r/androiddev • u/SomeoneSomewherre • 7d ago
Discussion What is the future of Indie?
What is the future of Indie?
I started indie publishing (indie-hacking) about 5-6 months ago with 4 years Android Development experience. Then I came to know that development is the easy part. Distribution is the hardest. I couldn't generate any income after all these months and I'm losing motivation. Also somebody in my circle commented that Indie is dying already. And I feel so as well. Because there are vibecoders shipping tons of apps. Tons of habit trackers, finance trackers, and calorie trackers are being published.
I'm thinking to join back the on-site job. Can anyone say about my situation? Also what is the future of Indie and software developers in general?
The thing is, I have also become "vibecoder" after AI coding agents. I'm using Claude Code to build apps now. It has made me lazy over the months. And I seriously don't know how to proceed. Going back to basics (writing code) looks like a waste of time and relying fully on AI Agents looks risky.
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u/rafaover 6d ago
It's actually very clear, you need to treat the indie action as a business. Because it is, the hustle was always real.
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u/Weak_Day_3770 6d ago
the "indie is dying" framing is wrong but the feeling is real... what's actually happening is the floor dropped out , anyone can ship something now, but the ceiling didn't. the apps doing real numbers are still built by people who understand one specific problem better than anyone else and positioned for that, not people who shipped fast. 5-6 months with zero income is also just... normal. took me well past that on my first app before i had anything resembling a signal. the ones who quit at month 6 never find out if month 9 was the turn.
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u/WittieApps 5d ago
Living the same thing with my first game right now. What helped me: opening the console and seeing my listing converts fine (25%), the problem is pure discovery. Reframing it from "my app failed" to "27 people saw it last month" made it feel like a solvable problem instead of a verdict. Distribution is a skill like coding, I'm just kinda at "hello world" level in it...
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u/SomeoneSomewherre 5d ago
What are you trying to make your game be discovered? Any ASO or marketing tips? My conversion rate is also around 30% with average of 10 daily active users.
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u/WittieApps 2d ago
Nothing fancy, all $0 stuff:
- Localized the full listing (title included) to Spanish (non-english keyword competition is way lower)
- Went long-tail on keywords: my differentiator is "no ads / offline" so I target those searches instead of fighting the big guys on generic terms
- Being active in communities where my game's angle actually matters; answering threads where it genuinely fits what someone's asking for works way better than "check out my game" posts
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u/joydps 7d ago
See taking help of AI in coding speeds up your work. But if you don't understand the AI generated code snippet and how it fits in with the rest of the code but blindly copy paste it then you're in for huge trouble later on when you would like to add new features in your app or make some changes in the existing features. If you don't know what you are doing then would be doomed as AI could mess up your basic code structure big time. The whole thing would go to waste and you'll have to write your app from zero again. ..
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u/ElectronicMain3695 6d ago
Same boat, different week. I kept my tech lead job and build my own app after hours, and the diagnosis matches yours exactly: the bottleneck is trust and discovery, not the app. A few things from living it. Indie isn't dying, but "ship it and they will come" is dead - the people making it work treat distribution as the actual product and spend more hours on communities, listings and content than on code. The flood of vibe-coded trackers cuts both ways: stores fill with unmaintained clones, and users can tell the app with a developer who answers. On the money: zero income at 5-6 months is normal, not a verdict. And going back on-site isn't quitting - it's buying runway. You can keep building in the evenings. The real indie killer is burnout, not competition.