Indie Devs Can't Market Their Wellness Apps
Independent developers are creating apps to address frustrations with existing self-improvement tools and habits. They're often driven by personal need or feedback from loved ones, but struggle with marketing and scaling due to limited time and resources. This highlights a gap between the desire for personalized, engaging self-improvement and the current app landscape.
SOURCES (60)
“So i got a lot of feedbacks yesterday, about my app for burnout, self care for workspace management and career crisis analysis. I coded and vibecoded at the same time more functionalities for the application but i think that i'm missing something else. Do you…”
“Most sleep and white noise apps today require paid subscriptions, logins, or force you to watch video ads right before bed, which completely ruins the point of winding down. I wanted something lightweight that opens instantly in a browser, works on both mobile and desktop, and lets you play relaxing background audio without friction or sign-ups. You can try it out here: FallAsleep It is completely free to use. I would really appreciate any feedback on the audio loops, user interface, or features”
“Really appreciate the feedback, and you hit the nail on the head! That week 3–4 cliff is honestly where most habit apps fail once the initial novelty wears off. We actually designed Growy with that exact drop-off in mind — it's meant to be the onboarding hook, but long-term retention relies on a deeper progression loop: **Meta-progression ("My Garden"):** Growy isn't just one standalone plant. Once it reaches max level (around month 1), you plant it into your permanent garden a”
Here it is: https://github.com/s2b-dev/smart-second-brain
“This sounds great - I’m happy to give the iOS version a try and would be glad to provide feedback. Installing from the App Store in a moment. How would you like to recieve feedback? To your email address? Posted here? Via the in-app “contact support”?”
“ill get to the point, im building a mobile health/wellness app that helps you get into habit / routine easier and trying to be as frictionless as possible. Quick description is you can build a "plan" (set your goals, a meal plan, a workout plan, etc) and version/share them or whatnot and you configure this once and then you can quick log them and have a nice insights screen to always know your progress and adherance overtime. I try to solve friction with ai throughout the app as in any”
“ill get to the point, im building a mobile health/wellness app that helps you get into habit / routine easier and trying to be as frictionless as possible. Quick description is you can build a "plan" (set your goals, a meal plan, a workout plan, etc) and version/share them or whatnot and you configure this once and then you can quick log them and have a nice insights screen to always know your progress and adherance overtime. I try to solve friction with ai throughout the app as in any”
“🫶🏻🫶🏻 i really care about behaviour change. i have bipolar 1 and a history of addiction. so im pretty passionate about my current goals + lifestyle design app…. if you want to learn videos follow jake castillo from cal ai on linkedin!”
“Hey everyone! 👋 I've been building GrowDay, a habit tracker designed to make building habits more motivating and rewarding. Instead of simply checking off habits, GrowDay turns your progress into a little journey. 🌱 Features: • 🌱 Grow your virtual companion Growy • ✅ Track daily habits • 🎮 Earn XP and unlock achievements • 🔥 Build streaks • 🤖 AI Mentor for personalized guidance • 🌿 Personal garden • 📊 Progress statistics GrowDay is now available on both iOS and Android. I'm looki”
just shipped a full UI redesign for anti scroll, android app that hard blocks other apps once your time's up, no override option, no way back in early. also added dark mode,…
“it's wild that so many apps still lean on self-rating when half the time i'm just tapping whatever gets me to the next card fastest”
“Hi everyone! I'm vibecoding (and programming some parts myself, but having fun with AI) a little web app that tracks your mood during your days at work. I made this because I had a time during my career where I was struggling and unable to see how my work was literally costing so much energy and effort from my mind. Eventually I switched jobs and I'm now very happy — but I wish I had a way to track how work was influencing my days back then. That's what I'm building. I want to kn”
“Short version: you photograph your clothes, and each morning the app sends you one complete outfit built from what is actually in your closet, adjusted for the weather. We built it because we owned plenty of clothes and still lost 20 minutes every morning deciding. The part worth testing is not the photo capture — it is whether the outfit it picks is one you would genuinely have worn. TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/kEx4vrfn What it needs from you: an iPhone on iOS 17 or later abou”
“Hi everyone! I'm vibecoding (and programming some parts myself, but having fun with AI) a little web app that tracks your mood during your days at work. I made this because I had a time during my career where I was struggling and unable to see how my work was literally costing so much energy and effort from my mind. Eventually I switched jobs and I'm now very happy — but I wish I had a way to track how work was influencing my days back then. That's what I'm building. I want to kn”
“I kept catching myself doing the same thing: bored, pick up my phone, and then it's twenty minutes later and I'm deep in a feed I never meant to open. I didn't want an app telling me to touch grass. I just wanted something better to do with five minutes. So I made Yorlo. Every day there's a new question or random thought — something you can actually think about, answer, or send to a friend. If one isn't enough you can keep going. It's coming to iPhone and it's free. N”
“Hey guys, wanted to share my story in how I fixed my screentime usage. I used to be quite addicted to doomscrolling (5+ hours of tiktok/reels a day). After trying screentime blockers like Opal and One Sec I was able to cut it down to ~3 hrs a day, but the remaining problem was when waking up and going to sleep—the habit to scroll would just be automatic. Screentime blockers stopped helping because most of them let you take breaks whenever you want. I tried Brick as well but ended up with the sam”
“Damn near 29% conversion is wild for an app that does exactly what people say they want but never actually follow through on. The irony of people downloading a focus app in droves is not lost on me 560 installs with zero reddit effort means you've got something that's catching on its own, curious what the retention looks like once the notifications are in and people actually remember they installed it”
“In return can I ask you to try my app https://bodhi.dishajyoti.com Without giving much info about it, it will be helpful if you can share what you thought is key use case and how you used it. I want to understand if user find it easy to use and understand purpose”
“Hey everyone! I created this minimalist Daily Habit & Task Tracker in Notion to keep daily goals simple and organized. It includes: • Daily Habit Progress Tracker • Task Management System • Clean, aesthetic view I’d love to get your feedback! submitted by /u/masti_Act_7909 [link] [comments]”
Hi! This is so helpful and I'd love to use but sadly the link says the page cannot be found on Notion. Would you be able to paste a working link? Thanks!!!
“Built a free Telegram self-care bot with n8n + Groq — adaptive daily tasks based on energy/mood”
“Hey everyone! I'm Izumi, solo dev behind Levelite: Gamify your Life. About a year and 8 months ago I launched it in the middle of a pretty brutal depression. I'd always been hooked on video games, so I figured maybe that could be part of the solution instead of the distraction it usually was. The problem Levelite tries to solve I tried Habitica first. It just felt like a productivity app wearing a costume, the game part was thin, and I never actually wanted to open it. So I went the oppo”
Hey everyone! I just launched my first app in the Apple App Store! Health and fitness are very important to me, and I take my daily movement goals very seriously. Staring at…
“The flow seems clear enough but I'd test it on someone who's never seen it before and just watch where they hesitate maybe add a quick undo for the roll in case someone taps it by accident”
“the deliberate list of what it is not will recruit better than the feature list does. no streaks, no gamification, no guilt for skipping a week — people who journal have abandoned three apps for exactly those reasons 😞 which is also where the testers are. somebody writing that they dropped a journaling app because the streak turned it into homework is describing your product back to you without knowing it. answer that person about the habit, not the app, and the beta invite arrives as a reply r”
“always liked the idea of a shared streak, one bad day tanking weeks of work was the reason i kept ditching trackers. gonna give it a spin and see if the character actually keeps me around after the novelty wears off”
“I've been building this solo for a while and I'm at the point where I need real people using it, not just me. Verafeel is a journaling app. You write freely, like a normal journal, but instead of just filing it away or asking you to tag a mood, it reads what you wrote and asks one real follow-up question based on it. If you mention work stress, it might ask if it's the workload or something specific. You can answer, correct it, or say it got it wrong entirely and it actually remember”
“Most habit trackers are built around keeping you coming back forever. I wanted to try the opposite. I built Motif , an Android habit tracker where the goal is for a habit to eventually stop needing the tracker. The main feature is Habit Graduation . Habits progress through: Starting → Building → Strengthening → Graduated Every 14 days, Motif also gives you a short check-in based on the SRBAI automaticity scale to understand whether the habit is actually starting to feel automatic. Once it does,”
“A few months ago I shipped Ombré, an iOS noise app for focus and sleep. Downloads flatlined after launch. Total paying customers: one. And honestly - fair. It's a noise generator. Charging a recurring fee for something with zero marginal cost never sat right with people, and every thread I read about noise apps said the same thing: "why is this a subscription?" So as of today's update, it isn't. No more monthly or annual plans - one $14.99 purchase and everything is yours f”
“Pausely is a menopause/perimenopause symptom diary for Android. Fully offline: no account, no cloud, no ads, no trackers, no backend at all. Flutter + SQLite on device. Free during the beta, and testers keep a lifetime license at launch. What it does: a ~10-second daily check-in (hot flashes, sleep, mood, brain fog, joint pain), plain-statistics pattern cards, and a one-page PDF summary for doctor appointments. I need testers for Google's closed-testing requirement — 12 people opted in for 1”
“do the millions of apps that exist each solve a unique problem? is not the appearance or feel of something enough reason for its existence? where are the people who do not want to endlessly swipe on tinder, repeatedly get rejected on instagram, sit behind their phone or computer looking at nothing but a discord conversation or maybe roleplay someone completely different in the metaverse, supposed to go? if there already is an app or service which provides what i have described, i would love to l”
“Oh that’s really cool - I definitely didn’t see this when I was checking for apps similar to this! What parts of it does your wife like?”
Here are some options incl. tutorials: https://youtu.be/7-Os36k4pHs
“I would encourage you to think more specifically about what problem you’re solving that other apps aren’t! I don’t really understand how the mechanism you’re describing is ultimately any easier for these people than any other service”
“👆🏻 This and depending on the habit if it is just a Yes/No on if it was done, you can use Meta-Bind to have checkboxes adjust the frontmatter.”
“Hi there. I'm no expert so I'll be providing my opinion as a Saudi living in Riyadh only. I'd like to start by saying since this is a zero-cost product where the only thing you'll be paying is your own time, it wouldn't hurt to work on a very simple prototype as a PoC/demo either way. Anyways, regarding your questions: 1- From what I've seen, I think there would be some initial friction since the elderly people who'd be needing such services (quite old) are slightly t”
“Just add your habits to the daily template's frontmatter as a flag type. Then all you need to do is mark habits every day when you complete them. There are plenty of habit plugins that take these habit flags from daily notes and draw them in the GitHub style.”
“thank you for the kind words! if you do end up using it, I would love to hear any feedback you might have.”
“You can do something with bases or data view (do core plugins count?) but it won't look like a heatmap without community plugins.”
“I made OwnTime to balance between competing priorities in my life. The idea is based on two main influences: the concept of "roles" from "The 5 Choices" (2015), and my repeated failure to effectively implement time blocking due to the necessary flexibility in my role.The app allows you to define time budgets, which are not much more than a few mutually exclusive countdown timers. The UX is essentially that of a chess clock for an arbitrary number of players with configurable time.The whole point”
“Honest recap in case it helps anyone launching with no audience: What flopped: 26 straight days of short-form video → 6 followers. Reach ≠ installs; the content treadmill barely moved anything. What worked: posting in one relevant niche subreddit drove more installs in a single day than a month of videos combined. A genuinely relevant, honest post beats volume every time. The surprise: overnight, China became my #2 market — turned out my store listing localization got picked up by App Store sear”
“This app started as project only for myself but I found it so useful to iterate over several months until I released it earlier this year. Meanwhile I published several updates and use it myself every day to dive into memories of past years and cleanup my library at the same time 😊 https://flohgro.com/onthisday/ submitted by /u/FloHyO [link] [comments]”
“I spend way too much time on YouTube. More than I dare to admit. I checked the Screen Time stats on my iPhone, and I’ve been consistently over 10 hours a week for several weeks. That’s almost 2 hours a day, and I know that this is not healthy. This is time I could have spent with my wife and my kid, working out, hanging out with friends, or enjoying a hobby. The thing is, I never meant to spend all that time there. I always start by watching an educational video (something about a new technology”
Hi! I made a new interval timer app with the intent to stand out from the many others. In addition to tap controls and voice control, my app introduces camera gestures! You…
“3 weeks of building a focus app while constantly getting distracted by my phone. Felt appropriately embarrassing. The irony pushed me to make Strict Mode a core feature; if you start a session, the app prevents itself from being deleted. No easy escape. 3 emergency unlocks per month if you truly need out. Launch week stats: - Day 1: 2 downloads. i know the number is lower, but yeah, it's been a week so far. - Currently at 2 reviews, with a 4.0 rating from 1 user so far. - Biggest surprise: t”
“I've always found it weird that we track individual things — money in one app, habits in another, sleep somewhere else, goals in another — but rarely look at how they interact. So I spent the last few months building a system where you can log things like finances, sleep, mood, energy, focus and goals, then see your progress over time. I'm curious how other people currently track this stuff. Do you use one system for everything, several apps, spreadsheets, or basically nothing? 😂 What d”
“[Android only for now] Guarded watches how long you're in those apps each day, nags you with increasingly annoyed reminders once you're going too long, and if you don't stop, it kills your streak. No streak = no bragging rights on the leaderboard, no badges, friends get notified you slipped. It doesn't lock you out or anything, it's just really good at making you feel bad enough to close the social app yourself. Free, no ads. Need a handful of people to opt in as closed teste”
“no signup and no data collected is a strong hook, lean into that harder in your app store listing imo. most people dont read past the first two screenshots so make sure the privacy angle is front and center there”
“I kept uninstalling every blocker I tried whenever the urge actually hit, so I built a different kind of blocker. Cairn intercepts when I type an adult side, uses the phone camera to count 20 push-ups, and then asks whether I still want to continue. It deliberately doesn't make access impossible. The idea is to interrupt urge and make your reconsider after (100% of the time, I would leave the site). The key differentiator here is the shift in approach from a complete blocker to one that offe”
“I’ve been building an iPhone app called DailyQuad. The idea is pretty simple: instead of starting with a giant list of habits, start with a few goals that actually matter and focus on showing up consistently. Goals can be simple yes/no goals or things you measure, like steps, water, protein, exercise, reading, sleep, or whatever matters to you. There are trends so you can see what you’re actually doing over time, plus metrics for tracking things like weight, measurements and body composition. It”
“It depends on the person. Habit trackers don't work for me on Notion. I usually need a mobile notification for streaks and I don't like the Notion mobile app.”
“I tested ZenTask without signing in, on desktop and a 390px mobile viewport. I created a task with notes and three micro-steps, reloaded the page, tried the filters, ran Focus with Brown Noise, and tested the Task Deconstructor with two different tasks. Task creation was quick, persistence worked, and the mobile layout stayed clean. A few reproducible issues: - On September 1, the new-task form defaulted the due date to August 31, but the saved task still appeared under Today. - “Plan three heal”
“I have learned over the years that my routine is no routine. I have no reason to track what I do daily. The cleaning gets done. I keep a calendar of appointments and anything that requires I leave my house. I don't see a need to track things. I was doing it because everyone else was. I would miss a day or two and feel like I failed. I just have a different way of doing things. Why do you want to track things? Do you have a real need to track, or is it because everyone else is?”