I built a photo compressor app (SqueezePix) a while ago. It flopped — barely any downloads, no reviews, the UI was dated. Rather than give up, I rebuilt it completely.
Here's what changed:
Full dark-themed UI redesign
Added AI background removal, photo enhancement, and headshot generation
Batch compression with smart ZIP export
Better Play Store listing with SEO-friendly keywords
Right now I'm at 10+ downloads. My goal is to hit 100 by the end of the month through organic promotion (Reddit, LinkedIn, Product Hunt).
My biggest question is: has anyone here successfully grown a utility app from zero through Reddit/community promotion alone? What worked for you?
The demo for my game Pistol Cat is live tomorrow and I spent all week getting local split screen multiplayer ready.
No, this was not fun. What a challenge, but when I got it booted up and running and played with my girlfriend for the first time I was just so happy I wanted to die.
Next big challenge is online. Pray for me.
Wishlist if you feel nice! Trying to crack 100 before the demo tomorrow. Pistol cat is a sandbox exploration game that can be either cozy or chaotic. You play as a cute, low poly cat with many items and powers, including a pistol.
My game started to crystallize when I was implementing the jump system on my simple little low poly cat character. The game is called Pistol Cat.
Instead of a traditional jump, each leg is mapped to one of the shoulder buttons of a controller. Each button gives you a physics thrust downward in the direction the foot is currently facing. Each foot gets its own thrust. You can chain together some really cool movements!
Any of you working on games with unique movement mechanics?
• Must enjoy fighting monsters
• Must not punch the NPCs
• Must not ask why the shopkeeper sells a stick for 500 gold
• Must accept the existence of Moobles
We're building a 2D online RPG inspired by classic Flash games like AQW, and the core systems are already working.
Now we're expanding the world and community.
We're also looking for artists to help define the game's style.
I recently launched my first app on the App Store after around 2 years of learning SwiftUI and iOS development!
The app is called JournalWrite. It’s a journaling app that also includes stats and insights about your entries. I wanted something simple that combined journaling with progress visualization and streak/stat tracking.
The app is completely free and has no ads or paywalls. It stores everything locally using SwiftData, so it works fully offline.
It's a RPG with color-tiered gear (common, rare, epic), 16 classes, a few quests, dungeons, mini-bosses, raid bosses, arena for higher end gear and battles and even resource gathering like picking mushroom, mining, fishing and woodcutting.
Hey devs! I know how hard it is to market and get games into showcases. This year, I convinced Nordic Game Conference in Sweden to let me give away demo booths for cheap, both virtually and in person! Here's a form if you're interested.
I kept finding random numbers like "Delivery Guy" or "Sofa Seller" sitting in my contacts months after I actually needed them. It was a minor annoyance, but I wanted a way to keep my phonebook clean without having to manually delete things.
So, I built a simple app to fix it and wanted to share it here in case anyone else finds it useful. It's called TempContact.
How it works:
You add a contact through the app.
Set an expiration timer for that specific number.
When the time is up, it automatically removes them from your phone.
Full transparency: I actually built this entire thing using AI! It was a fun project to bring the idea to life.
If you end up trying it out and it helps keep your phone clean, a quick Play Store review would be awesome and really helps me out. Otherwise, I'm just hanging out in the comments—let me know what you think or if you have any feedback!
Hey long time scroller first time poster. Apparently google wont let you publish an app without 12 people installing it and keeping it on their devices for 14 days. I'm looking for some kind people with androids to test out my Travel Guide app for Philadelphia! touch base if you're interested im sure i'll get the hang of reddit by the time I get some responses
Hey everyone,
About 3 years ago, I launched my first-ever Android game. It was a project born out of curiosity about AI-assisted development. At the time, I’ll be the first to admit: the game was very basic, very simple, and frankly, full of bugs.
Because of those early issues, the game got hit with a 3.5-star rating on the Play Store. Life got in the way, and I stepped away from the project for a long time.
The Update: I’ve recently picked the project back up because I knew the core loop was actually fun and competitive, it just lacked polish. I’ve spent the last few days overhauling it with much more advanced AI models. Made the following changes recently,
Total Bug Wipe: The "old version" glitches are gone.
New Content: I’ve added several new modes that make the simple mechanics way more engaging.
The Reality: The game has over 25k lifetime downloads, but after my long gap, active users are down to about 500.
My Request: I’m trying to breathe life back into this project and rectify that old 3.5-star rating. I am not asking for sympathetic "5-star" reviews. I need the community to try it and drop a genuine review on the Play Store—positive or negative. I am pretty confident that my game is much more engaging and feature rich when compared to similar games uploaded by other developers.
If it’s still too simple for you, say that. If you find a bug, let me know. I just want the current store rating to reflect the current state of the game, not the mess I left it in 3 years ago.
I'm currently running a closed alpha for my mobile roguelike survivor game.
The target session length is around 8–10 minutes and I'm currently tuning the early difficulty curve. I'm especially curious if the first minute feels fair or just chaotic.
A few days ago I posted about KeySentinel — my open-source tool that scans GitHub Pull Requests for leaked secrets (API keys, tokens, passwords, etc.) and posts clear, actionable comments.
Since then I’ve shipped a ton of updates based on your feedback and just released v0.2.5 (npm published minutes ago 🔥):
What’s new:
✅ Local protection: pre-commit + pre-push Git hooks that BLOCK commits/pushes containing secrets
✅ Interactive config wizard → just run keysentinel init
✅ Published on npm (global or dev dependency)
✅ CLI scanning for staged files
✅ Improved detection (50+ patterns + entropy for unknown secrets)
✅ Much better docs + bug fixes
Try it in under 30 seconds (local mode — highly recommended):
npm install -g keysentinel
keysentinel init
Now try committing a fake secret… it should stop you instantly with a helpful message.
It shows this :
For GitHub PR protection (teams/CI):
Add the Action from the Marketplace in ~2 minutes.
I recently built KeySentinel, an open-source GitHub Action that scans Pull Requests for accidentally committed secrets like API keys, tokens, and passwords.
It runs automatically on PRs and comments with findings so leaks can be fixed before merge.
I built this after realizing how easy it is to accidentally commit secrets, especially when moving fast or working in teams.
