Indie Devs Ship Fast Then Stall Before Anyone Sees It
Indie developers are struggling with the transition from building to launching and growing their apps. They're caught in a cycle of over-polishing, fearing user rejection, and finding distribution far more challenging than creation. This leads to delays, wasted effort, and a sense of being stuck.
SOURCES (60)
“Interestingly, I’ve actually thought about this question quite a few times over the last few months while working on a new desktop app for the global market. I’ve also had my fair share of pretty serious ups and downs in business over the years, so…”
“Built a mobile ios app last month and downloads have been slow like averaging 1 a day but i got my first trial user today. Haven’t really marketed the app that much, maybe a small comment here and there since i didnt want to spam or make cringy posts like ive seen others do. Wanted to just see how it went organically. Ive been struggling coming up with posts for instagram/tiktok (i havent posted any) would like to know how you guys find good ways to convey an app in a post that doesnt just look”
“I shipped my first real solo app: The Burgundy Journal. It's a news app that uses AI to summarize stories from trusted sources and strips the clickbait out of headlines. It links keywords in summaries so you can track how a story progresses by how it gets covered by different sources. I built it because staying informed via social media platforms was rotting my brain, and actual news sources took way too much time. I still use it most days, a year in. I think the app is genuinely useful. The”
“Why is it ridiculous that an app might have a product strategy that is different than your individual unique desires and preferences? If Notion isn't meeting your design needs, you can choose different apps. Notion has clearly made a conscious decision to reduce design optionality so that the pages have a consistent look/feel so they are recognizable when people share Notion pages. This is by design. You may not agree with it, but thats why we have free will to choose apps that align with ou”
“I think the biggest test isn't whether the UI “looks AI” — it's whether the design feels intentional and specific to the product. Font, less animation, and restrained shadows can definitely help, but I'd also look for the common AI-generated patterns: identical card layouts everywhere, excessive rounded corners, generic typography, gradients/glassmorphism without a purpose, and decorative elements that don't help the user. I'd do a pass screen-by-screen and ask: “Why is this”
“For my app specifically, it was closing off security loopholes. The basic functionality took about 2 days. Idiot-proofing it took 2 months.”
“if you can't tell the difference, why do you want the UI to be less AI before launch? If the app is all vibe coded, let the UI be too. It shows people what you're about and whether they should trust the app. They can make informed decisions.”
My app hit $8k/mo and I still haven't told anyone About 14 months ago I launched a productivity tool, basically scratched my own itch -was tired of patching together Notion and a…
“I think PWAs are worth it for the right kind of project. For small utility apps, I really like the fact that users can just open a link and start using the product without installing anything from an app store. If they want, they can still add it to the home screen later. The part I found more annoying is updates and caching, especially on iOS. Service workers can make deployments feel less predictable if an old version is still cached, so you need a solid update strategy. For simple tools thoug”
“I started a mobile game in mid August to see how far you can actually take a serious project with AI. I wasn't after a prototype, I wanted something that ends up on the stores. I've been building it with Claude Code the whole way, using Opus and Fable. Two and a half weeks later I've got it to a point where I can finally show something. Legend of the DEV is an idle tycoon game. You start in a rented room with a second hand laptop, living off small gigs, and from there you build a glo”
“i've been building a vocabulary app (vibeling, mine) for nine months. as of today: $237 mrr, 45 paying subscribers, 3,292 active users in the last 28 days, $0 ever spent on ads. almost all of those nine months went into the product. more training modes, a better spaced repetition schedule, speech recognition, ten interface languages, tens of thousands of seo pages. i'm glad i did all of it and almost none of it moved the revenue line. the two things that did: deleting a button. the home”
“It’s been a bit over 10 weeks since I launched Kepp.io 11 releases across iOS and Android later, I looked back at what I actually spent most of my time building. There have obviously been a lot of product changes. New onboarding, AI collection assignment, localization, sharing, better link previews, and a lot of smaller UX improvements. But a surprisingly large part of the work has been everything behind the product. I built a Harness for prompt evaluations so I can compare output quality, perfo”
“yeah. Im noticing its taking up to 2 hours from me assigning the apps to the device, to the app being installed.. its quiet annoying really. I've tried using assignment filters to speed things up but the outcome is the same.”
“So... I used to think launching a “real” product meant pixel perfect ui, 100 settings, dark mode, the whole thing. Every project took 2 to 3 months and by the time it was live the idea felt dead. This year I flipped it. Now I treat full stack launches like scrappy experiments. One narrow use case, one main flow, payments wired in the laziest way that still works, and a tiny admin view that only I ever see. Ship it to 10 humans, iterate in prod, then decide if it deserves a second week. Weird par”
“I'm a beginner indie developer. Sometimes I have an idea, but I don't have a detailed plan for how to implement it. I've tried using AI to help me map out the details, but it doesn't work well – it feels like AI doesn't really understand how humans actually operate or what looks good to us. I often get frustrated and stuck because the implementation details are too vague. So I'd like to ask everyone: when you have an idea, what's your process for making all the steps”
“Things u mentioned make clear sense. An idea with enough traction will automatically be transferred to be able to a state "claim and start building" once this is done then the responsible builder would be the owner of that build, other builders may request to collaborate with owner or owner may raise a help request so collaboraters may join. Owner and collaboraters would then decide to lock or keep open for more builders if needed. All live projects with builders involved in it will be”
“Shipped Anti scroll about a year ago (andriod app, hard blocks other apps, no override) and still activley building on it. Quick update. Barely posted on reddit in August, was just working on features mostly. Interestingly numbers were pretty posotive; Installs: 560 (500 in July) Store Visitors: 6.25 (5) Conversion Rate: 28.9% (18%) Daily Acquisitions: 2.07 (1.07) same traffic, but way more of it converting. Things i shipped: Dark mode, scheduled timers, day scheduling, a proper onboarding walkt”
“Building **Born Today** (an on-this-day birthday app) showed me exactly where curiosity products die: installation is easy, returning is not. I am sharing what I observed honestly and asking whether a novelty app justifies continued building or is a stepping stone. App Store link: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6755918680 For anyone who has shipped a fun-once app: at what point did you decide it was a real product versus a portfolio piece? submitted by /u/Admirable-Drag-2416 [link] ”
“I made them this little interactive experience around our memories and things I wanted to say, sent it over, and their reaction was honestly way more intense than I expected 😂 They were completely invested in going through it. That reaction basically made me think: Okay… maybe there’s actually a product here. So I turned it into BloomQuest: Celebrate and eventually launched it on iOS and Android. The basic idea is pretty simple. You choose someone and an occasion, add memories, photos, inside j”
“Duuuuude..... "go nuts, make a proof of concept dashboard or app, and then hand it off to us to fix up, and we'll make it production." Fuuuuuuck that noise. That's one of the worst ideas I've heard in a while. HELL no.”
“Two months ago my daughter asked to download a number-matching puzzle game. I got hooked too, beat it in two days, decided it was too easy, and figured I'd try building something harder myself. Problem: I've never written a line of code. I spent the next two months directing Replit's AI agent to build the whole thing (Claude and ChatGPT helped with planning and review), nights and weekends. It's called Cavernum, 60 levels, number-matching puzzle mechanics with cave-crawl blockers”
“On android you can just build an apk, and install it directly to your phone. Use that as distribution for now, then if you think you are getting traction, or you think this can be an investment, then I suggest paying for the developer account. If its just you, then this way should be fine. If you end up planning on buying developer subscriptions, my suggestion is to have more app ideas for later to submit so you can maximize your subscription. I will start off with Google Play developer too as i”
“I’m confused about what problem this solves. Can you state the pain point in a sentence?”
“Some of the deal breakers can be worked around by users: * Docker image: users can make them themselves (e.g. I make some images myself and automate updates using CI). * Phone home: can be blocked by not allowing networking to containers (e.g. by allowing only internal communications on the container, which should be the default when a service doesn't needs internet access). * Needs internet on first launch: can be a deal breaker, as allowing internet access to a container increases signific”
“When the app I had given up on and left behind, suddenly gets subscribers it feels like free money! It's so easy to forget the hours, days, weeks, months poured into an app. My first ever published app was published on the Google Play store back in May. And then nothing happened. I managed to give away around 50 promo codes to get someone to install it, but had no marketing budget. I tried to "SEO" it, but couldn't even get it to show when searching in the play store itself. So”
“You're witnessing, in slow motion, what will become a category of "apps we don't build anymore". We're a heartbeat away from a localized, personal mobile AI OS - in the scale of things. Every android in the future will have a "create an app based on some personal preferences!", which will usher new protocols to share between them, etc, as necessary. I don't know what it looks like after that. I know it's generally not tough to tell "expert in area fix”
Hey, I am building a productivity and project manager saas and I know there are already 1000+ apps in this niche and big players like Notion, Obsidian, and many more, but I…
“A change to a shared component can quietly wreck a page nobody opened during review. The only way to find out today is for somebody to run bun tauri dev and click through, which nobody does exhaustively and CI cannot do at all. Springen has a neat answer to this. Its desktop binary takes screenshot <dir , renders each screen once, writes PNGs and exits, so the interface can be checked in CI on a machine with only a software rasteriser. No display server, no window, no human. The coilbox version”
“the design part surprised me. i thought i was adding a colour scheme and ended up finding progress bars and poster titles that were wrong for reasons nothing to do with the theme. the free bit wasn't much of a decision. charging extra to read your own library would've made the rest of my pitch hollow.”
“Every time I post about what I build, someone explains that it is simple now. A model for the reasoning, Twilio for the numbers, one of five providers for speech, some file search for the retrieval. A proof of concept in a day. They are right. I built that POC. It took me a day and it worked. Here is what the day did not contain. Getting a phone number that legally works. My telco provider's regulatory bundle rejected me ten times. The reason turned out to be that the legal entity name I had”
“I've shipped a few apps and by now everyone here probably knows that building is not the hard part anymore. But now since it's so easy to build it's also easy to pick the wrong thing to build. Every ASO tool I looked at starts after you've already built it. Here are your keywords, here's where you rank, good luck. Which it's useful, but it's answering the question after you've shipped. So I built the one that answers the first as well. You point it at an idea and”
“I've been building OpenTV, a TV show tracker for people who lost their history when TV Time shut down. It imports your data export and rebuilds everything on your phone. It's been dark only since day one. I like dark apps, I use dark apps, so that's what I made. Then my first paying subscriber asked in my subreddit if lighter themes were coming, because "black is kind of difficult for me". He'd paid for the tier that includes themes, and every theme in it was a shade of”
“I’ve been working professionally as an Android developer for about 8 years , but I’d never really built anything substantial for iOS. For a long time I wanted two things: To properly learn iOS development instead of just understanding it from the outside. To have an app that was completely my own. Something I could design, build, ship and maintain without it being a client or company project. That eventually became BAGL (pronounced “bagel”), short for Bring a Grocery List . The idea came from be”
“You can spend years designing and testing, and still hit the dumbest, most painful bugs the moment real users touch it. I've experienced this in my previous startup: every time we thought we had covered every edge case, a real customer would find another one. Real-world usage is just messy in ways you can't fully simulate. Here's how I choose to to deal with it in current product (Alien) Be okay with rewriting. You build something, realize it was wrong, rewrite it, realize it's s”
“Actually, even the apps that that add a lock screen button still just dump you into the app where you see all the previous stuff that hijacks your attention and then still want you to press something to record the note. With Olly, whenever you open it you never see anything to distract you and recording starts instantly from the lock screen. It was actually surprisingly difficult to achieve, probably why many don’t offer it. Thanks for the suggestion, I’ll think on that as you’re not the first t”
“I’ve been building on-device iOS apps solo for a while now — a few are live on the App Store, one’s in TestFlight. I write, I ship, I post, I try to get the word out. And most days the numbers just… don’t move. Some days I genuinely wonder if I’m bad at this, or if the whole idea just isn’t good enough, or if I’m doing all the “right” things wrong. Then I read that it usually takes months before anything picks up, and I try to believe that, but it’s hard when you’re staring at the same low numbe”
“looked at the first three screenshots without reading anything. i got "capture a thought from the lock screen without opening your phone" by the second one, so the story lands. the thing i didn't get from the screenshots is your second problem, the knowing-where-you-put-it one. that's the part i'd actually pay for and it's invisible in the shots. also curious how you tested this, did you show them to anyone cold before shipping, or is the A/B in the store the test?”
“I’m looking for fresh eyes on the onboarding for my iOS app, The Agora: Philosophy Debates. One piece of feedback I recently got was that I may be thinking too much about retention before making sure a new user reaches the first “this is actually useful” moment fast enough. That made me want to take a harder look at my onboarding. The app is built around learning philosophy more interactively by choosing a question, taking a position, and defending your reasoning while being challenged through t”
“Some days ago I posted about my app called Continuum, I got a little discouraged because in my mind it wasn't 100% ready to be launched (some ugly UI and a few bugs already being fixed) Today I opened my Stripe just to see some webhooks and saw that the subscribers graph had a new user. I was suprised because I hadn't been promoting it for a while, besides having some early users (8) it was suprising, someone trusted my app in developing stage. submitted by /u/lemavoos [link]”
“i shipped a supplement timing app last week. a group of founders my age went through it and the only thing any of them said was that the onboarding was overwhelming. nobody mentioned a single other thing about the app. so i went and counted. 27 screens before you see anything useful. the payoff, the part where it shows you your stack and drops it into your day, is screen 21. people were answering 20 questions on faith before the app gave them anything back. i've already rewritten it down to”
“I have been solo developing an iOS journaling app for five months now. No employees, no funding, no one to show my ideas to and tell me if they are bad. This is the real challenge. I have gotten so used to seeing my app that I have lost vision for it. I have lost the ability to tell what is good and what is bad. The name is Journal.IO. The main flow is to write and view what the app has noticed. The notices are based on patterns that the app has developed over the weeks of journaling for you ins”
“Small teams need planning, but excessive planning can become its own form of procrastination. I’m interested in lightweight milestone systems that help indie developers make decisions without requiring a large production process. What does a useful milestone contain for you: a playable build, a measurable technical goal, a user-feedback target, a content checklist, or a decision about scope? Do you plan around weeks, features, playable loops, or public builds? I’d also like to hear how people ha”
“i kept trying to make the app feel smarter because i thought that was the point. extra layers, extra prompts, extra little wins. testers mostly ignored all of it and kept asking for one boring thing: let me get back to the task fast. i was split between todoist, notes, and a paper list for a while so i didnt really trust my own instinct here lol. beedone ended up working better once i made it less like a planner and more like a place to leave a trail of what i was actually doing. kinda annoying”
I launched an app last week after building for the past 8 months or so (music review application). On the day I launched some major publications in the space started posting about…
“Smart! :) I am not sure exactly about the 16KB, but I remember having only a couple of days to fix it. It might be that I missed the email and then found it by accident when I was about to release a new version on the Google Play Console page.”
“Real feedback from my TestFlight beta last week: 5 out of 5 stars. They tapped highlights for the supplement stack, fasting timer, gratitude journal, food scan, and design. Then in the text box, two words: "confusing to use." Anonymous, no other detail. That one's been stuck in my head. Not a bad review, not really a complaint - but it means someone liked what they found enough to explore five different parts of the app and still couldn't connect the dots. I built CaltrackIQ so”
“I've been trying to create my own app for a while now, and the very first obstacle was: what should I build? Notes app, QR generator? These apps are useful but absolutely not worth my time if I'm looking to solve a problem or build something successful, because they're trivial and there are already so many solutions out there. I struggled for a long time to come up with a fresh idea, the next big thing. But realistically, that doesn't exist. The big things we know weren't cre”
“I posted my chore app here a few weeks ago. Since then I have spent basically all my time on distribution instead of code, and the numbers were educational enough that I would rather write them down than pretend it went well. The baseline, 28 days: 437 store impressions, 62 installs, 57.58% listing conversion, 33 monthly actives, 18 people still there after 7 days. That conversion rate is the whole story. More than half of everyone who reaches the page installs. The listing is fine. The screensh”
“I've been trying to create my own app for a while now, and the very first obstacle was: what should I build? Notes app, QR generator? These apps are useful but absolutely not worth my time if I'm looking to solve a problem or build something successful, because they're trivial and there are already so many solutions out there. I struggled for a long time to come up with a fresh idea, the next big thing. But realistically, that doesn't exist. The big things we know weren't cre”
“Thank you for explaining that. I will keep a look out for Android in that case.”
“Those numbers are painful but completely normal for a first launch, mine looked similar for like a month straight Don't touch the name or icon yet unless they're objectively terrible, two weeks is nothing. Keywords and screenshots are where you can actually move the needle without burning all your momentum What's your conversion from impressions to page views sitting at right now”
“I don't run. I walk. And every fitness app I tried was built around pace, splits and segments, things a walker can never compete on. You open them and there's nothing there for you. So a few months ago I started building the one I wanted. Version 1: territory. The genre already exists. INTVL has ~2.5M downloads doing exactly this: you walk, you claim map area, someone else takes it by walking over it. Before writing any code I read a lot of angry threads from their own users, and the top”
“Curious to know why a developer cannot build the tool you are promoting here? What does your app do differently that he is unable to replicate?”
“That’s my point, the product is likely to change in that first period, not as in shift the whole focus but could mean removing bloating features, fixing critical bugs etc. So my point was not about necessarly having 0 users, but to focus on gaining users who are willing to stress-test your product. You could post your SaaS on something like Producthunt and you’ll only get users who glaze you or provide little feedback that isn’t exactly critical to your growth. Many of us hunt the need for users”
“I recently built an iOS app and assumed building the app itself would be the hardest part. For me, it wasn’t. Once the app was ready, I started working on ASO and keyword research. Finding the right keywords, checking competitors, comparing different countries, and figuring out what I could realistically rank for took way more time than I expected. I tried a few ASO tools too, but I still ended up doing a lot of the research manually. I spent around 3 weeks just trying different keywords and ASO”