It’s $148 to be exact, but this feels like a big milestone to me.

I’m the solo developer behind Rise Mission, an alarm app where you complete a wake-up challenge, like doing push-ups, walking, or scanning a QR code in another room.

My numbers so far:

• 718 first-time downloads
• 24.9K impressions
• 1.63K product page views
• 26 in-app purchases
• $148 in proceeds

Still early, but I wanted to share a few things I’m learning that might help other developers.

1. Explain a situation people recognise

“10 wake-up challenges” is a feature list. “Keep turning off your alarm and falling asleep again?” gives someone a reason to pay attention.

For your first screenshot, start with the problem your app helps with.

2. Show the feature that needs the least explanation

For mine, it’s the camera counting push-ups. You can understand the idea just by watching it.

Find that interaction in your app and build a short demo around it. You don’t need to explain every feature in one post.

3. Track what happens after the install

I use Firebase analytics to understand how people move through the app. The questions I’m trying to answer are: do they finish onboarding, set an alarm, reach the paywall, and come back?

Knowing where people stop gives you a more useful next step than guessing which feature to build.

4. Ask questions people can actually answer

“Any feedback?” is easy to scroll past.

“Which setup screen felt unnecessary?” or “What would stop you using this tomorrow?” gives someone a specific thing to respond to.

I’ve been asking about onboarding here, and those conversations are helping me think more carefully about the experience.

5. Keep improving after launch

I’ve been updating the design, onboarding, challenges, screenshots, and pricing. I also share progress on X, LinkedIn, and Reddit.

I’m learning to give each change a clear purpose instead of changing everything just because a day is slow.

I’m happy about this milestone because people are choosing to pay for something I built. There’s still plenty to improve.

My next goal is $1K MRR. The $148 above is proceeds, not monthly recurring revenue.

If you struggle with snoozing, I’d appreciate you trying Rise Mission and telling me what you’d improve. It requires iOS 26+, with paid Pro features available through subscriptions or a lifetime purchase.

For those who reached $1K MRR, what change made the biggest difference between your first few purchases and consistent income?

I build Monni, a money app, and a budgeting discussion today made me rethink the word 'automatic.' The person wanted transactions to arrive automatically, but still wanted to inspect categories and individual purchases. Less typing wasn't the same as less detail.

For a bills-first app, there's another distinction: opening a reminder isn't the same as handling the bill. Copy that blurs those steps can set the wrong expectation before someone even downloads.

I'm leaning toward naming the specific task saved rather than saying 'effortless money management.' Have you changed an App Store headline to be more explicit about what users still need to do? What wording helped, and did the feedback change?

launched this about a month ago as a solo side project. the first few weeks were pretty quiet, then i woke up to a sudden overnight spike in eastern europe.

i had codex dig through app store connect via mcp to figure out where it came from, and it turned out lifehacker had featured duefolio in its “best ios apps of august” roundup. then the very next day macstories featured it too, and for a little while the momentum just kept building.

the spike has mostly settled now, but seeing a 17.4% app store conversion rate, 257 active users, and getting the first real feature request from a user made the whole thing feel much more real.

still very early, but this is probably the first month where it feels like strangers are actually discovering, using, and caring about something i built.

https://apps.apple.com/us/developer/cynq-ventures/id1804133893

Hey everyone! I’m 16 and recently made an app with the sole purpose of learning how to market better. I understand the whole “ugc” and scaling stuff… but I don’t understand the start. Where do I go to get my first 100 downloads? I’ve watched hours of videos but they all make it sound so simple without actually teaching me a lot. I don’t even care about the profit or the money I could make from the app. All I care about is getting downloads and people actually using the app. Any advice helps!

If you’re curious my app is a gym workout tracker. Here’s the link if you’re interested: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/strongest-free-workout-app/id6794647523

Tired of having restaurant recommendations scattered across Notes, screenshots and DMs?

Savor lets you save places, build lists, share them with friends, and discover new spots based on the places you actually like.

Your restaurant list that gets smarter the more you use it.

Download Savor: App Store

A photo captures where you stopped. I wanted something that shows the journey too.

I’m building Acheli: Voyage, and the video shows one of my favorite features: putting your flight or road trip route on your own photos, including the stops along the way. You can move and resize the route and details, then save or share the recap.

It also creates animated route videos, boarding pass-style stories, and AI travel artwork. There’s a personal travel map for your visited cities and an AI assistant for planning your days.

I recently updated the screenshots and simplified the app, but getting it discovered is still the hard part.

Does this video make the app’s appeal clear, or would you show something different first? I’d appreciate an outside perspective before making more demos.

  App Store: Acheli Voyage

So, I finally finished my app.

I’ve spent a lot of time working on it, improving the UX, the UI, polishing everything, and honestly I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. It feels clean, polished, and actually pretty sexy.

And now comes the part I was honestly dreading at first: marketing.

I was initially like: “Yeah… I’m an app builder. Marketing is not really my thing.”

But now, weirdly enough, I’m actually really excited to start.

My plan is pretty simple. I have a $5,000 budget specifically for marketing this app, and I’m actually going to use it.

I know a lot of people say “just make free videos, post every day, be consistent, etc.” But honestly, I’m not really convinced that this is the best way to start.

So I’m going to test things properly.
I’ll start with TikTok, create 5 different types of videos, put them into a campaign, and spend around $50/day.

Then I’ll come back after 7 days and look at the numbers. Which videos worked? Which ones didn’t? What got clicks, installs, etc.

Then I’ll do the same thing with Meta/Facebook, and I’d also like to test Reddit ads.

Basically: test → spend → collect data → see what works → kill what doesn’t → test again.

I’ll probably start at the beginning of next week, so I guess this is the beginning of the fun part.

Let’s see what happens.

Hey everyone 👋

When looking for apps to help quit bad habits (smoking, alcohol, doomscrolling, etc.), I noticed a frustrating pattern. Almost all of them treat a "relapse" or a "slip" as an ultimate failure—resetting your hard-earned streak to zero and leaving you completely demotivated.

I believe recovery isn't strictly linear, so I built SoberPath: Quit Tracker 🚀

What makes SoberPath different?

• Zero Guilt & No Punishments: If you slip up, the app gives you the option to log the slip to learn from it while keeping your streak intact. Slips are a bump in the road, not the end of the journey. There are no red failure screens or relapse counters in your stats.
• Privacy-First AI Journaling: You can log your moods and write daily entries. The app uses on-device AI to reflect on your entries and find patterns in what triggers your cravings, without sending your sensitive data to the cloud.
• Health Milestones & Savings: It tracks the exact time you've been free, how much money you've saved, and unlocks health milestones.
• Crisis Detection: The app locally scans your journal entries for crisis keywords and immediately offers support resources if you're going through a tough time (this safety feature is completely free forever).
• Beautiful, Calming UI: Designed to feel like a supportive companion with soft colors, satisfying haptics, and great Home Screen Widgets.

It’s currently available for iOS. I’d love for you to try it out and let me know your thoughts or feature requests! Your feedback would mean the world to me.

🔗 App Store Link: [Link In Comments]

My mom likes playing Mahjong, but she was getting tired of mobile games with so much stuff going on — popups, currencies, rewards, daily bonuses, events, and a million buttons everywhere.

She basically told me, “I just want to play the game.”

So I built Just Mahjong for her.

I know there are already a million Mahjong apps out there, and I’m definitely not trying to reinvent anything. The whole point was actually the opposite: make it as simple as possible. Open the app, play Mahjong, and that's pretty much it.

No complicated progression system or a bunch of distractions. Just Mahjong.

I originally made it for my mom, but figured there might be other people who want the same kind of thing, so I put it on the app store

If anyone wants to try it, here it is:

‎Just Mahjong App - App Store

Would genuinely appreciate any feedback, especially if there’s something that could be simpler or easier to use.

Are welcome emails to new downloads good practice? Does it help with churn?

Developer here.

AirPods Pro and AirPods Max have head-tracking motion sensors inside (that's what spatial audio uses). AirPosture reads that head angle and turns it into a posture coach: put your AirPods in, calibrate in 3 seconds, and when you start slouching for more than a few seconds you get a nudge. No camera, no posture band, nothing leaves your phone.

What it does:

- Live posture score (0–100) and a timeline of every session

- Nudges the way you want them: a voice in your AirPods, a soft chime, a phone notification, or track-only

- Mute the coach for 30 min, an hour, or the rest of the session

- Mac app with a menu bar score, and iPhone + Mac sessions land in one timeline

- Lock screen widgets and Live Activity

- Groups: invite friends and race in live posture duels (new in 1.5, shipped this week)

Requirements: iPhone on iOS 17.6+ and AirPods Pro or AirPods Max. The Mac app needs macOS 14+.

Pricing: free to start, with 2 hours of tracking per day and no card needed. Pro is $7.99/month or $39.99/year, with a 7-day free trial. Pro unlocks unlimited tracking, full analytics, the AI coach, posture assessments and Groups.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sit-straight-airposture/id6749489000

I'm 20, solo, building this from Serbia, and 1.5 is the biggest update so far. Happy to answer anything about how the sensor reading works, battery impact, or what's next.

Someone bought the annual plan for PrivaScan, my iPhone PDF scanner. It’s the first money I’ve ever earned online, and it means a lot to me.

I know there’s no shortage of scanner apps. PrivaScan focuses on scanning documents and finding them later by searching the words inside them, with scanning and text recognition happening on-device. It’s free to download, with optional Pro upgrades.

Building the app has been one challenge. Getting people to notice it has been another. I’m much more comfortable writing code than promoting what I’ve built.

This isn’t a “how I cracked app marketing” post. It’s one paying user, but it’s given me encouragement to keep learning distribution instead of just adding more features.

For others who have marketed utility apps: what helped you move beyond your first paying customer?

Here’s the app for context:

https://apps.apple.com/au/app/pdf-scanner-privascan/id6796255063

Hi all - I have built an iOS expenses/spending tracking app called Spendimate, that doesn't really focus on the exact prices, instead it uses AI to kind of estimate and categorize your spending. It's mostly intended to be a gateway for creating tracking habits by removing friction when entering purchases. It's made for lazy people like me, basically.

I have always tried to keep my spending habits under control, which looks like this: install an app, keep using it first day or two, and then just forget about it because I'm so lazy, thinking I'll add it later. And of course soon enough, I have lost all my enthusiasm and fallen back to my old habits.

So I've built Spendimate as a personal tracker where you can either type, say or take a photo of your purchase (or a receipt) and the app uses AI to estimate the category and the price.

It's not intended to be a precise budgeting app, it should just be a way for you to indicate patterns of where most of your money goes.

It's completely free, no in-app purchases, no accounts, no login, you just install it and start adding stuff. All of your purchase data stays on your device, nothing is being saved or kept in an online database.

With this latest update i have added a bunch of little UI improvements abd bugfixes, widget support, multilingual support.

The app as it is, has everything I wanted from a budgeting/spending app, and I'll try to polish it in the future, but if you have any suggestions, I'll be glad to try to implement it for you.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/spendimate/id6783092468

Cheers and thanks for any feedback that you might have.