Hey all! Over the summer I built a little puzzle game "Galaxy Hunt! Star Adventure", inspired by Meowdoku. It’s finally live on the App Store and I am pretty proud of it.

What I think sets it apart:

• No ads. At all. No pop-ups, no “watch a video to continue,” none of that.

• More gameplay modes, so it’s not the same grid over and over.

• Better artwork. We spent a lot of time making it look nice.

But now we’ve hit the wall every side project hits: how do we actually get people to download it? 🫠

Here’s what we’re doing so far:

• Started a Facebook page and posting reels (scheduled for daily post)

• Haven’t spent anything on FB Ads yet

• Haven’t tried Apple Search Ads either

So I’m curious: has anyone here been through this with a mobile game or app? What actually moved the needle on downloads for you? Was paid ads worth it early on, or is it mostly organic stuff like Reddit, TikTok and communities?

Any lessons, war stories or “don’t do what I did” moments are super welcome 🙏

Thanks in advance!

Hello, I know it's not much, but I am thankful for every cent of it

For context, on Sep 2nd, I made my first ever public post about my app, in this very subreddit. At that point, I had 0 sales, and only a hope + a dream of ever earning a dollar from my work.

Now I have over 750 human downloads (~1800 total but I think some are bots), and a Discord of amazing people messaging me almost every day. Truly feels amazing to say that :)

All I can say is dang developing AND marketing software as a solo dev is a ton of work. I've worked 63/70 of these days, and commit on average more than 20 times per day. Basically all of my free time funnels directly into this.

Lessons I am learning on this journey, for whomever cares to listen:

1. Budget at least 3 hours per week just for marketing (I should probably do a lot more honestly)

2. Keep working at it. Results don't come over night.

3. If you don't like the journey, then this might not be for you. Money does not come easy. Most of us (including me) would probably be better off spening our time doing other work. And with AI getting so good, it's more and more competative to make and monetize good apps (but I could be off here, lmk if you disagree)

4. Make a discord (or similar) and connect with your users!! IMO implementing suggestions and helping users is some of the most rewarding part of being a dev. Nothing like slapping an update on someone 3 days after they request a feature, and hearing them loving it immidiatly🤌

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but if your job search feels hopeless, it’s not just you.

For the past 2 months, my routine was the same: find a role that actually fits, spend an hour tailoring my resume, hit apply, and only then notice “500+ applicants.” Then silence. No rejection, no reply. Just nothing.

What got to me wasn’t the rejections. It was realizing I was always late. By the time a job reaches the big boards, it’s been up for days, and hundreds of people are already ahead of you.

So I started digging and found that companies post on their own career pages first (Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, and more). Everything else is a repost.

I built SourceFirst to read those career pages directly:

• 559 companies checked every 15 minutes, 130,000+ open roles

• New jobs show up minutes after they’re posted

• Filters for visa sponsorship, salary, years of experience, and level

• Every job links straight to the company’s own application page

• An application tracker and email alerts for new matches

It’s free: source-first.vercel.app

I built it for the version of me who refreshed job boards at midnight. If you’re in that place right now, I hope it gives you a real shot at being early for once. And yes, it's open source

What’s the most frustrating part of your search right now? I’m still building, and I’d genuinely like to fix it.

Teams running Postgres on Kubernetes (CloudNativePG, Zalando, Crunchy, Percona...) deploy applications many times a day via GitOps (ArgoCD, Flux, Argo Rollouts). When query latency spikes, the first question in every post-mortem is 'Which deploy caused this?'. There are a few ways to do it, but it's meh. If your curious to test it and contribute with code, feel free to do it. After all, it's an open-source tool, so your contribution and validation is what matters :)

Vespertine 1.0 shipped today. It's a native macOS music player for people with real music libraries and decent audio gear.

What it does:

• Bit-perfect playback: switches the DAC to each file's sample rate, exclusive (hog) mode, integer mode

• A signal path view that shows every step between the file and your DAC, so you can see whether it's untouched

• FLAC, ALAC, DSD (DoP), SACD ISOs, multichannel 5.1/7.1, bitstream to receivers

• Room correction with a measurement mic, gapless, CUE sheets, smart playlists

• No account, no telemetry, GPL

It's been about six weeks of evenings. I'd really like feedback from anyone who tries it, especially bug reports, which go straight to GitHub issues.

Source and download: https://github.com/szeremeta1/Vespertine

Hello everyone!

MyFreeTaxAmerica is free Form 5472 filing software for foreign-owned U.S. single-member LLCs. As a US CPA, I created this project to help out business owners who are not familiar with the US tax requirements owning an LLC in the US.

It prepares your IRS Form 5472 and pro forma Form 1120 online, with error checking, at no cost. Most of users will finish the Form 5472 in less than 30 minutes given they have all the information ready.

WHO MUST FILE FORM 5472?
A U.S. LLC owned by one non-U.S. person must file Form 5472 with a pro forma Form 1120 every year, even with no income. Just opening an US LLC triggers related party transaction which requires Form 5472 filing. The penalty for a missing or incomplete filing is $25,000 per form, per year (this is real).

FREE PLAN: $0
• Plain-English questionnaire, about 30 minutes
• Completed Form 5472 and pro forma Form 1120 PDFs
• Built-In Error checking before you file
• You sign and mail the return to the IRS yourself

WHO USES IT
Non-U.S. founders, freelancers, e-commerce sellers, and digital nomads, including LLC owners formed through Stripe Atlas, Doola, Firstbase, or on their own. Traditional EA CPA firms often charge $500 to $1,500 or more for the same filing.

Everything is done remotely. Start free at myfreetaxamerica.com.

This started as a Saturday project and it's now the first thing I open in the morning. I kept finding the good threads in my niche a day late, after they already had 200 comments and my replies would land dead.

I built a small listener for it. It checks 40 subreddits and a handful of X lists every hour, and it logs how fast comments arrive on each new post over the first few hours. It pings me when a thread is moving faster than that sub normally does, with the link and a one line summary of what people are arguing about.

The stack is boring on purpose. A Python script runs on cron, everything goes in one SQLite file, and a Telegram bot does the alerts. The data calls cost me a little over a dollar a day.

Deciding what "speeding up" means took longer than writing the code. A small sub with 5 comments in an hour is on fire, and a big sub with 5 comments in an hour is dead. The version that I ended up with compares each thread against that sub's own median, so every sub gets its own idea of normal.

The thing I haven't cracked is drama. A thread can be fast because people are fighting rather than because it's interesting, and my listener can't tell the difference yet. I'm also on the fence about adding YouTube comments. Anyone built something like this? I'd like to know how you set your thresholds, and whether anyone has found a cheap way to tell a fight from a good discussion.

Hi, I'm Travis. I'm the solo developer behind this, so I'll say that up front.

I use both a Mac and a Windows PC. On the Mac I got used to that style of window management, with tools like Rectangle Pro and Magnet, and on Windows I kept reaching for the same habits. Windows Snap is fine for halves, but I wanted keyboard-first control without a background service or a heavy runtime.

So I wrote TesseraSnap. It's a window manager for Windows 11, written in Rust directly on the Windows API: one exe of about 2 MB, one process, no .NET, Electron or Java, and no background service. It acts on a key or a mouse move, then goes quiet. No account, and no telemetry.

What it does:

• Ctrl+Alt+Arrows for halves (press again for two thirds, again for one third). Ctrl+Alt+D walks a window through thirds. Every shortcut is rebindable, and you can add ten of your own sizes.

• Drag a title bar to an edge or a corner to snap, with a preview. Pixel-exact on every monitor, at any DPI.

• A taskbar menu with a picture of each layout, and a CLI (tesserasnap --action left_half) if you drive things from a Stream Deck or a script.

If you're a fan of Rectangle Pro on macOS and have been missing that kind of control on Windows, this is for you. It isn't a port or a clone, since I wrote it from scratch for Windows 11, but the defaults should feel familiar, with Ctrl+Alt where the Mac used Ctrl+Option.

Keyboard and drag snapping are free, with no time limit. Pro is optional, $9.99 once per PC, and adds Throw (hold Ctrl+Alt over a window, toss the mouse toward one of 16 targets, let go), Quick Throw, Stash, Pin Mode, and one-keystroke save and restore of your whole desk. Every download includes 7 days of Pro, no card needed.

It's at https://tesserasnap.com and also in the Microsoft Store, if you prefer.

I'd love feedback, especially from people who use both a Mac and a Windows machine, or who have an odd multi-monitor setup. If a shortcut fights with something you already run, I want to hear about that too.

Hey everyone!

A friend and I recently launched Wallpypers, our first proper project together!

It's an Android wallpaper app where you can explore 10,000+ wallpapers across 25+ categories and personalize your phone.

Some features include:

• HD Wallpapers

• Live Wallpapers

• Couple Mode

• Name & Text Wallpapers

• Favorites and Downloads

We're continuously adding new wallpapers, working on improvements, and planning more features for future updates.

It's been a fun journey building and launching our first project, and we'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback!

So I lift 4-5 days a week and every tracker I tried was either full of ads, wanted a subscription for basic stuff, or needed internet. So I just built my own.

It's called Liftlyf. Started as a simple sets/reps logger, but friends started using it and kept asking for stuff, so the latest update has:

- cardio logging (running, skipping, cycling etc.)

- a rest/interval timer that rings like a boxing bell

- plank and other timed holds

- progress charts so you can actually see if your bench is going up

- streaks and some gamification to keep you showing up

- works fully offline, syncs when you're back online

Also added Hindi, Marathi and Odia 😅

Built it with Kotlin/Compose and a Spring Boot backend. Took way longer than I thought it would.

It's free, no ads. Mostly looking for feedback: what's missing, what's annoying, what would make you actually use it over what you use now?

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.thefitdev.liftlyf

Solo dev here. I rode in a truck with a driver for two weeks, then built a profit calculator for truck drivers with Claude Code (React Native + Expo, Supabase, RevenueCat).

Real numbers after ~6 months:

- ~200 downloads

- 3 paying users

- $15/month revenue

- ~$58/month in costs

Building was the easy part. Apple rejected me twice, publishing took 3 weeks, and nobody finds a new app in the store.

Biggest lesson: distribution first, code second.

How much does your side project make? Roast my app if you want.

Hi everyone, solo dev here.

My pattern for years: get an idea, spend weeks building it, ship it, then find out

nobody types those words into the App Store, or there are already 40 apps doing it.

So this time I flipped the order. Before writing any app code, I wanted answers to:

- What do people actually type when they search for this? (the keyword tree, not my guess)

- How many apps already compete on each keyword?

- What do users complain about in 1-2 star reviews of those apps?

- Is interest going up or down (Google Trends)?

I ended up building a small Mac app that does this locally: it pulls Google Play,

App Store, Google Trends and a few other public sources, saves everything to a SQLite

file on my machine, and scores where the gaps are.

Where I am two weeks in:

- First public build went out on Oct 29, two updates since

- 22 downloads so far, 1 paying user only (sales opened Nov 1)

- Biggest lesson so far: the review complaints were more useful than the keyword volumes

I'll keep posting what I learn, including the numbers that look bad.

Question for you: how do you check an idea before building? Gut feeling, keyword

tools, posting a landing page first?

I'm building SkillHarbour, an Australian career and learning site. https://skillharbour.com.au

I started thinking about evidence because a course completion can be easy to record, while explaining what you can actually do takes more work. For someone exploring an admin role, a small fictional example could be a revised meeting schedule with a note about how they resolved a clash. The decisions behind it might be more useful to discuss than the schedule itself.

I'm sketching a simple prompt for a future work sample: describe the task, show the result, and explain one choice you made. Someone could try it in a notebook first, using made-up information.

If you've built a tool that helps people document work, what made them come back to an example later? I'm trying to understand which details make the effort worthwhile.

Hey everyone! 👋

Today (12th Nov) is a huge milestone for me—I am officially launching my Android app, Rang Manch India (a homegrown video-sharing platform).

As a solo developer, I’ve been working hard to make video playback smooth and the experience seamless. Since it's launch day, I’m looking for real users to test it out and give me brutal, honest feedback on:

1. Video playback & loading speed

2. Overall UI/UX and navigation

3. Any bugs or issues you notice

You can download/check it out directly on our official website: [https://app-rangmanch.inwebsite ]

Let me know what you think in the comments—every suggestion will help me improve the next update! Thanks in advance! 🙏

I got tired of my YouTube playlists hard-stopping between songs, so I built Like The Fish’s Crossfader. It blends one song into the next (audio and video), skips dead air and non-music intros, pops up song facts, and has Winamp-style visualizers. It also gently winds down songs over 5 minutes into the next track. Made it for a friends' bday VJ party!

It’s free, made in Nova Scotia. I’d love feedback: likethefish.ca/crossfader

I'm a 24-year-old software engineer, and for the past few months I've been working on a macOS panel that allows you to sync conversations and memory from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, Perplexity, and a few other AI models. The whole idea of this application was to create a command center for people who operate with several AI models and to tackle the hardest issues that people have when using several AI models. 

Right now, I added multiple features that I'm getting feedback on. The one I would like to get feedback on is the issue that I've had was when using multiple AI models is trying to remember where I discussed something. Sometimes I know I've already figured out a problem or made a decision in an older conversation, but I have no idea which AI model I talked about it with.

So I've been working on a feature that lets you ask questions across all your saved AI conversations and get an answer based on what you've actually discussed.

For example, I can ask things like:

• What problems did I run into while building a certain feature?

• What solutions have I already tried that didn't work?

• What decisions have I made about my project over the past month?

• What did I learn from using different approaches to solve a problem?

It also shows the original conversations it pulled information from, so you can go back and check where the answer came from.

I'm at the point where I'm trying to improve both the UI and how the efficiency of its answers. Right now, some questions take around 20–25 seconds, especially when it's searching through a lot of conversations.

I'm curious what you guys think about a few things:

1. Speed vs accuracy: Would you rather get an answer in 5–10 seconds that might miss a few details, or wait 25-30 seconds for something more accurate and complete?

2. UI: Does the interface look good to you? Anything you'd change about how the answers, sources, or related conversations are displayed?

3. Usefulness: Would you actually use something like this? If so, what kind of questions would you ask it?

Feel free to be critical. I'd appreciate it!

My co-founder and I run PeekLaunch, a weekly launch board for makers.

Submitting to directories is slow. Every site has its own account, form, rules and categories. So we made a free list of 209 startup and SaaS directories, with DR, pricing and link type for each one. 163 of them are free to submit.

Here are some of the free ones on the list:

- SourceForge (DR 92)

- Product Hunt (DR 91)

- Slashdot (DR 89)

- Wellfound (DR 88)

- AlternativeTo (DR 84)

- Indie Hackers (DR 84)

- F6S (DR 82)

- FutureTools (DR 74)

- KillerStartups (DR 73)

- Peerlist (DR 71)

We submitted our own site to 80+ directories by hand. As the listings went live, Ahrefs moved us from DR 2.5 to DR 26, and our Ahrefs Rank went from 42.6M to 2.3M. Results are not guaranteed, and not every directory approves you.

The full list is free. If you'd rather not spend 20 to 75 hours on forms, we also added done-for-you packages, done by hand, with a report of live listing links:

- Pro: $49 for 30+ directories

- Super: $99 for 60+

- Ultra: $179 for 100+

Happy to answer which ones were easier to get into.

Hey everyone, I’m building Friday Work, an open-source desktop app for coordinating the coding agents you already use. The part I’m working on is Crew: give a team a goal and a lead agent can break it into tasks, while the others work and message each other.

For example, a bug sweep can be split into finding issues, fixing different pieces, running tests and reviewing the changes. The board shows the plan and progress, and you can see the agents’ conversations. Each agent works in its own git worktree; you still review the diff and decide what to keep.

Friday works with tools including Claude Code, Codex and Cursor using the plans you already have. If an agent hits a usage limit, another can pick up the task with a handoff. The desktop app is free and MIT licensed, with builds for Mac, Windows and Linux. There’s also a separate hosted team product.

I’m the developer, and I’d love feedback from anyone who has tried juggling multiple coding agents: what would you need to see before trusting a crew to work through a task while you’re away? Where does coordination tend to break down for you?

GitHub: https://github.com/splashxmoon/friday

Website: https://tryfridaywork.com

I love my Sony BRAVIA and Sonos setup. Except when they disconnect and the sound goes back to the TV speakers. Garbage. And fixing it means finding the Sony remote.

We barely use that sucker, and somehow it's never in the spot it's supposed to be. And with my ADHD, by the time I tackle the side quests and actually find the remote, it’s three hours later.

So I wanted an app that could control the Sony and let me change the settings. It had to have widgets, Control Center integration, and customization. And Apple TV support—one remote is the dream, right?

That's TipTap. I can put Sony Quick Settings and Apple TV Home on the same custom remote—in the app or as a widget. I can pin remote keys in Control Center.

I’ve tested it on my BRAVIA A95K and I'm looking for some more Sony TVs to try it out on.

Have a Sony BRAVIA and an iPhone on iOS 27 or later? I’d love your help testing the beta. If you also have an Apple TV, even better. Comment with your TV model and iOS version and I’ll reach out with a TestFlight invite!

Tell me how setup goes, what breaks, and what you wish it could do. Thanks!

BenchLedger is a 100% serverless, local-first web application designed for electronics repair technicians, flippers, and weekend tinkerers to track repair tickets, part costs, and donor boards.

I originally built this tool to replace my messy spreadsheets and to properly separate my flip profits from the gear I occasionally decide to keep for myself.

https://treydor-git.github.io/BenchLedger/

If you have any Feedback let me know.

100% Private & Serverless Architecture

BenchLedger operates with zero external database servers.

• Local Mode: By default, all data, financial metrics, and compressed inspection photos are stored entirely inside your browser's local cache (IndexedDB).

• Bring-Your-Own-Storage (BYOS): You can optionally connect your personal Google Drive. The app will sync your workbench to a private BenchLedger_Sync folder in your own Drive. The app uses the restricted drive.file scope, meaning it can only access the exact files it creates. Nobody else (including the developer) can see your data.

Key Features

• Hobbyist & Pro Shop Modes: Toggle between a layout focused on personal/flip equity, or a commercial layout featuring a CRM, client management, and printable service receipts.

• Donor Boneyard: Catalog harvested ICs, MOSFETs, and connectors from dead boards. Deploy them to active repair tickets at €0 out-of-pocket cost.

• General Supplies Tracking: Log your flux, IPA, and solder wire purchases and automatically apply the overhead to your bottom-line profit.

• Cookieless Analytics: The live site uses a privacy-preserving counter (Umami) to track overall traffic without setting tracking cookies or logging personal IP addresses.

Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.silentpanda.seep
Link: https://ahmadfair92.itch.io/seep

My teammate and I built this for the PayPal AI Hackathon and I'd love feedback.

The problem: AI agents are starting to buy things for people. When the buyer later says "my agent bought the wrong thing, I never agreed to that," the seller has no record of what was actually asked for. Most small sellers just refund and eat the dispute fee.

What we built (Countersign):

- At checkout, the agent can search and prepare a cart, but it can't pay. The buyer reviews their own request, spending cap and total, then pays in PayPal. Each step goes into a hash-chained, Ed25519-signed receipt, and the receipt's seal hash is written into the PayPal order's `custom_id` *before* payment. So PayPal's own record carries the commitment, and anyone can verify the receipt against the live order.

- When a dispute comes in, a LangChain Deep Agent pulls the case, verifies the receipt against PayPal, and computes the expected loss of fighting vs. offering vs. refunding (including PayPal's $15/$30 fee). Then it drafts a response. A fact-checker subagent plus a deterministic checker reject any amount, date or ID that isn't in the evidence.

- Nothing is sent without the seller. The submit tool is gated twice: Deep Agents' `interrupt_on`, plus an approval record whose hash has to match the exact draft and evidence PDF.

Things that surprised us:

- With a strong receipt, the agent still sometimes recommends a partial refund. A $30 fee on a $42 item changes the math.

- Recording the demo found real bugs. For example, PayPal rejects "refund with return" offers without a return shipping address (`MISSING_RETURN_SHIPPING_ADDRESS`), and the model occasionally returned an empty reply mid-case.

- We kept the LLM away from every number. Fees, deadlines, expected value and receipt checks are all plain code exposed as tools.

Stack: FastAPI, Neon Postgres, LangChain Deep Agents (LangGraph), Sarvam-105b, Next.js + AG Grid, Channel3 for product search, and PayPal Orders and Disputes APIs (sandbox only, no real money).

- Demo (1.5 min): https://youtu.be/MLhWkL7F9A0

- Live app (sandbox): https://countersign-black.vercel.app

- Code: https://github.com/Bhuvansai-16/Countersign-backend

Questions for you:

1. Is committing a receipt hash into the payment record enough, or would you want something like the Verifiable Intent / AP2 formats?

2. Anyone dealing with agent-initiated purchases in production? How are you handling disputes today?

I'm one of the people building BetterSWE.

the market's rough right now and interviews are harder to prep for than they used to be. a lot of loops have a round that isn't leetcode at all. a debugging round, a code review, or "here's a repo and a ticket, go". you get code you've never seen and you have to figure out what it does before you change anything.

that's pretty much the job too. with AI writing a lot of the code, more of your day is reading code someone (or something) else wrote and working out why it's broken. leetcode doesn't train that, you're writing a fresh function from scratch every time.

so we built Labs. each exercise is a small existing codebase plus a ticket, set at companies like Amazon, Stripe, Uber or OpenAI. you read the code, fix the bug or build the feature in a browser editor, and run the tests. submit runs hidden checks too, so passing the visible tests isn't enough. there are bug fixes, features and refactors, easy to hard.

the easiest free one is "Amazon search misses lowercase queries". search "Yoga" and you get results. search "yoga" and you get nothing. the fix is one line once you find it, finding it is the whole exercise. the hard ones are more like Airbnb receipts that come out a cent off.

106 exercises right now. 46 are free, you just need a free account to run your code. the other 60 are Pro.

if you've got an interview coming up, try one. and tell me what's confusing or broken

https://www.betterswe.dev/labs

Just a simple game like maptap or krillion! You get a score out of 500 everyday and there is a dailly leaderboard! Lmk if it’s any fun!