I have released a few apps on the app stores.
Most of them were small-scale applications.
They were not built for learning purposes.
These apps had fewer than five pages
and only one or two features.
Pop-up advertisements were shown to users on almost every page.
That was okay.
I did build these apps mainly for ad revenue.
But there was a problem.
Most of them had very low retention.
They didn’t really make money,
and they didn’t give me meaningful experience either.
That said, not all of my apps were built casually.
I did put real effort into a fortune-telling app
and an emotion tracking app.
They were more complete technically,
but the planning and features were driven mostly by my assumptions,
not by actual user needs.
In that sense, they also failed.
Interestingly, a very simple Korean language learning app
that I built with much less effort
is still generating around three to four dollars per day.
At some point, I felt that even if I made no ad revenue at all,
I just wanted the experience of running an app
where users actually accumulate over time.
And I needed a Flutter portfolio.
My Git repository was full of low-quality apps.
I didn’t really have anything I could call a portfolio,
nothing that clearly showed my experience or skills,
even though I had been developing for almost five years.
Long story short,
these days I decided to start another app.
This time, I’m really focusing on planning.
I’m comparing similar apps
and spending a lot of time researching
what kind of app makes sense to build,
based on niche markets and real user needs.
At the beginning, I considered making a running app
that helps people with running.
But I dropped that idea at the planning stage.
I didn’t want to compete with big applications
like Nike Run Club.
Beyond that,
there are already too many apps
that simply measure distance.
So now I’m about to make an app related to book reading.
I joined a book reading group on a social media app,
and I’m quite active in that group.
Because of that, I know there are many people
who are interested in growing their reading habits
or recording book phrases that impressed them.
Actually, I’m rarely coding right now.
I’m mostly forming the directory structure
and considering which libraries would fit this project.
As much as possible, I want to choose effective tools,
considering maintainability and scalability.
I don’t want to overengineer it,
but I do want to build a well-structured project.
Top comments (2)
The shift from assumption-driven to research-driven planning is probably the single highest-leverage change you can make as a solo dev. I went through something similar building a financial data site — spent months generating tens of thousands of pages before properly validating whether anyone was actually searching for the content I was producing. Turns out the pages I spent the least effort on (programmatic stock analysis) got more traction than the ones I carefully crafted.
Your Korean language app making $3-4/day with minimal effort is a great data point. Sometimes the simplest tool that solves a real, specific need beats the more ambitious project. The book reading app idea sounds solid especially since you're already embedded in that community — that's basically built-in user research before writing a single line of code. Are you planning to validate with that group before building, or going straight to MVP?
Thanks for sharing your experience — that's a really interesting data point about programmatic stock analysis getting more traction than carefully crafted pages.
I'm still in the planning phase. Before writing any code, I'm going through ASO research and review analysis to find a more specific niche. I want to make sure there's real demand before I start building.
The community is more of a passive inspiration for me — I'm not planning to validate with them directly.
Also still thinking about promotion. I'm planning to do some marketing and maybe publish content on social media too. That part feels just as hard as building the app honestly.
At the end of the day, this is still a small project and I'm honestly not sure how it'll go. So I'm trying not to put too much energy into it — just keep it lean and see what happens.