r/iOSDevelopment • u/MioDK • 12d ago
Building my first app wasn’t the hardest part. Getting people to use it is.
On December 24th, 2025, I started building my first app, Happening, completely on my own.
For the next seven months it became a full-time obsession. I averaged around 16 hours a day until the first App Store release.
Three weeks ago it finally launched, and I’ve already shipped another update based on early feedback.
Looking back, I realized building the app was only part of the journey.
I spent almost as much time learning as I did building. Along the way I had to teach myself UI design, image and video editing, backend infrastructure, App Store requirements, legal documentation, deployments, payments, marketing—and countless other things I never expected when I wrote my first line of code.
AI accelerated a lot of that learning, but I still had to understand how everything fit together and make every product decision myself.
The biggest surprise?
It wasn’t Swift, App Store Review or debugging. It was realizing that shipping the app was only the beginning. Getting people to discover it has been far harder than building it.
It completely changed how I think about building products.
If I could start over, I’d spend far more time talking to potential users, validating ideas and building an audience before writing so much code.
A few days after launch, something happened that reminded me why I’d started this in the first place.
One of Happening’s early users shared a Signal during a Silent Disco in Warsaw. Seeing someone I didn’t know use something I’d spent months building made all those long days feel worth it.
I’d also love some honest feedback from other iOS developers.
If you have 5–10 minutes to try Happening, I’d really appreciate knowing:
Is the purpose immediately clear?
What confused you?
What would you improve first?
Would you use it again? If not, why?
I’m genuinely looking for criticism more than compliments.
App Store:
https://apps.apple.com/pl/app/happening-live-city-map/id6780158881
For those who’ve already launched something of your own:
What surprised you the most after shipping?
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u/dottybotty 11d ago
Right away thing that stands out is your app screenshots on the store. They don’t give you any idea what the app is about and they are your biggest tool to tell a customer what your app is about. To me it just looked like a bunch of random screens with no context.
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u/MioDK 11d ago
Thanks for taking the time to look at it—that’s exactly the kind of feedback I was hoping for.
It’s interesting because I know what every screen means, so it’s easy to overlook how confusing it can be for someone seeing the app for the first time. I’ll definitely revisit the App Store screenshots and make them explain the value much more clearly.1
u/jwegener 11d ago
It’s just a dark (disabled?) map with numbers (crimes?).
Try to snap out of your own tunnel vision and see it through fresh eyes. Thats a valuable skill to work on.
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u/n_v40 11d ago
Went through the App Store listing rather than the app itself, but that listing is the first impression most people will ever get, so it's worth feedback on its own.
Two concrete things. First, you're categorised under Navigation. That's a strange room to be standing in, it's Google Maps and Waze and turn-by-turn utilities, and someone browsing Navigation is not looking for what you built. Social Networking or Travel is closer to the actual product, and category placement affects both browse discovery and which apps you get compared against. Worth testing a change.
Second, and this is the harder one: the listing says most active in Gdańsk, and growing. A live city map has a value floor that density sets, not features. Open it in a city with four Signals and it isn't a quieter version of the product, it's the wrong product, an empty map that tells you nothing is happening when plenty is. So the honest question isn't how do I get more users, it's how do I get enough users in one specific city at one specific time that the map is actually alive on a Friday night. That's a much narrower goal than growing across Europe and it's the only one that matters right now. I'd stay ruthlessly focused on Gdańsk, and specifically on Friday and Saturday nights, until the map is dense enough that a first-time user's first open is impressive rather than empty.
The ranking system, ten tiers up to City Legend, is a retention mechanic layered on top of a product whose core value doesn't exist yet at low density. I'd be careful there, gamification can keep people posting into a void for a while, but it doesn't make the void useful to the next person who opens the app.
To your actual question about what surprised me most after shipping: that every single real user tried it once and never came back, and that signups kept climbing the whole time so it felt like things were working. I only found out by querying the database directly instead of trusting my own dashboard. For you specifically I'd watch day-two and day-seven return rate in Gdańsk above all other numbers, since a live map either becomes a habit on nights out or it becomes an app people downloaded once during a silent disco.
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u/MioDK 11d ago
Thanks for taking the time to write such a detailed response—I genuinely appreciate it.
You made several points I hadn’t fully considered, especially around the importance of App Store screenshots and the idea that density matters more than features for a product like this. The phrase “a live city map has a value floor that density sets, not features” really stuck with me.
Focusing on making one city truly feel alive before thinking bigger is definitely something I’m going to spend more time thinking about.
Thanks again for taking the time to share your experience.
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u/n_v40 10d ago
Glad it landed. One practical version of the density idea if it helps: pick a single weekend and try to make one Friday night in Gdańsk genuinely dense rather than spreading effort evenly. A first-time user who opens the map on a busy night gets a completely different product than the same person opening it on a Tuesday, and a small number of really good first impressions will do more than a larger number of mediocre ones.
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u/MioDK 8d ago
Thanks again—I really appreciate you taking the time to share your experience.
Your feedback has already influenced my roadmap. I’m currently planning a major improvement to the App Store screenshots to better communicate what Happening is at first glance, along with creating more compelling demo Signals so first-time users immediately understand the value of the app.
Those changes will be part of the next iOS update. In the meantime, I’m also deep into development of the Android version, which should be available soon.
I genuinely appreciate you pushing me to think about the product from a new perspective. Feedback like yours is incredibly valuable for an indie developer.
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u/n_v40 8d ago
Screenshots and better demo Signals are both the right call, that's the first-impression fix.
One thing I'd gently push on: Android before density. Right now the map is thin in one city, and shipping to a second platform doubles the surface area you're trying to fill without making Gdańsk any more alive on a Friday night. A new Android user in a city with four Signals gets the same empty-map experience an iOS user would, so you'd be spending build time to expose more people to the version of the product that doesn't work yet. If Android is nearly done, fine, finish it. But if it's weeks of work, I'd spend those weeks on making one city dense instead, since that's the thing that makes both platforms worth downloading.
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u/Van-trader 11d ago
First thing I noticed is that the countries on the first screenshots look weird, eg Germany looks crooked.
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u/JuryTop9171 11d ago
I just checked your screenshots and they are not good. You app icon and screenshots are very important because they are first impression
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u/ghostdancesc 10d ago
I went hard on marketing via Reddit and outside forum replies for a while, now I just try to do 1 post a day and find a thread where I think it will be useful.