A long-overdue check-in from the solo dev in Japan who keeps making apps nobody asked for
Hi. It's Kei.
If you've read my stuff before, you know the shape of this already: I'm a solo iOS developer in Japan, I taught myself to code a few years ago, and I keep shipping little apps into a void that mostly ignores them. Then I come back to Medium and write about it like I'm confessing something.
It's been a few months since the last one. I want to say I was doing something glamorous. I wasn't. I was sitting at the same desk, in the same chair, rebuilding the same apps over and over, one screenshot at a time.
So this is just a check-in. No big launch, no dramatic story. Just — here's what I've actually been doing while I went quiet.
I fell down a screenshot hole and didn't come out for weeks
Someone told me once — actually, a kind stranger named Roman told me this in a Medium comment months ago — that I spend a month building an app and ten minutes on the screenshots, and that this is completely backwards. The screenshots are the thing people actually see. The app is the thing they see after they've already decided.
I couldn't stop thinking about it. So I did the obviously unhinged thing and rebuilt the store media for my entire pet-app line. Nine apps. All of them. New screenshots, new preview videos, in ten languages.
If you want a number: it came out to something like 720 still images and 351 preview videos. I built little tools to generate them because doing it by hand would have taken until next year. Some nights I'd fix one alignment bug at 1am and then realize it was wrong in all nine apps and all ten languages at once, and I'd just sit there staring at the ceiling.
All nine are live now. Did downloads explode? No. But they look like real apps made by a real person now, instead of apps made by someone who gave up at the screenshot stage. That feels like it matters, even if the numbers haven't caught up yet.
The apps that actually shipped
While I was in the screenshot hole, a few things did make it out the door:
- MuraLog (the diary-with-a-cat I wrote about last time — Romi is still down there in the corner, still refusing to frown at anyone) got a bunch of updates. She's a little more polished now.
- PlantCareDiary got a big redesign and shipped.
- MyDailyPets, MyDailySleep, and WorldHolidays all pushed real updates.
- And I did the thing I swore I'd stop doing: I started a brand-new app. It's called COLLEMO, and no, nobody asked for it, and yes, I built it anyway. I have a problem.
I also quietly turned one of my apps into something completely different. It used to be a gratitude journal. It's now a dream journal — you write down last night's dream before it fades, and a little AI tries to gently guess what it might mean. (It's for fun and self-reflection, not fortune-telling. I put that in the description twice so nobody yells at me.) Renaming and repurposing an app you already shipped is a strange feeling. Like renovating a house while people are technically still living in it.
The boring confession: the money
In an earlier post I got a little preachy about ads and money. So in the spirit of being honest with the three of you still reading:
I finally sat down and did the math on what all of this actually earns. Ad revenue across the whole portfolio, annualized, is roughly $118. A year.
I'm not going to dress that up. That's not "ramen profitable." That's not even "one nice dinner per month." That's a rounding error for most people reading this on Medium.
And here's the thing I learned staring at that number: you cannot optimize your way out of an audience problem. I spent a while convinced that if I just tuned the ad placement, picked better ad units, moved things around, the number would change. It doesn't. The number is small because not enough people know the apps exist. Every lever I actually control is downstream of that one problem, and that one problem is marketing — the exact thing I'm worst at.
Which, I guess, is why I'm back here writing this.
What I've figured out (and what I haven't)
The stuff I've gotten better at is all the invisible plumbing. I can build an app, localize it into 35 languages, generate a few hundred localized screenshots and videos, submit it, deal with the occasional App Store rejection, and ship an update — mostly without breaking things. Two years ago none of that was true.
The stuff I have not figured out is the only stuff that moves the number: getting a single additional human being to care.
I tried a few things while I was gone. I looked at Reddit again — my posts get eaten by low-karma filters before anyone sees them, which is fair, that's what the filters are for. I've got a stack of blog drafts I never published. I keep hearing "just do Product Hunt," "just do TikTok," "just build in public," and every one of those is a whole second job I don't have the energy for after the first one.
I don't have a clean ending for this. I'm not going to pretend I cracked it. I'm just still here, still shipping, still bad at the part that matters.
What I'm asking for
Same as always. If you made it this far, thank you — genuinely.
If you've ever gone from "nobody uses my thing" to "some people use my thing," I want to know what actually flipped it. Not the generic advice. The specific thing that worked for you.
If you're a fellow tiny-audience solo dev, say hi. It's lonely out here and I like knowing there are others.
Or just go poke at one of the apps and tell me it's ugly. Honestly that's useful too.
Links
- You can find everything by searching KeiK LLC on the App Store — that's the developer page with all of them.
- My website: keik.co.jp
I'll try not to disappear for so long next time. No promises. There's another app half-built on my desk right now and I already know I'm going to finish it before I do anything sensible about marketing the ones that are already out.
Thank you for reading. It still means a lot every single time.
— Kei
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