuned right but man is it expensive. The amount of money you have to spend on user aquisition for apps and games is absolutely staggering, comes as no surprise at all that they are making this kind of money.

Works really fine. Icon could use some more love...

I used to be a graffiti guy at least on some level when I was a teenager. I was always very interested in design, lettering, music etc. Then I got my first very own computer, spent way too much time on it, downloaded all the basic software for making banners, making music and so on, it was magical what you could do! I wanted to learn everything.

Finally an older friend asked if I could design a website for his new company, "since you know those computers and stuff" Actually I didn't know how it was really done but somehow I hacked something together by googling and so on :) Fear of failing is your biggest enemy.

Later I went to school just to get some paper out and paving the way for future education possibilities but haven't really had the time or motivation to continue further. So I could say I'm self taught all the way.

If you are truly curious about how something works, you can teach your self it all, read books, watch videos, make stuff, make some more stuff, fail, try again, keep your mind open, listen what older more experienced people has to say.

If you don't know yet what's your true calling, school can give you some direction and help you find it. School is also great for networking with like minded people and staying active but even in school you have to take a huge responsibility and dig deeper on the subjects on your own time. Courses are often short and very general and it's hard for the teachers to keep up with how fast things are moving in this field of work. I remember when one of my teachers told me that "if you want to make sure you have work till the rest of your days and make some big moeny, learn Symbian now!" And then iOS/Android came and here we are...

wow

2x for ios 1x for android, that's how I've been doing this for some time.

I really love to use sketch but only to a point... It slows down really fast and as people have already mentioned, it becomes REALLY SLOW, everything lags behind. I hope future updates will fix the performance issues soon because sketch is a brilliant tool. I have a year old retina macbook.