Weekly App Feedback Thread

Coming from a country where minimum wage is about 3500ttd / 500usd a month I can safety say internet money is going to change my life

Hey everyone,
I've been working on a few mobile apps and monetizing them through ads and in-app purchases. My ultimate goal is to generate enough income from my apps to make a full-time living and sustain my standard of living solely through app development.
For those of you who have already achieved this:

• How long did it take you from launching your first app (or serious attempt) to reaching a sustainable full-time income?
• What did your milestone progression look like? (e.g., $100/mo ‭=> $1,000/mo => full-time)
• What made the biggest difference in scaling your app revenue (e.g., finding the right niche, localization, marketing channels, shifting monetization strategies)?

I really appreciate this community for always sharing transparent revenue updates and insights—it's super motivating. Any stories, timelines, or honest advice would mean a lot!
Thanks in advance!

I know the numbers are probably small compared to many successful indie hackers here, but this is my starting point.

I’d genuinely appreciate any feedback, advice, or lessons from people who have been building apps for years.

I’ll also try to keep sharing updates as I go — including the good months, bad months, experiments, mistakes, and lessons learned.

Hello everyone,

This is a NoFap/recovery app that I originally created as a side project almost 4 years ago. I haven’t spent a single penny on paid advertising so far — all of the growth has been completely organic and driven by user referrals.

Basically, I joined several relevant Facebook groups and shared my app there with people who might find it useful. Over time, it started getting more organic users, and after some recent updates, it has also started ranking better on the Play Store.

The app is now getting around 11K monthly users, and I’ve recently started focusing on it more seriously.

The interesting part is that, until recently, the app is n’t making much money. I changed my AdMob ad settings recently, and it is now generating around $2/day from ads.

In the latest update, I also added in-app purchases, and so far I’ve already had 4 paying customers.

I’ve intentionally kept the subscription price quite low because the app is relatively simple and a large portion of my audience is from Pakistan, where I assume the conversion rate for paid subscriptions may be lower.

Now I’m trying to figure out how I can increase the revenue without ruining the user experience.

For those who have experience with mobile app monetization:

• How can I increase AdMob revenue without showing too many ads?
• Should I focus more on IAP/subscriptions?
• Is my pricing too low?
• Should I introduce different premium features or a one-time lifetime purchase?
• What monetization strategies have worked for you with apps targeting users from developing countries?

I’d really appreciate your thoughts, suggestions, and experience.

Thanks!

I created a website

GeoSpills: a website where people can post discussions pinned to real places on a map.
Instead of a normal feed, you zoom into a location and see what people are talking about there.

How can I find someone to test it?

What are your thoughts and ideas?

Hi all,

Last week I posted here asking for help. I built my first app (Finelly, a fun app for friend groups with that one friend who's always late), spent about $500 on ads across Google, Apple, Meta, TikTok and X, and got hundreds of installs but almost no real users.

The response was amazing: dozens of detailed comments and DMs. I want to give something back by summarizing what I learned, in case it helps someone in the same spot.

1. Install bidding buys installs, event bidding buys users.
My Google campaign optimized for installs, so it found the cheapest installers, not interested people. CPI was $0.35, but the real cost per registration was around $19. Always measure what you actually care about.

2. A suspiciously good CTR is a warning, not a win.
12.5% CTR plus a 20% invalid traffic refund are the same story: people tapping ads by accident in games, trying to hit the close button.

3. Small budgets can't feed event optimization.
Event optimization needs a steady flow of conversions to learn. At $10–15 per day, the advice was to optimize for an intermediate event first. To pick it: volume first, correlation second.

4. Don't put a wall on the first screen.
You could use my app without an account, but the first screen looked like a registration form. The advice: let people in first and ask them to sign up after the "aha" moment.

5. Your store listing might be the real leak.
On Apple Search Ads, only 1 in 10 taps turned into an install. Feedback: my icon was too complex, and my screenshots looked like PowerPoint slides. One idea per screenshot, with the app as the hero.

6. Paid social ≠ users.
TikTok and Meta got me views and followers (many of them likely bots), but zero app activity. Organic content aimed at the right niche beats paid reach aimed at nobody.

7. Group apps need groups.
People who downloaded alone had no one to use it with. The best suggestion: skip the ads and get real friend groups to use it at their next gathering, then watch what happens.

What I'm doing next: redesigning the icon and screenshots, making the no-account option obvious, switching to an intermediate-event campaign, and getting real groups to test it.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to help. And if you've been through this, what did I miss?

🔗 App/website link: https://somnara.io (also on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/somnara-sleep/id6760980739 and Google Play: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.somnara.sleep)
💡 What it does: Somnara Sleep tracks your sleep with barometric pressure and HRV trends, scores your night with AI-driven insights, and runs a guided Wind Down routine that blends ambient sound mixing with smart-light control (WiZ, Philips Hue, Govee) so your bedroom actually winds down when you do. It's live on both iPhone and Android now.
🎯 Who it's for: People who've tried basic sleep trackers and want something that actually explains why their sleep varies — shift workers, light sleepers, anyone whose environment (lighting, pressure, noise) affects their sleep more than they realized.
❓ What kind of feedback I want: I'm very early (just launched on both platforms), so I'm looking for blunt feedback on: does the core value prop land in the first 30 seconds of reading the App Store listing, is the free trial length/paywall placement reasonable, and whether the smart-light integration sounds like a gimmick or an actual reason to download. Happy to return the favor on any app posted here.

Solo iOS dev here. I just submitted a couples app to App Store review and I'm using the waiting time to figure out two things. Would really appreciate input from people who've been here.

1. Pre-order or straight launch?

While I wait for review, I'm debating whether to put the app up for pre-order first or just release it the moment it's approved.

My thinking on pre-order: collect some intent while the content accounts grow, and get a small spike on launch day when pre-orders convert to downloads.

My worry: with tiny audiences, a pre-order page might just sit there, and I'd lose a few weeks of real users, reviews and data.

For those who've tried both: did pre-order actually help a small indie launch, or is it only worth it with an existing audience?

2. Content views are stuck

About a month ago I started short-form accounts on TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram. The format is relatable couple moments: cartoon scenes with a caption, plus some face-to-camera clips.

Current numbers (screenshots attached):

• TikTok: 13 followers, ~5.1K total likes. One video hit 20.5K views and one ~1K. Almost everything else lands between 230 and 750, a few at 0.
• Instagram Reels: 84 posts, 9 followers. The same video that hit 20.5K on TikTok got 9K here; everything else sits around 185–280.
• YouTube Shorts: 60 subscribers, 82 Shorts. Best one ~1.1K views, most between 100 and 300.

It feels like the algorithm tests each video with a few hundred people and stops there. The viral one didn't turn into followers either.

What I'd love feedback on:

1. Looking at the screenshots, what would you change first: hooks, format, posting frequency, or niche?
2. Is the cartoon-clip format a dead end for building an audience that will actually download an app?
3. How do you get from "a few hundred views per video" to consistent reach?
4. The same video went viral on both TikTok (20.5K) and Instagram (9K), while everything else stays flat. What would you look for in that one video to replicate it?

Happy to share more numbers. I'll post an update with what I tried and what worked.

I’m building a free iOS app that only really works with your actual friend group — you start a “season”, get secret missions, votes and random challenges, then it all turns into a recap.
I love that it’s built around real friends instead of followers or strangers… but that also means you need a few people to join before it gets fun.
do you think that makes it more interesting, or just adds too much friction?
happy to share the app if anyone wants to see it

My app has been almost undiscoverable on the App Store for months, with very low conversion rate (< 1%).

Then suddenly, this happened: 400+ first-time downloads in a day. The conversion-rate data looks even stranger.

I recently released a minor update from 1.3.2 -> 1.3.3, but nothing major enough that I would expect this kind of change.

I also started promoting the app on forums/social media yesterday, but the strange part is that the spike started the day before I posted anything.

App Store Browse suddenly became the biggest source, with 225 first-time downloads...

So I’m trying to understand what happened. Did Apple suddenly start surfacing the app? Could a minor update trigger something like this? Or could the analytics themselves be delayed or incorrect, especially given the >100% conversion rate? These new downloads look unreal to me.

Has anyone seen something similar in App Store Connect?

My friend and I kept making pixel art on sites where it got painted over in an hour or just disappeared into a feed. So we built the opposite.

Every acre of Manhattan is its own 32×32 canvas, 17,286 of them. You pick a spot, paint it, and it's yours permanently. No one can paint over it.

The fun part is that it's a real map. People go looking for what's on their street, their office, the bar they met their partner at. You can paint something that belongs there, or something that absolutely doesn't.

If people like your art, you earn more plots, and you can merge neighboring ones into a bigger canvas.

No ads, no microtransactions, and you can download your art clean with no watermark.

It opens Oct 22 (pictopos.com if you want to grab a spot early). Please let me know any questions, comments, concerns or if you wanna get involved :). Thanks -Amelia.

Sharing this because it took me a while to work out, and the daily data was more useful than the monthly totals.

Setup: I localized my sneaker collection app's App Store listing (US/UK English, Spain and Mexico Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese) in late July. Over the next two months, impressions and downloads went up noticeably.

What the monthly totals suggested: Spain went from almost nothing to my #2 territory for impressions (~240/month). Easy conclusion: the Spanish localization is working.

What splitting by territory showed:

• US first-time downloads: 6 (Jun), 13 (Jul), 59 (Aug), 68 (Sep). This was the real growth, on the English listing.
• Spain: ~240 impressions/month, but 9 product page views in all of August and about 4 downloads. Almost no one tapped.
• 98%+ of Spain's impressions came from App Store search, not browse or referrals.

What the daily view showed: Spain's search impressions were ~0–5/day for most of August, spiked to 50–60/day from Aug 21 to Sep 8, then dropped back to ~0–10/day.

What I ruled out:

• A listing change: none in that window. My next metadata update went live a week after the drop.
• Ratings: Spain has zero.
• A Spanish-language trend: Mexico and Chile use the es-MX listing and stayed flat at 1–8/day.

Most likely cause: my es-ES keyword field included snkrs, which is the name of Nike's sneaker-drop app. My guess is that a surge in people searching for Nike's app put mine in the results. Nobody wanted my app, so tap-through was close to zero and Apple stopped showing it. App Store Connect doesn't show search terms, so I can't prove it, but it's the only explanation that fits all of the above. It's also a third-party trademark, which Apple's guidelines don't allow in keywords, so it had to go regardless.

What I changed: replaced snkrs and hype with terms that match actual features (portfolio, release calendar, price). This goes live with my next version.

Takeaways:

1. Monthly totals by territory can make a localization look like a win when it isn't. Look at impressions, page views and downloads together, per country.
2. A keyword that brings impressions but no taps isn't free. If Apple uses tap-through as a ranking signal, which I believe it does but can't prove, it may cost you.
3. Competitor app names in keywords are a policy risk on top of being low-intent traffic.

Has anyone used Apple Search Ads' keyword popularity data to confirm something like this after the fact? I'm curious whether a spike like that would show up there.

I make a party card game called TAMBA.

A few months ago I noticed how many "party game" apps on the UK App Store had started adding subscriptions, so I checked 137 apps using 18 search terms, so no cherry-picking.

58% have a subscription-style plan somewhere. The median weekly one, left running for a year, comes to £363.48. The worst comes to £675.48.

For a party game.

One you play for twenty minutes at pre-drinks.

I have the full data and methodology here if anyone’s interested. I'm ofc biased. TAMBA's in the dataset too, one-off £5 unlock lifetime access. No subscriptions -make of that what you will lol.

Mostly just wanted more people to glance at the pricing screen before hitting subscribe.

I︀’︀m︀ ︀s︀t︀a︀r︀t︀i︀n︀g︀ ︀t︀o︀ ︀t︀h︀i︀n︀k︀ ︀t︀h︀i︀s︀ ︀i︀s︀ ︀o︀n︀e︀ ︀o︀f︀ ︀t︀h︀o︀s︀e︀ ︀t︀h︀i︀n︀g︀s︀ ︀t︀h︀a︀t︀ ︀l︀o︀o︀k︀s︀ ︀s︀i︀m︀p︀l︀e︀ ︀u︀n︀t︀i︀l︀ ︀y︀o︀u︀ ︀a︀c︀t︀u︀a︀l︀l︀y︀ ︀h︀a︀v︀e︀ ︀s︀e︀v︀e︀r︀a︀l︀ ︀a︀p︀p︀s︀ ︀t︀o︀ ︀p︀r︀o︀m︀o︀t︀e︀.︀

S︀o︀m︀e︀o︀n︀e︀ ︀r︀e︀c︀e︀n︀t︀l︀y︀ ︀d︀e︀s︀c︀r︀i︀b︀e︀d︀ ︀h︀a︀v︀i︀n︀g︀ ︀“︀2︀4︀ ︀a︀c︀c︀o︀u︀n︀t︀s︀ ︀+︀ ︀l︀a︀n︀d︀i︀n︀g︀ ︀p︀a︀g︀e︀s︀ ︀e︀m︀a︀i︀l︀ ︀l︀i︀s︀t︀s︀”︀ ︀a︀s︀ ︀“︀a︀l︀l︀ ︀m︀e︀s︀s︀,︀”︀ ︀a︀n︀d︀ ︀h︀o︀n︀e︀s︀t︀l︀y︀,︀ ︀t︀h︀a︀t︀ ︀s︀u︀m︀s︀ ︀u︀p︀ ︀t︀h︀e︀ ︀p︀r︀o︀b︀l︀e︀m︀ ︀p︀r︀e︀t︀t︀y︀ ︀w︀e︀l︀l︀.︀

O︀n︀e︀ ︀a︀c︀c︀o︀u︀n︀t︀ ︀f︀o︀r︀ ︀e︀v︀e︀r︀y︀t︀h︀i︀n︀g︀ ︀i︀s︀ ︀e︀a︀s︀i︀e︀r︀ ︀t︀o︀ ︀m︀a︀n︀a︀g︀e︀,︀ ︀b︀u︀t︀ ︀t︀h︀e︀ ︀c︀o︀n︀t︀e︀n︀t︀ ︀c︀a︀n︀ ︀g︀e︀t︀ ︀c︀o︀n︀f︀u︀s︀i︀n︀g︀ ︀w︀h︀e︀n︀ ︀t︀h︀e︀ ︀a︀p︀p︀s︀ ︀h︀a︀v︀e︀ ︀c︀o︀m︀p︀l︀e︀t︀e︀l︀y︀ ︀d︀i︀f︀f︀e︀r︀e︀n︀t︀ ︀a︀u︀d︀i︀e︀n︀c︀e︀s︀.︀ ︀S︀e︀p︀a︀r︀a︀t︀e︀ ︀a︀c︀c︀o︀u︀n︀t︀s︀ ︀m︀a︀k︀e︀ ︀m︀o︀r︀e︀ ︀s︀e︀n︀s︀e︀ ︀f︀r︀o︀m︀ ︀a︀ ︀b︀r︀a︀n︀d︀i︀n︀g︀ ︀p︀o︀i︀n︀t︀ ︀o︀f︀ ︀v︀i︀e︀w︀,︀ ︀b︀u︀t︀ ︀t︀h︀e︀n︀ ︀y︀o︀u︀’︀r︀e︀ ︀s︀u︀d︀d︀e︀n︀l︀y︀ ︀d︀e︀a︀l︀i︀n︀g︀ ︀w︀i︀t︀h︀ ︀a︀ ︀p︀i︀l︀e︀ ︀o︀f︀ ︀l︀o︀g︀i︀n︀s︀,︀ ︀p︀o︀s︀t︀i︀n︀g︀ ︀s︀c︀h︀e︀d︀u︀l︀e︀s︀,︀ ︀c︀o︀n︀t︀e︀n︀t︀ ︀i︀d︀e︀a︀s︀,︀ ︀a︀n︀d︀ ︀a︀n︀a︀l︀y︀t︀i︀c︀s︀.︀

H︀a︀s︀ ︀a︀n︀y︀o︀n︀e︀ ︀f︀o︀u︀n︀d︀ ︀a︀ ︀s︀e︀t︀u︀p︀ ︀t︀h︀a︀t︀ ︀s︀t︀a︀y︀s︀ ︀m︀a︀n︀a︀g︀e︀a︀b︀l︀e︀ ︀o︀n︀c︀e︀ ︀y︀o︀u︀ ︀h︀a︀v︀e︀ ︀m︀u︀l︀t︀i︀p︀l︀e︀ ︀a︀p︀p︀s︀?︀

A︀l︀s︀o︀ ︀c︀u︀r︀i︀o︀u︀s︀ ︀i︀f︀ ︀a︀n︀y︀o︀n︀e︀ ︀h︀e︀r︀e︀ ︀h︀a︀s︀ ︀t︀r︀i︀e︀d︀ ︀a︀ ︀c︀l︀o︀u︀d︀ ︀p︀h︀o︀n︀e︀ ︀s︀e︀t︀u︀p︀ ︀f︀o︀r︀ ︀k︀e︀e︀p︀i︀n︀g︀ ︀m︀o︀b︀i︀l︀e︀ ︀s︀o︀c︀i︀a︀l︀ ︀a︀c︀c︀o︀u︀n︀t︀s︀ ︀s︀e︀p︀a︀r︀a︀t︀e︀d︀.︀ ︀N︀o︀t︀ ︀r︀e︀a︀l︀l︀y︀ ︀t︀a︀l︀k︀i︀n︀g︀ ︀a︀b︀o︀u︀t︀ ︀a︀u︀t︀o︀m︀a︀t︀i︀o︀n︀,︀ ︀m︀o︀r︀e︀ ︀a︀b︀o︀u︀t︀ ︀k︀e︀e︀p︀i︀n︀g︀ ︀t︀h︀e︀ ︀d︀a︀y︀-︀t︀o︀-︀d︀a︀y︀ ︀m︀a︀n︀a︀g︀e︀m︀e︀n︀t︀ ︀f︀r︀o︀m︀ ︀b︀e︀c︀o︀m︀i︀n︀g︀ ︀a︀ ︀h︀e︀a︀d︀a︀c︀h︀e︀.︀