I just launched my new app which is a habits tracker with a bunch of cool features but i rly don t know how to make people download my app, i m rly bad on that side. Any tips?

Imagine a user opening your app with a clear goal.

But then they face:
• Too many steps to sign up
• Confusing navigation
• Slow loading screens
• Forms asking for unnecessary information

Every extra obstacle gives users another reason to leave.

Here's what to do instead:

✅ Simplify onboarding.
✅ Make important actions easy to find.
✅ Improve app performance.
✅ Remove unnecessary steps from key user journeys.

Good UX isn't just about making an app look beautiful. It's about making the next step obvious.

At Crescent Webs, we help businesses build user-friendly mobile apps and web applications designed around real customer needs.

📩 [info@crescentwebs.com](mailto:info@crescentwebs.com)
🌐 www.crescentwebs.com

💬 What's the first thing that makes you uninstall an app?

Logging food should take five seconds, not five minutes. So I built Grub: you tap the mic and say “two scrambled eggs, a slice of sourdough and a flat white,” and it works out the calories and macros and logs them.

Three ways to log

Built for real eating

See your progress

Speaks your language — log in your own language and Grub converts it to nutrition data. Region settings help it recognise local dishes and accents.

Privacy: no account needed. Your data stays on your phone unless you sign in to sync. You can delete your account from inside the app.

I’m a solo dev, it just went live, and it has rough edges. What I’d like to know:

It’s free during early launch, with a generous daily limit on voice and scans while I watch my costs: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/grub-voice-calorie-tracker/id6795403191

Built with React and Capacitor, Claude for parsing, Whisper for speech. Happy to answer questions about how it works.

astonishingly hard as always

Hi everyone I’m a beginner and want to build my first app but I don’t know where to start. What should I learn first and which tools or languages are best for a beginner? Any advice or free resources would help.

Hey everyone! I'm an indie iOS dev and I just launched PetTalks, a free social network for pets and pet parents.

🐶 Create your pet's profile

📸 Share photos, videos and stories

💬 Chat with other pet parents

📍 Find nearby pets and vets

🏆 Join weekly challenges

🔍 Help lost pets get home

It's still early, so I'd love your honest feedback 🙏

📲 Download free:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pettalks-pet-social-network/id6804202577

Indie iOS dev here. Most apps lose installs on the App Store page, not in the app. The screenshots just don’t sell what the app does.

I’ll do the same for yours, 100% free. Upvote&Comment this post, DM me:
1- App Store link and
2- your email and I’ll send you a new set.

First 25 apps only, so I can give each one real attention.

On 10 October I posted here: $294 on Apple Ads, 57 downloads, 0 paying users. You left 131 comments. I read all of them and rebuilt most of the app. Here's what changed and what the numbers did.

What I changed:

- Onboarding: 15 screens before the price is now 4.

- Price: $39.99 a year is now $29.99 (still 7 days free). Monthly went from $9.99 to $5.99, lifetime from $119.99 to $79.99.

- Name: "Toll: Habits with Proof" is now "Toll: Habit Photos Unlock Apps", so it says what it does.

- Design: the dark purple is gone. It's light now, with a new icon.

- Words: no more "gate". It says exactly what happens: skip the gym and your apps stay locked until you take your photos there.

- Ads: off. Everything below is organic.

- Since then: the app and its store page in 8 more languages, proof without a photo (time at a place like your gym, or steps from Apple Health), and a Winter Arc challenge on the App Store for November.

Before (with ads, 8-10 Oct):

- 25 people started the onboarding, 7 reached the price (28%).

- 1 free trial, cancelled the same day.

After (11-17 Oct, no ads):

- 41 people started the onboarding, 27 reached the price (66%).

- 2 free trials.

- From App Store search: 17 downloads out of 369 impressions (4.6%).

- Revenue: still $0. The first trial that's still running ends on 20 Oct.

What it taught me:

- Ads can't fix a funnel. $294 bought 53 installs and $0.

- Now people who see the page download it. The problem is that few see it: about 60 search impressions a day. So the work now is search ranking and translated pages, not ads.

Thanks to everyone who was blunt with me. If you're like me and scroll when you should be at the gym, here it is, 7 days free:

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6814730604

Happy to share any number from the funnel in the comments.

Start a useful discussion about how teams maintain mobile apps after launch, what work they include, and how they budget for it.

Writing requirements:

- Use conversational, clear English.

- Make it sound like a genuine question, not an article, advertisement, or lead-generation post.

- Do not invent personal experience, an existing app, clients, revenue, or maintenance expenses.

- Do not pretend the author is an independent customer or hide a commercial affiliation.

- Do not mention M TECHUB, agencies, services, websites, or booking calls.

- Include no links, promotional CTAs, hashtags, or requests for DMs.

- Avoid SEO keyword repetition, generic introductions, and exaggerated claims.

- Do not use wording designed to evade moderation.

Content:

- Open with an honest observation: launching an app is only the beginning of the ongoing work.

- Briefly distinguish maintenance—bug fixes, security patches, dependency updates, OS compatibility, and monitoring—from new feature development.

- Ask how people divide responsibility between internal developers, freelancers, and ongoing support arrangements.

- Ask respondents to distinguish engineering/support costs from hosting, third-party APIs, and other operating expenses.

- Invite real monthly or annual spending examples, with currency and enough context to interpret them: platform, app complexity, and support coverage.

- End with one focused question about an unexpected maintenance task or expense.

Cost accuracy:

- Do not invent prices or present a fixed percentage of development cost as a universal rule.

- Invite community examples instead of supplying unsupported benchmarks.

Community fit:

If a subreddit and its rules are supplied, adapt the post to those rules. If the topic is prohibited, explain that instead of disguising it.

Do not promise moderator approval or protection from a ban.

Return only the title and finished post.

I thought I would share my first app launch experience.  It’s called Outgo:  Subscription Tracker. I put out a version 1.0 a few months ago, but I really didn’t consider it finished until my new version 2.0. Version 1 was the phone / iPad app but I didn’t get the Mac companion version done until 2.0, and then I wanted to add a little game in, haha.    Anyhow, I wanted to see what the whole experience was like launching a software app, and it’s been pretty smooth.  The app is free.  No IAP, no tip jar, nothing.  It’ll just be free forever.  I don’t need to make money with it, I just wanted to make a really high quality and safe app. 

This market is crowded with bill/subscription apps and, development went pretty smoothly, and I thought… what is the point of a subscription app that charges you a subscription to use?  Since this isn’t an income source for me I just launched it and didn’t check it again until today when I got an email from someone who has the app and really seems to love it!  They offered a suggestion that I will push through on the next update of a feature I didn’t think of.  It just reached almost 100 downloads! When I went to the App Store I even have 2 copycat apps that took my name, and my original app icon (but not my free price tag)! I think that is a compliment??   If anyone wants to check it out please do, I would love any feedback!

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/outgo-subscription-tracker/id6769302436

My principal problem is to speak and show my face in a video. Its hard for me

Hi
I am not from USA and my app is apparently ranking at the top for Breakup and NoContact (as per 3rd party ASO tools)
But I am not sure how much correct results are shown specially when I check it using VPN

if anyone is from USA, can you please help me know the actual ranking as shown in your phone? it will take just a couple of minutes

Most people I know have downloaded a flashcard app (Anki, Quizlet...) and stopped opening it within a week. The method works. Opening the app is the problem.

So I'm building Pinned around the opposite idea: the main experience is a home screen / lock screen widget. You see a card, tap to reveal, mark it, next card. The app is mostly for managing decks.

Where I am: solo dev, design done, core study loop working in the app, widgets in progress. Not launched, no users yet.

Questions for people who've shipped apps:

1. Is "widget-first" a strong enough hook, or does it sound like a feature, not a product?

2. How would you validate this before launch?

I built and launched a full-scale life management app entirely with AI over the last 10 months. Tonight I asked Claude - who has been my wingman on this project the entire time - whether it would consider my app to be “vibe coded.” Here was the response:

“‘Vibe coding’ in the pejorative sense refers to someone prompting an AI to generate an app in an afternoon with no real understanding of what’s under the hood, no testing, no iteration, and no genuine product thinking. The result is usually something brittle, insecure, and thrown together.

What you actually did is different in several meaningful ways. You had a product vision that existed for over ten years before a single line of code was written. Every feature started as an idea you identified, and we’d work through the logic, user experience, and edge cases in detail before a single prompt went to Cursor. You set up and managed the database, integrated the APIs, configured the payment infrastructure, and handled every App Store submission yourself. When something broke, we diagnosed it and iterated — sometimes through many cycles before it was right.

The development happened over nine months with extensive testing, a beta program with real users, bug tracking, and structured project management. You understood what you were building at a product and experience level deeply enough to make real decisions about it. You used AI as a development tool the same way a founder might use a contractor — directing, reviewing, refining, and owning the outcome.

The security concerns around vibe-coded apps are legitimate — someone who doesn’t understand their own codebase can’t identify vulnerabilities or make informed decisions about data handling. The question is whether that describes you and your app, not whether AI was involved in writing code.”

Curious what this community thinks. Is there a meaningful distinction here or is AI-assisted development AI-assisted development regardless of the process behind it?

Hey everyone!

I'm an indie developer, and I recently built Capylift, an iOS workout app that uses AI to generate personalized workout plans, coach you through your workouts, and check your exercise form for supported exercises.

One design decision I'm genuinely unsure about is the app's identity.

I added a cute capybara mascot to make the experience feel more friendly and less intimidating, especially for beginners. But I'm wondering if that makes the app feel less serious or professional as a fitness tracker.

I'd love to hear your honest opinions:

• Do you prefer fitness apps with a friendly mascot, or do you prefer a clean, serious, data-focused design?
• Would a capybara mascot make you more interested in using the app, or would it put you off?
• What would you expect from an app like this that would make you actually stick with it?

I'm not here to claim it's better than existing apps. I'm still figuring out what works, and genuine feedback would help me a lot.

Thanks!

I started on CoinCurrently with less than 1 year of experience. iOS 14 had just come out, SwiftUI was brand new, and Home Screen widgets were one of the new features.

I figured I’d try to make a couple of widgets and see what happens. I made a few to track cryptocurrencies and posted about it on Reddit. The post got almost 300 upvotes, which I thought was pretty awesome, so I decided to make a whole app, native for both iOS and Android.

Everything I built in the app was for myself—because I wanted to learn and because it was fun to experiment. It seems like people appreciated what I built.

The app peaked at #99 in the Finance category on the App Store and reached 500 daily users. Not too bad for a hobby project!

After 6 years, I’ve achieved more than I could ever have imagined, but my motivation for this project has died down. Because of this, I have open-sourced the two projects so other people can learn from my struggles and take inspiration for their own apps.

The app will continue to be maintained, though there won't be as many new features as before. I have moved on to another project that I am very excited to share in a few weeks.

The app is available on the App Store and Google Play:

• iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/coincurrently-private-crypto/id1543974454
• Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cryptium.coincurrently&hl=en_US

And now it's also on GitHub:

• iOS: https://github.com/orre1996/CoinCurrently-iOS
• Android: https://github.com/orre1996/CoinCurrently-Android

I'm a solo developer building an iOS health/fitness app with Apple Watch support. I've mainly marketed it through Reddit so far, and I'm now moving from a free release toward a paid version.

My saved dashboard snapshot from 18 October shows:

- 44 first-time downloads in the tracked period (17 September–17 October), provisional.

- 23 downloads in the latest recorded 24-hour window (17–18 October, Berlin time).

- 8,372 cumulative views across 19 Reddit posts, one of which was removed.

That doesn't mean Reddit caused all 44 downloads. I don't have reliable post-to-install attribution, and Apple's download reporting is delayed. The attached image is from my own manual dashboard, not a Reddit conversion report.

I've also tried organic content, but it hasn't worked well so far. I want to work on ASO next. I have about $100 in Apple Ads starting credit and can put in around $200 of my own money at the absolute maximum.

With that small a budget and an upcoming free-to-paid change, what would you test first: App Store positioning/screenshots, a tightly scoped Apple Ads keyword test, or more organic content? What would you measure before deciding whether to spend more?

I'd especially appreciate examples of organic content formats that have worked for small consumer apps, and how you tested them without a big audience.

We're launching an iPhone nutrition app soon, and pricing is the decision I feel least qualified to make. Our current thinking is a free trial, then a monthly and a yearly plan, roughly in line with similar apps. For those who've been through it: - Did you start higher or lower than where you ended up? - Hard paywall after a trial, or a free tier with limits? - How long did you wait before testing a different price? Numbers welcome if you're happy to share.

I don't want my apps sending a notification just because someone hasn't opened them lately.

A reminder about an unfinished task has a clearer purpose. But the tap matters too: if it drops someone on the home screen and makes them hunt for the item, I've only done half the job.

For reminders I add, I want a direct path to the relevant item, and a sensible explanation if it's already completed or deleted.

That's the flow I'd test before spending time on clever notification copy.

My app was stuck at 10+ downloads for months, and suddenly jumped to 100+ very recently. I had done absolutely nothing for months and when I checked back, it hadn't stayed at stagnant. This has given me a lot more hope in my app, but now I feel stuck again. I truly believe in my app's quality, but I don't know how to get it out there to reach thousands of downloads. I appreciate any tips that you guys might have. Thanks.

I've recently been delving into creating my own apps, and I am currently creating one that tracks trades and stock markets and learns from them and builds on itself and what its learned, I've put about 30 hours into building this engine and only had it run simulations on stocks and future stocks so I don't have to spend any real money until it proves that it is profitable. Is anyone else out there trying anything like this? My application is currently locked with an access key until I feel its completed, but id like to know if anyone else is doing something similar to this?

I’m building a receipt/grocery-spending app, which is a hard thing to get anyone excited about. So I 'm trying a small browser game as the entry point. No Login - just a free to enter nickname and a highscore.

Setup:

Runs directly on the website.

The game mechanic is the app’s core idea (playing with receipts/prices), so players get the concept without reading a feature list

Challenge-a-friend + share buttons (WhatsApp, FB, X, Telegram), each tagged via query param so I can see track the channels

A soft link to the app after a round. No popup, no gate

I only had very limited feedback (with 2-3 users) so far -

It has been fairly positive, and people play more than one round (around 3 usually)

The open question is conversion: game → app install is completely unknown to me

Questions for people who’ve tried something similar:

Did a game or interactive demo ever beat a plain landing page + video for installs, or did it just bring in players who never convert?

Does the game need to teach the app’s core action to convert, or is “fun + brand” enough?

Weekly challenges/leaderboards: worth the upkeep for a solo dev?

Happy to share my numbers again in a few weeks if it’s useful.

For context, this is the game (browser, no signup): https://bonstructer.com/en?src=reddit-appbusiness#spiel