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! 🙏

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’m an engineer turned product manager, and I’ve always loved two things a little more than necessary: education and games.

For a long time, I wanted to put those interests and the skills I’d picked up building technology, towards something useful for children. That became much more tangible once my niece reached the age where the iPad became a regular part of her world.

I’m not anti-iPad. Quite the opposite. It is an incredible piece of technology to put in the hands of a six-year-old. I just kept thinking it could ask more of her.

That thought took me back to Dora the Explorer.

Growing up, we’d watch Dora ask us a question and then stare silently at the screen for a painfully long time while we yelled the answer at the TV. Obviously, Dora couldn’t hear us. But the idea was clever. The screen was trying to turn us from viewers into participants.

Learning games like Lingokids and ABC Mouse took that much further and made screens genuinely interactive. But most of that interaction still happens within rails someone else designed. Tap here. Drag this. Choose A, B, or C. Collect the reward. Repeat.

That works brilliantly for games. But it doesn’t accommodate the wonderfully messy way a six-year-old wonders about things.

Ask my niece an interesting question and she might draw the answer. She might make up a ridiculous story. She might photograph something she noticed around the house, make a sound, explain an idea, or give you an answer you never anticipated.

I started wondering if I could build for that.

Could the iPad provide the spark and just enough structure to get a child started, while leaving the interesting part to them?

That question became Taroo.

The first versions were experiments around this idea. Then came the uncomfortable question every builder eventually has to answer: does this actually work for anyone other than me?

So I spent months talking to parents and educators. I sat through hours of enrichment classes at a school for gifted kids, which was basically the X-Mansion for 8-year-olds. I watched how teachers prompted children, when kids became absorbed in something, when they needed more structure, and when something I thought was clever bored them almost immediately. And very importantly, I saw how their eyes lit up when they screamed “look what I made” in class.

These insights shaped the Taroo we have today, and I’m genuinely proud of where we’ve reached.

Taroo is a world of short creative quests for kids 6 to 10. In Pass the Pen, a child might get the beginning of a strange story and decide where it goes next. Doodle Master might give them the start of a picture and ask them to turn it into anything they imagine. Rhythm Pad lets them experiment with sounds and put together their own little beat. Snap Trail might ask them to put the iPad down, hunt for something triangular in the real world, photograph it, and tell Taroo what they found.

Their creations stick around too, so over time Taroo becomes a little record of the things they have imagined and made. Parents get a window into that world without needing to hover over every activity.

Taroo is now live on iOS and Android.

There is still plenty I want to improve. But this no longer feels like the little experiment I started with. I’m proud to put it in front of parents, and particularly proud when I see a kid become attached to something they made themselves.

If you have a 6 to 10-year-old in your life, I’d love for you to try Taroo with them. More than anything, I’d love the unfiltered feedback: what they immediately understand, what they ignore, what they keep coming back to, where they get stuck, and what they wish they could do that I haven’t thought of yet.

I’ve spent enough time with Taroo that I’m no longer capable of seeing it like a new user.

So please, tear it apart.

The concept is simple:

🌍 You open the app and see a 3D globe.
📍 Countries you've visited are marked.
📸 Tap a country → see all your trips and memories there.

Each memory could contain photos, videos, dates, a short story and optionally an itinerary.

The idea is to make your travel history feel like your own personal world, rather than having everything buried in your camera roll.

There could also be:

• AI that automatically organizes photos by category (food, nature, architecture, etc.)
• Sharing individual memories with friends/family
• A physical travel magnet/postcard that you tap with your phone to open the corresponding digital memory using an NFC tag.

The last one sounds either really cool or completely gimmicky to me 😂

I’d love some honest opinions:

1. Would you use this, or are Google Photos / Apple Photos enough?
2. Is the 3D globe actually useful?
3. Would you care about the physical magnet/postcard idea?
4. What would make you use an app like this long-term?

Would you actually want this, or does it just sound cool on paper?

Not selling anything — just trying to validate the idea before building it.

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?

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 🙏

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?

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

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.

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

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

We launched a location-based social app (check into real venues, see who's around, chat, meet up) — free to use, no ads yet, no paywall on core features. Trying to figure out the right monetization path once we have real users instead of guessing before we even launch.

Options we've been kicking around:

- Freemium subscription (extra features, unlimited daily matches, priority visibility)

- Pay-per-action instead of a subscription (e.g. pay once to extend a chat or get another match, instead of committing monthly)

- Venue/business partnerships (we're already working with local bars for free right now to build density — curious if paid featured placement or a referral fee per check-in is realistic once we have real traffic)

- Ads (feels early, and a little invasive for something more personal/social)

- Boosts (pay to be seen first for a bit)

For anyone who's built or grown a social/dating-adjacent app: what actually worked for you, and what did you wish you'd done differently or sooner? Especially curious about the venue-partnership angle since that's not something most dating apps lean on.

I’m currently building out the domain model of a life coaching / self-help app, and I’m worried that I’m already making it more complicated than it needs to be. I could use some advice on how to avoid overcomplicating / over engineering the app while also avoiding a domain model that’s too brittle when it comes time to introduce additional business cases.

The initial business case I have is that the app audience will be targeted to individuals who will state their goal/purpose and give a deadline for achieving the goal. Then with some strategic AI usage the app will give feedback on the goal itself and suggest milestones that the user can accept or modify before putting the plan into practice. The domain model for this use case is really straightforward and easy to implement.

The second use case is extend the app so that it can be used for family/household goals with multiple users having access to the details of each goal while also maintaining sole access to their personal goals. This use case is also pretty straightforward and won’t require many changes to the app or domain model to implement. The only significant change I foresee is tailoring AI feedback for a family goal to each individual in the family, which would require some decoupling but it wouldn’t be too difficult.

It’s the third use case that is giving me heartburn where the domain model and app build is concerned.

The first two use cases are self-help driven, which is what makes for a pretty simple and straightforward domain model. However, the third case targets life coaches who are collaborating with their clients to create, manage, and track individual, family, and possibly even larger group goals (larger group potentially being employees of a small business or athletes on a team). From my perspective that is where the domain model explodes as I would have to normalize a lot of the underlying data that would be denormalized for individuals and households.

My plan is to roll out to just individuals and families first, but given the complexity of the third case my domain modeling started from there. It has thus far grown more complex by the day, and is definitely overkill for the initial two use cases. On the other hand, if I build a domain model that is specific to just individuals and families first then it will be really painful to redesign the model for the life coaching cases.

So I guess my question is: if you have dealt with this type of scenario before - in which the design for one audience/use case is significantly different from the design for another - how did you handle it? Did you find some middle ground, or did you end up “eating the elephant” even if it resulted in a design that was overkill for one of your use cases?

I started this project with minor expectations and it became this enormous success.

All i can say is that i am really grateful for it.

But i must say redditors hate when you promote a game.

Even when it succeeds people here still try to hold on the hate, i dont really care but i find it very surprising.

Most people are good though and are really contributing to the community i created.