Love the story about that app. I had the same experience when I was looking for something in the App Store and I couldn't believe it was nothing there.
You have very good looking onboarding but that notification request from the beginning is very bad user experience. Have you thought about having a separate screen where you describe user how important it is to enable notifications and allow them show that request by themselves using a button?
Anyway, app is really cool and wish you good luck with it! Can't wait for v3 :)
