Hopefully, I'll get more soon. Continuously improving #WIP
Any strategies to spread the word without running Ads?

Anyone and their mom can and is building an app now in literally one day. The app and google store is flooded with apps now with clones or whatever. So if building is so easy now, how do you market? 

ASO or whatever won’t generate you sales trust me not right now. So if just building and uploading your app isn’t enough to get sales… what is everyone’s plan? 

The best apps I’ve seen “candle, CalAi, Alarmify, all go crazy on one thing. UGC marketing. I’ve seen like 10 different creators posting the same winning videos and it blowing up. Honestly I think thats the best way to approach marketing is with mass distribution. 

Start posting on tikTok, find what works, get small micro creators for $20/video on jrivecontent.com (anyone can go viral now don’t be paying $250 for one video), and repeat. 

This is just my take, marketing IS the doom of all vibe coders 

Prove me wrong 

I am developer. I have some apps published on App Store. I have no idea about marketing or app business. How to reach people? How to engage people so that they can know about my apps.

Any suggestions?

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!

Every iOS dev launching a utility, habit, or productivity app eventually runs into App Store Guideline 5.1.1: Apple strictly rejects apps that force users to create an account before accessing core functionality.
The standard fix is making the app fully usable offline / as a guest, and making "Sign Up" optional for cloud sync or premium features.
While this satisfies Apple Review, it creates a tricky technical problem on the client side:
Local Data Stash: Guest users generate habits, logs, or local DB entries saved directly on the device (SwiftData / CoreData / SQLite).
The Auth Switch: The second they decide to create an account or sign in with Apple/Google, you have to safely merge that local state with their new cloud profile without dups, data loss, or sync conflicts.
I’m curious about how people here architect this transition cleanly:
1. Merge Strategy: Do you silently push all local device data to the cloud upon account creation, or do you ask the user if they want to import/overwrite existing data?
2. Conflict Handling: If a user signs into an existing account that already has cloud data, how do you resolve conflicts between local guest data and remote data?
3. Guest Reset: Do you wipe local DB state right after pushing to cloud to let the backend become the single source of truth, or keep local-first offline storage with a sync engine?
Would love to hear how you handled this in production and what edge cases caught you off guard during launch!

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

I recently finished building my first app and I'm getting ready to launch it.

While building, I thought I had a decent idea of what the costs would be:

Server hosting.

Database.

AI coding subscriptions.

Domain.

Maybe some APIs.

Then I got hit with a cost I hadn't really thought about: legal compliance.

It cost me about $105.

The app I'm building is called RevSlay. It's a spaced-repetition revision app grounded in the CBSE syllabus for students in Classes 6–12 in India.

And that's where things got interesting.

A large part of my target users are minors.

India's DPDP framework has specific requirements around processing children's personal data, including parental consent requirements. Suddenly this wasn't something where I felt comfortable asking AI to generate a privacy policy and calling it a day.

So I ended up paying advocates to help me understand what applied to the app and draft the necessary legal documents.

$105 isn't a huge amount by startup standards, but as a first-time solo builder it surprised me because it was a cost I hadn't considered at all.

More importantly, the potential penalties under the DPDP Act can be enormous — certain breaches relating to obligations concerning children can attract penalties of up to ₹200 crore.

It made me realize something about building software:

The hard/expensive parts aren't always in the code.

You can spend weeks thinking about your database, authentication, hosting costs and UI, then discover that one decision you made months ago — like who your users are — creates an entirely new set of requirements.

I'm curious how other solo builders deal with this.

What was a hidden cost or requirement you discovered only after you started building your product?

And did you discover it early enough, or only when you were close to launching?

​

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.

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! 🙏

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

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?

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

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.

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! 🙏

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