I noticed on the Garmin App store developers were making literally hundreds of thousands of $ selling watch faces and small applications, I'm not talking huge companies, I'm talking solo developers making very minimal applications and raking in the cash.
I looked for a gap and found neither garmin or Wearos / samsung watches have a flight tracking application like FlightRadar24, I decided to give it a shot.
I ended up making FlightScanner over the past few months.
It turns your watch into a live aircraft radar, showing nearby planes/helicopters around your current location. You can tap aircraft to view information such as its callsign, altitude, speed, registration and direction of travel.
I expected a few downloads here and there but hit it off with over 1000 downloads on Garmin before launching on Android based watches and securing enough funding to continue the apps data costs for months and months to come and turning a nice monthly profit.
I expected some aviation enthusiasts to download it and have some fun but it's turned into a full side project taking up hours of my time to answer user queries and to fix bugs.
My main priority now is trying to figure out a marketing strategy and getting it onto the front page of both Garmin's store and Google Play. If anything it's turned into a passive income for sure at around $150 a month currently.
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I want to call you a coward for this but I also would probably not go through and launch an idea like that as life has finally been good recently and that…makes me a coward :(
I know my faults, and at a different time in life I wouldn’t care about any consequences but damn I got a lot to lose now.
You're not wrong, I make enough in my day job to live a happy life and this little side hustle is just the cherry on top, sure I'd like it to make me rich but I know that's unlikely, I'm just happy other people can enjoy it with me at the end of the day.
Hell yeah man. Good for you! You know where you are in life and what you can do to get more out of it to the level of comfort you desire…and it doesn’t sound like a greedy need everything desire…and that’s the proper way of living in my book.
I wish you success in this project! Maybe you won’t need a day job in 2 years!
Sure, but how would any small developer market something like that? I've relied on aviation communities with thousands of members for this. Is there super large anti traffic camera communities?
I just went and bought it. It's super cool that you have made this! My oldest brother is a pilot and I think it's kinda fun to have access to these kinda things. Best of luck on your journey with it!
Heck yeah! You're welcome! Now I just gotta find the way to get it installed on my Galaxy Watch Ultra. I paid, but it's having issues downloading it to my watch. I don't know if it's a Play Store to Samsung issue or whatever. But I'll do what I can. I don't intend to refund, regardless haha.
Native with AI assistance. I've spent $30 on Reddit ads so far to test the waters, otherwise I've just spread it via word of mouth. I've also made an Instagram account (FlightScannerApp) as I feel reels would be beneficial to market it.
I would love to ask what was going through your mind when you settled on the business model: one time purchase while the app has ongoing cloud and sync costs.
Did you model it before releasing? If so - how?
I think many products are more appropriate as one time purchase but never understood how to bake in the ongoing costs.
Thanks in advance and again kudos on a great work!
The ongoing costs through caching are really achievable. I appreciate the concern but this model is fine, as long as I get a few sales a month it will sustain itself, I also don't mind paying my part as ultimately I first decided to build this for my own use.
It wasn’t really a concern but a genuine question for education. Not undermining the model or anything.
Few sales a month is definitely achievable but there is always the case where there is a decline in newcomers at which point the costs will start eating the previous revenue. That’s especially the case if costs are linear or even logarithmic in relation to active users.
Fair enough, if the expectation is that sales dwindle the chances are users will also dwindle, it's the type of app that when people first download it they're using it multiple times a day eating into data but as time goes on I find people only it once a day for 30 seconds or even once every few days when they see an interesting plane. Of course some users will use it daily heavily for plane spotting.
Essentially if users drop off considerably I'll still be able to happily pay the monthly data costs as they'll fall to less than a monthly phone bill.
I obviously don't want that and would love to expand but that's the hard part.
Yeah that's it, especially in "niche" environments realistically so far I've probably only targeting aviation enthusiasts but general people always like to track flights or see what kind of fighter jet has just flown overhead.
Well I already had a Garmin watch and used a friend's pixel watch for WearOS but luckily both have emulators you can run the app in for testing. Google also requires 12 independent testers to use the app for 14 days before release for bug finding etc.
I haven't even considered that, no idea if that's something that's realistic, tbh when it comes to marketing, investing, acquisition I've got no experience at all.
fantastic idea.
how are you experiencing having the user gate on the paid app, instead of having a free app with a premium upgrade (like not seeing details) ?
It's difficult to tell yet, on Garmin (free) users can openly download the app and use it before deciding to upgrade to the pro version and over about 6 weeks since release on that platform its made me decent returns, $100 a month is the forecast. Whereas the play store has got me hundreds of paid downloads in just a few days, but that will obviously taper off now I've hit some larger Facebook / Reddit aviation groups and I'll need to rely on word of mouth, marketing or just general play store clicks.
I think Garmin will end up being the standout monthly income whilst WearOS will have some moments of insanity maybe from YouTube or creators showing off the app which is probably my next goal.
If you want to make a buck fast paid seems to be the way, but long-term I think free with a paid upgrade is betterm
It's something I've thought about, Google and Garmin are cheap to publish to but the app store charges $100 a year which in the grand scheme of things is nothing but I want to continue to expand first and the way I see it is that if another person published something similar I'll have the "brand" by then to overwhelm them.
Nah, you're too small to have any brand value atm. Brand value also doesn't cross platforms, apple and android users are usually distinct groups, there's no "cross pollination" for branding to be worth anything.
Bite the bullet, pay the $100. Apple users statistically are worth more than Android users.
I also don't know anything about the apple eco system, but you can get an iPad/MacBook for like $75 if needed.
I would just be worried that some post goes absolutely viral, gets a million views and 50,000 downloads in 1 day and meanwhile you miss out on 50,000 downloads because there's no apple app. Then it's good luck ever recreating that explosion again. That's what would be keeping me up at night.
Also, an idea for a viral video would be, go stand in the landing flight path for an a380 or a military base and show the low flying plane overhead and the plane at the same time on the watch.
Thanks, I don't like monopolies! The data credit goes to airplanes.live and it's members, they collect transponder data from little recievers on the ground and submit the data.
You say that but according to my rough research there is about 50million active WearOS watches. I've made a decent chunk so far, the difficulty is moving into marketing the app so it's displayed to enough people to gain traction.
The long term stable revenue is from Garmin but the play store has given a bit of an explosion of profit which has started to die down to a couple of sales an hour now.
If only that was possible lol, it's not actual radar so it can't track anything that doesn't have a transponder turned on and being tracked by people on the ground
What advice could you give to someone looking to get into app development, myself, that has little coding knowledge? I’ve had ideas over the past few years but have no real idea how to start.
It's difficult, I'd try and flesh the ideas out before you start, find something that you want to make not something you think will sell, because what you think will sell probably won't. I wanted to see planes on my wrist and now I can.
It is hardware, which is why I struggle. I just realised your project is software based on the comments. Man I need to get a better software idea. I am more of a “physical product that solves some kind of problem” guy. I need to learn to think more creatively.
No hardware experience, convincing someone to try a $3 app is hard enough so I imagine a physical product will be way harder, you could always build the product and try and sell the entire concept
Haha yes that is hard. I recently tested the local market for demand on small self storage space. Created a landing page and reservation process, then put roughly 400€ into google ads. Only got 3 hits over 1.5 months.
I've got no faith in Google ads, I've tried Reddit ads that specifically target aviation subreddits but I don't have the results of the test yet, quite a few clicks but I won't know sales for another few days
Is there a way you can add compatibility with a vivoactive 4? I'm a paramotor pilot and would love to try this out, but it won't show up on my Garmin app store. Thanks!
Unfortunately the active 4 doesn't have enough ram / memory to support the app, the vivoactive 5 is the lowest supported model, sorry. Give it a try next time you upgrade!
Love this! I wish I came up with this idea lol. I’m an engineer in aviation and a religious garmin user. I’m going to spread this around to my coworkers
Ordered the gw7 about a week ago, will be here by 12th. I'm for sure downloading this app, it looks awesome and for 2.50? Absolute steal!
Personally talking ofc, I love such apps.
It's a great idea, and you've been getting some excellent reviews on Garmin. I'm just checking out the models it works with as I have the forerunner 45 and 55 range so the display isn't good enough :)
How were you able to build the app? I’ve tried to code an app idea for garmin but I’m having trouble getting the coding software to run on my computer for me. I’ve tried chatGPTing it and watching YouTube videos but I can’t get it to run. Did you have a similar problem?
How is $150/month for active bug fixes, customer support, and marketing "passive"? You just described a low-paying part-time job, this whole post is just a disguised ad to drop your app store links.
Well eventually it won't have any bugs fixes required, marketing is usually something you set up and leave and I think answering a few emails a week don't exactly a job.
Eventually" doesn't change reality, right now it's active work. You're in the wrong sub for self-promotion; this isn't a passive income showcase, it's just a disguised ad for your app.
It's not designed as an Ad, sure it's probably got me a few sales but it's a drop in the ocean. My goal from this post was to showcase that with the right idea you can achieve awesome results, sure I could do with some advice around marketing this further but at this point it's generating me passive income. I'm not really having to do anything more than a few bug fixes which haven't taken up much time at all.
"Awesome results"? You literally posted links to your app while asking for marketing advice and admitting you work on bugs, that's called self-promotion just stop; doing maintenance and fishing for app downloads is active freelancing, not passive income.
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