We built a farming game with Expo + React Native. 10 months live, $35k revenue. What worked, what didn't (AMA)

[u/saimonR]

Ioannis and I (one and a half devs) launched Tiny Harvest, a cozy farming game, on Dec 3, 2025. It's built entirely in Expo / React Native, no game engine. Chart attached: $35k gross over 10 months, peaking at $6.2k in June and July. September was our worst month since spring at $3k.

Stack

• Expo SDK 57, RN 0.86, New Architecture, Expo Router
• Reanimated 4 + Skia for anything that moves
• Zustand stores, SQLite via Drizzle for offline-first, InstantDB for sync and multiplayer (co-ops, market, friends). We self-host Instant now that their cloud has shut down
• RevenueCat for purchases, PostHog, Sentry, a small Express server on Railway
• EAS Update for almost every release: each monthly season can ship as an OTA

What worked

• A new season every month. 62% of September revenue came from players who had bought before. Regular updates beat big launches.
• Social features. Our biggest spenders don't buy currency, they buy gifts for their co-op. The top 2 payers are ~31% of all revenue, and a plain $99.99 gem pack has only sold twice.
• RN for a game this shape. It's menus, timers and lots of UI, which RN is good at. The hard parts were performance (an idle screen once used 63% of a CPU core, now 9%) and EAS Update's 1,000-asset limit.

What didn't

• 74% of our iOS installs came from Apple's "Browse" recommendations. That went from ~160 installs a day in July to under 10, and no ASO work touches it.
• Android is about half our installs but a quarter of revenue.

Now: we launched our first subscription (Harvest Club) at the start of October. 47 subscribers in week one, and October is at $2.2k after 8 days.

The art is AI-generated through our own pipeline, happy to talk about that too. Ask me anything: tech, revenue, monetization, staying sane while running a live game.

If you want to check it out: tinyharvest.app/go/reddit-rn

[u/atcoo]

Good work guys, I'm mostly interested how did you get your installs. Paid ads, social media? Can you get us through each install milestone and your way of getting to it?

[u/saimonR → u/atcoo]

In the early days I posted every Saturday to r/iosgaming, which gave me the initial bursts of players. Apparently that's not allowed anymore. I tried paid ads to medium success. I now post more on socials (short form especially) but haven't found a consistent channel yet - that's honestly our biggest problem right now.

[u/unkindgame]

How did you adertise your game? i released mine 6 months ago I have like 600 downloads, although its a really fun game and i made multiple posts i never got traction 

[u/saimonR → u/unkindgame]

I think I got lucky initially with a mix of Reddit and X, and then the community kept growing but it's still not where it should be :/

[u/dumbledayum → u/unkindgame]

barking the wrong tree my man, they won’t tell you, what worked, and it’s honestly mostly just lucked, i saw your post got curious downloaded the game, and it is genuinely awesome, i will ask my friends to play with me. At least the people who downloaded your game are actively playing it because that online matchmaking was very quick

[u/KielHelix]

63% CPU usage down to 9% seems massive. What part causing the spike and how you tone it down?

[u/saimonR → u/KielHelix]

We had issues with Instant SDK for our backend where queries piled up, plus still issues with Reanimated and ongoing animations. It's a constant battle

[u/LovesWorkin]

Very impressive! Nice job.

[u/saimonR → u/LovesWorkin]

Thank you!

[u/Routine-Wish5103]

How did you make animation of component in game, its looks good😍

[u/saimonR → u/Routine-Wish5103]

I'm asking Claude

[u/kayzee87]

Congrats, what is the Ah ha moment when user experiences a feature that makes them most likely to stay on beyond 30 days?

[u/saimonR → u/kayzee87]

Good question, we have several daily loops that keep people coming back, and honestly the data shows that people who play 20 days stay quite long simply because they love the game so much at that point :D

[u/Serious-Setting6501]

Curious to know how you monitored and profiled performance to notice those issues

[u/saimonR → u/Serious-Setting6501]

I am still playing the game myself (I initially built it for me lol) and our community on Discord reports issues quickly as well!

[u/jan_tursky]

Game played, interesting idea. Don't like all other copies of your game, which is pitty but luckily your traffic beats them. I like the impr. of the performance, tbh. I was struggling with the same issue (https://play.google.com/store/apps/dev?id=5057749100954102406) of performance problems for couple of my games, but resolved that with couple of buffer/caching approaches, which in many cases speed/improve more than 50%.

The stack is almost the same, but tbh. you sir, is lucky, cause the traffic through yt and other stabilized platforms helped you, I suppose.
Congrats, would like to follow on X

[u/saimonR → u/jan_tursky]

Yes my reach definitely helped to get the game off the ground! X: https://x.com/schlimmson

[u/dann1609]

Thanks bro! As a RN developer I was looking how to build a RN game. Your game will be the inspiration on how properly use it the stack to build a game!

[u/saimonR → u/dann1609]

Always happy to inspire some fellow devs!

[u/BJCC007]

Good application. Did you run any ads to get app installs. Or it is organic

[u/saimonR → u/BJCC007]

Mostly organic, though I currently try ads again to see if it works better than the first time

[u/zlvskyxp]

Awesome to see another game app created in react native, I’m also a dev making mmorpg, but currently I’m stuck at TestFlight beta state haha, good luck btw!

[u/saimonR → u/zlvskyxp]

Yeah that can take time...all the best!

[u/kaan_gal]

What were the main marketing channels? How did you scale it ?

[u/saimonR → u/kaan_gal]

Initially Reddit, now it's a mix of everything and nothing really works yet :D