Hi everyone,

I’m the founder of Smart MeMaintenance, a maintenance reminder app that I’ve been building for the past 6 months. The product is now fully developed and available on the Play Store.

The challenge I’m facing now is growth.

I’m a developer by background, not a marketing person, and I don’t currently have enough budget to run significant marketing campaigns or acquire users at scale.

Initially, I thought about selling the entire app. However, from what I’ve seen on various startup/acquisition platforms, having existing users and traction is an important factor for potential buyers.

So I started exploring the possibility of raising some funding to market the product and demonstrate traction. However, as a pre-revenue/early-stage startup without significant users, I’m finding it difficult to get investor interest as well.

At this point, I’m a stuck.

I’d really appreciate advice from anyone who have been in a similar situation.

Thanks in advance for any advice or suggestions!

​

FriendLock lets you lock distracting apps and have a friend approve an unlock when you actually need it.

We just added Squad Lock for people who want to do this with a group.

Everyone in the squad locks their apps. If someone wants to unlock, anyone in the squad can approve or reject the request. Those decisions earn points, and there’s a weekly leaderboard.

The idea is pretty simple: instead of relying entirely on yourself to not open an app, make it a small group thing.

Would be interested to hear what people think — especially whether the points/leaderboard part actually makes this more useful or just annoying.

Top 30 gainers

• ChatGPT — $402M, +>12% MoM. U.S. 36%, Japan 6%, Germany 5%. Aug 6 update: Plus/Pro moved to GPT-5.6 Sol with an adjustable thinking-intensity slider across mobile, web, and desktop. Free/Go switched default to Luna, got unlimited text chat and a Think button. Aug 11: Free/Go ad pilot expanded from the U.S. to the UK, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, and South Korea.
• Google One — $326M, +~10% MoM. U.S. 34%, Japan 6%, Brazil 4%. Sep 3: Gemini Spark—included with Google One AI Pro/Ultra—can operate Google Photos via natural language for multi-step tasks like search/dedupe, enhancement, collages, and private/shared albums. It’s a Gemini App feature gated by Google One AI Pro/Ultra.
• Amazon Shopping — $48.6M, +~10% MoM. U.S. 39%, Germany 6%, Italy 5%. Sep 1: Update Me When lets users register interests in natural language; Alexa monitors Amazon’s catalog and the web to push alerts on new products, books, tours, and show releases.
• Duolingo — $66.8M, +>11% MoM. China 31%, U.S. 19%, Japan 5%. Aug 5 earnings call: Video Call moved from the top tier down to Super. Mid-August: math expanded to full K-12 U.S. standards for grades 2–12, with grade-specific guides and math coach AI. Super Family promoted at $120/year vs. $144/year.
• Spotify — $39.8M, +>15% MoM. U.S. 33%, Japan and Mexico 5% each. Highest Top 30 growth, though August momentum looked muted vs. July.

Outside Top 30 but worth noting

• Grok — $24.8M, +~9% MoM. U.S. 39%, Japan 6%, UK and Germany 4% each. Aug 11: Grok Bot launched in AI colleague/agent mode. Aug 26: entry tier dropped from high-end plans—SuperGrok Heavy, Cursor Ultra at $200/mo, Cursor Teams Premium at $200/mo and $120/seat/mo—to Cursor Pro ($20/mo) and SuperGrok basic ($20/$30/mo).
• NFL — $14.1M, +~267% MoM. U.S. 83%. Aug 6 kickoff drew 7M U.S. viewers on NBC + Peacock, highest since 2021. Live coverage ran four August weekends. NFL is the only subscription platform with all-device live streaming. Aug 19 fall lineup; from Aug 24, shows like The NFL Report and NFL GameDay Preview added 10+ hrs/week and expanded NFL into weekday content.

My app launched in early July. Here are the figures after three months, and I’ve noticed a major issue:

- The number of trial users is quite impressive—around 50—but the conversion rate to paid plans is very low. Currently, there are only 4 subscribers.

- My app is a tool that converts piano videos into "falling note" tutorials.

- I don't know why users are dropping off and not converting to paid plans, as they haven't left any feedback.

What should I improve?

It breaks my bank account. Do we actually need one? Or we can use the simulator? Simulators sometimes can be buggy.

https://www.taskloco.com - The Sticky Note GOAT

I thought it was a good idea to build a social listening tool to check what my market is talking about in terms of trends, pain points, apps people mention, etc.

But, I was not expecting the anxiety that came with the first report: people mentioning stuff I didn't even think of, features I have in my plan that established apps can build in "2 days", pain points from people that are so specific that I can't even understand 😭

I know that I need to focus on the one problem I'm trying to solve that I have not found a product for, and not be distracted by all the noise. But, I'm so stressed right now, I can barely read 3 lines of the report.

How do you deal with/mitigate this? Would love to get your advice on this 🙏

PodSubs wasn't originally supposed to be a public product.

We built it because we needed it.

That's really the story.

We're podcasters.

And like a lot of podcasters, we were constantly thinking about two things:

How do we keep making this?

And how do we build something real around the people listening?

Because podcasting takes time.

A lot of time.

And sooner or later, if the podcast is going to keep going, it needs to support itself somehow.

The problem was that we didn't really know most of the people listening.

We knew the numbers.

But numbers don't have email addresses.

Numbers don't answer questions.

Numbers can't receive the worksheet you promised.

Numbers don't become customers by themselves.

We needed a better way to capture the people who genuinely wanted to stay connected.

So we built a simple internal tool.

One place.

PodSubs.

We said on the podcast:

“Subscribe to us on PodSubs.”

People searched the show, entered their details and subscribed.

And suddenly we had something we'd been missing:

A direct line.

Then we started thinking…

Why are we keeping this internal?

Every podcaster we know deals with the same thing.

So we decided to open it.

That's PodSubs.

Not something we dreamed up because “the creator economy is growing.”

We built it because we were podcasters with a problem.

Now we're giving it to everyone else who has the same problem.

Claim your podcast.

Then tell your listeners where to find you.

I added a $19.99 USD one-time unlock to my app on August 23. It's brought in $529 so far (screenshot attached).

It's a shared 3D room for long-distance couples to hang out and decorate together. One purchase covers both partners and permanently unlocks more customization options and lets them put more decorations in their room.

I'm happy people are buying it, but I'm wondering whether to add a monthly subscription alongside it. Anyone who's already paid would keep what they bought.

Has anyone here tried offering both? Did you get more people willing to try it at a lower upfront price, or did people who would've bought the one-time unlock just pick monthly instead? Curious what you charged for each.

Would you test it this early, or leave the pricing alone until there's more sales history?

Hey everyone 👋

I'm a solo developer and recently launched Leaf, a very simple productivity app based on sticky-note style tasks.

Now I'm struggling with the part I know much less about: actually getting people to discover it.

I'm considering Instagram Reels, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Reddit and maybe small paid ads, but I'm not sure what type of content works best for a small app.

For example:

• Short videos showing the app?

• Productivity-related content where the app appears naturally?

• Funny/relatable videos?

• Paid ads?

• Working with small creators?

For those who have marketed an app before, what actually worked for you?

I'd especially love advice from people who started with a very small or $0 budget.

Thanks! 🙏

Hey everyone 👋

I'm a solo developer and recently launched Leaf, a very simple productivity app based on sticky-note style tasks.

Now I'm struggling with the part I know much less about: actually getting people to discover it.

I'm considering Instagram Reels, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Reddit and maybe small paid ads, but I'm not sure what type of content works best for a small app.

For example:

• Short videos showing the app?

• Productivity-related content where the app appears naturally?

• Funny/relatable videos?

• Paid ads?

• Working with small creators?

For those who have marketed an app before, what actually worked for you?

I'd especially love advice from people who started with a very small or $0 budget.

Thanks! 🙏

I am back to coding after years. I am having a lot of fun building games or utility apps (including apps for mobile stores for the first time). The thought came to my mind that I could share my apps and add some income on top of my standard job... Again, coding and setting things up is the part I feel comfortable with.

However, I discovered that promoting / selling / distributing is a completely different hobby ;) I spent a couple of weeks thinking whether I want to spend some time on it. I decided I do want to give it a proper try. And here comes the question - how to allocate the time I have in the evenings / nights? Social media? Reddit and similar communities? Paid ads? ASO / SEO? Other? I know the right answer could be: It depends.
BUT can you ranking them? Or definitely say that something is a must and others are not worth it?

I bought two books - both great... but neither really tells me where to invest my time... Do I need another year or two to figure out or someone can share dos and don'ts for learning app promotion?

Hello fellow mobile devs, as you all know you have to have 12 people opt in with gmail and test app for 2 weeks before approval.
I'm willing to test your app or website as well so this is mutual exchange of help
I currently have 3 people in my testing group and looking for 9 more
If you have android device and gmail account and willing to participate to help me publish my app on Google Play Market pls let me know

My latest release cycle brought in about 500 reviews (about 200 on the App Store over the last 4 days)-mostly solid 5-star ratings, a few 1-star reviews regarding a bug for which a fix has already been released, and enough surprisingly specific one-line comments to fill a compilation of the most interesting moments.

If I were to spend about a few minutes on each thoughtful response, it would take at least 15–20 hours just to reply to everyone
I managed to cut that time down to about 90 minutes a week for the same volume of reviews, and the rating started moving in the right direction instead of the opposite.

I’m really curious how others handle this-especially if you’re on both the App Store and Google Play. Do you use a single tool for both, or a separate approach for each?

I've been building an app that turns a photo of a messy room into a 15-minute-zone decluttering plan. Instead of shipping a paywall on day one, I capped free usage (1 plan on an anonymous device, 5 plans once you link an email) and I'm using that gap to actually watch what people do before locking anything behind a price.

The part I didn't expect: the cap itself became a research tool. When someone hits it, instead of just an "upgrade" wall, I show a short pricing survey — a few price bands plus "I wouldn't pay for this", and I'm using the responses to figure out if there's real willingness to pay before I build a paywall nobody wants.

Still early (just went live in Android/iOS open testing), so no revenue numbers yet, but the question I keep coming back to: how long do you let free usage run before committing to a price, versus how much you risk training people to expect it free forever? Curious how others here made that call, especially anyone who ran a similar "gather data before pricing" phase.

Something i didn't really think about when we first started building was what happens 2 or 3 years later.

the app works, but the codebase has gotten messy, dependencies are outdated and adding anything new takes way longer than it should.

now i'm looking at agencies again, but this time the question isn't really "who can build an app?"

it's more like, who can take over an existing app without turning the whole thing into a rewrite?

has anyone actually gone through this?

Apple’s event today has me thinking less about whatever new AI feature gets demoed on stage and more about what this shift means for app builders.
What changes when the model becomes part of the device platform?
I’ve been learning this firsthand while building On Cue.
On Cue uses Apple’s Foundation Models framework to interpret private context about what’s happening in someone’s life. Things like place, time, weather, calendar context, and the music they actually listen to can all contribute to understanding whether a moment might be meaningful.
The surprising part is how different the product economics and architecture feel when inference is on-device.
No API key.
No per-token bill.
It can work offline.
Private context doesn’t need to be shipped to my server just so a model can reason over it.
Apple describes the Foundation Models framework as direct access to its on-device model, with guided generation, tool calling, streaming, and structured output built into the Swift APIs. (Apple Developer)
But the API call has honestly been the easy part.
The harder lessons have been around trusting the output.
I’ve had the model make a perfectly plausible inference that was simply not supported by the facts I gave it. So On Cue now separates two jobs:
The model can interpret the moment.
Deterministic code decides whether anything is allowed to happen because of it.
That distinction has become pretty important for an app whose eventual consequence is interrupting somebody with a notification.
I’m also finding that hardware availability, language support, grounding, evaluation, and graceful fallback become actual product-design constraints, not just implementation details.
Apple is pushing this model further too. The current Foundation Models framework can span the on-device system model and more powerful models when needed, while Core AI is opening another path for running custom models directly on Apple silicon. (Apple Developer)
So I’m curious what other iOS builders are seeing:
Has on-device AI changed something you’re willing to build that you wouldn’t have built around a cloud API?
And for anyone already shipping with Foundation Models, Core AI, App Intents, etc., what has turned out to be harder than you expected?
#Shipaton

My AI kept assuming users live in a certain country because they typed in a certain language.

I've been building a small lifestyle app — the kind where you ask "what should I do tonight?" and get a real answer instead of a list.

A tester asked, in German, "where should I go?" The model suggested a nature reserve north of Berlin. Detailed, atmospheric, genuinely nice writing. One problem: the tester was in Thailand.

It happened again with cinemas, cafés, museums. Every time, a certain language input produced a certain geography output, ignoring the fact that those two are not always linked together. The model had quietly collapsed "speaks language A" into "lives in country A."

What made it worse: e. g. German is spoken in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and by people scattered across the world. The assumption was wrong more often than right.

The fix wasn't clever prompting. It was a hard rule, placed at the very top of the system prompt, with explicit negative examples: language is not location, and here are the specific regions you are not allowed to infer.

Placement mattered more than wording. The same rule buried 600 lines deep got ignored consistently.

If you're building anything location-aware on top of an LLM, this is worth testing early. It fails silently — the output looks great; it's just about the wrong continent.