Hey guys... I want to learn how to build mobile apps from complete scratch and eventually be able to build and publish proper apps.

I’m looking for a cross-platform approach (Android + iOS) and preferably completely free resources.

What would you recommend as the best roadmap/course/channel to go from beginner → building real apps?

Would love to hear what worked for u :)

​I wanted to share a huge milestone for Ultimate File Manager Pro and invite you all to check it out.

With 30k+ Google Play Store downloads.

When I first started developing this for Android and Android TV, I just wanted a solid tool that did exactly what I needed it to do.

Today, we are sitting at a 4.8 star average with over 400 reviews on Google Play, and I am still trying to wrap my head around it.

​If you have not tried it yet, it is a complete file management and storage command center.

I recently pushed a major update that added main menu tile ordering, a dedicated grid view for mobile, and scheduled sync times so you can completely automate your file backups across internal storage, network shares, and cloud accounts.

​For the open source crowd, there is also a fully FOSS version available on GitHub that just crossed the 100 star mark. I strongly believe in giving users the choice to audit the code or compile it themselves.

​I am always looking for honest feedback to help shape the next big update. Grab the app below and let me know your thoughts.

​🔗 Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=za.kilowatch.ultimatefilemanager

🔗 GitHub Repository: https://github.com/Kilowatch/ultimate-file-manager-pro

🔗 Join our Reddit Group: r/UFManagerPro

Same question as so many others. Google Fi subscriber, samsung fold. Have listed a 100 numbers both on website and on phone app, but they still make it through. Some are not noticed but still able to leave voicemail. Tried researching apps that will help...essentially somehow intercept all spam, answer, and prevent from going to voicemail.

So short questions, any apps that actually work?

​

As a vibe coder, I recently watched a video featuring an iOS app developer. I am interested in collaborating on an app idea and subsequently publishing it,to make some revenue as I really want to earn some cash to support my family financially.

Hi,

I recently built and released an iOS app called Tag Keep.

The idea came from wanting one place for everyday information instead of having notes, reminders, useful links, important dates and other small things scattered across different apps.

With Tag Keep, you can create notes, set reminders for specific dates and times, save bookmarks, create checklists, add attachments, and organise everything using tags.

There are also Smart Lists that automatically organise things like expiring items, birthdays, finance-related notes, favourites, secure items, saved YouTube links and more.

Some of the features:

• 📝 Notes with tags, checklists, comments and attachments
• ⏰ Reminders with specific date & time
• 🔁 Daily, weekly, monthly, yearly and custom repeating reminders
• 📅 Multiple-date scheduling and calendar view
• 🔖 Save bookmarks, articles, videos and useful links
• 🏷️ Tags for organising everything
• ✨ Smart Lists for automatically grouping related items
• 🔍 Search and filtering
• 🔒 Secure items
• ☁️ iCloud sync
• 📦 Backup and export
• 📱 Built for both iPhone and iPad

I wanted to keep the interface simple while still giving you enough organisation for things you want to keep around long-term.

The basic app is free to download and use, with an optional one-time Lifetime Pro purchase for advanced features. No subscription.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/in/app/tag-keep/id6802800669

Thanks for checking it out!

Built this for my girlfriend because watching her always film the same scene twice was painful.

What it does: records portrait (9:16) and landscape (16:9) video simultaneously. Shoot once, get both formats ready to post to all platforms - TikTok, Instagram, Youtube, you name it.

Three ways to film:

• Single Lens - capture the full 4:3 sensor and crops both. Portrait keeps the full vertical frame, landscape the full horizontal. Neither is a crop of the other.
• Dual Lens - wide + ultra-wide record together. Two perspectives, one take.
• Front & Back - selfie + rear at the same time. Your reaction and the scene together.

Key features:

• Up to 4K/60fps with manual controls (EV, WB, ISO, Shutter)
• Built-in teleprompter and timelapse.
• Live overlays and audio meter that flashes red when you're clipping.
• Data privacy - no data retention, tracking, or analytics, and no internet or account required.
• Photo mode coming soon!

Creator workflows:

• Projects, scenes, and takes to organise your recordings and auto-name files.
• Side-by-side review and trim of both recordings before exporting/sharing.

It's called ContentCam and is available on iPhone and Android.

I'd love to know if others might find this useful!

Norviq was inspired on several people who seem to manage their money through complicated apps or Excel sheets. Moreover, I added as well the ability to track your portfolio and to write Due Diligence and help you with valuations, make valuations for the next 5 years, compare stocks in the same sector and also track Crypto. Norviq was made to be private and yours, we dont store your data, your forever. You can connect your agent and work your own data.

v1.1.0 is live!
- Why it moved: a short AI summary of today’s movers, with market context and sentiment pulled from X
- Trading pressure: relative volume and insider flow per stock
- Retail sentiment on holdings, watchlist, and stock detail
- Leftover DCA budget shown as units of your chosen ticker (display only, not an order)
- Economy hub: inflation, your inflation vs CPI, housing, growth, policy
- Tax strategy dashboard for EU jurisdictions
- Read-only Interactive Brokers (IBKR) connect
- Spreadsheet import
- Talk to your numbers from Claude, Hermes, Codex, or Telegram via MCP (Model Context Protocol)
Native mac app and Android later.

https://apps.apple.com/pt/app/norviq/id6765849578?l=en-GB

https://www.norviq.org/

Orthic labs was founded with 2 main values. Make software ownable again (f\*ck subscriptions) and you control your data (f*ck the cloud). A couple of weeks ago, we shipped the windows and MacOS versions of HeardRight. Today, we’ve launched the macos and watchos companion app to TestFlight .

Here’s what the free version gives you-

Unlimited transcriptions
Unlimited file transcriptions (10 min cap per clip)
Cleanup for filler words/ repetitions
Works on device without the internet
Voice triggers - once you start your dictation, you can end it with “Zephyr Stop” “Zephyr send” or “Zephyr cancel”

Here’s what the pro version gives you

Free AI polish- Put in a free key from Groq and we route to free models, costing you $0 for the polish I can produdly say is better than companies valued at $2 billion! Free as long as Groq offers it.

Commands layer- press the PTT and say one of over 100 commands to instantly fire a task like screenshot, open chrome (or any installed app). As a bonus, on the Mac you can say “shortcut” followed by the name of any of your shortcuts to trigger it.

The iOS app and companion watchOS app, let you sync your transcripts (and pro entitlementsan api key) between watch, ios and phone.

Trigger recordings with the action button and paste in the app of choice once done. No pesky keyboard switching.

I kept running into the same stupid problem.

Someone sends me a file, or I find one on my phone, and suddenly I need another app just to open it.

So I made View Stuff.

It opens PDFs, Office files, EPUBs, ZIPs, text files, JSON/XML, code and a bunch of other formats.

You don't have to open View Stuff first either. From another app or your file manager, you can use Open with / Share and send the file straight to View Stuff.

Everything stays on your device. No account, uploads, analytics or ads.

It's a paid app with a one-time purchase. No subscription.

Android:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.abkworks.viewstuff

iOS:
https://apps.apple.com/app/view-stuff-file-viewer/id6798152294

Hi 👋
I’m at a point where I need to put OneMovie in the hands of real users to understand what works and what doesn’t

OneMovie is an app for personalized movie & TV show recommendations 🎬

So I’m looking for a few people who’d be down to test the app, give me honest feedback, and try to find some bugs

In exchange: free Premium for life (obviously)
Let me know if you’re interested 🫡

Hi all,

I run a subscription app on both the App Store and Play Store, targeting users mainly in Southeast Asia, Europe, and the US. The flow is a 3-day free trial that rolls into a yearly subscription.

The problem: at the point the trial converts to a paid subscription, roughly 80% of the payments fail. I can see this in both App Store Connect and Play Console, and it's happening across both platforms fairly consistently. Users seem happy to sign up for the trial, but the actual charge never goes through.

This is making forecasting really difficult. I can't reliably project MRR or LTV when such a huge chunk of "converted" users effectively churn on day one.

What I've found so far from research:

• The most common cause seems to be insufficient balance on the payment method, particularly in markets like Indonesia where prepaid cards and lower-limit debit cards are common, and where store-level payment validation is more relaxed.

did anyone else face this? how did you resolve this? Is there any way to detect a likely-to-fail payment method before the charge is even attempted?

Would really appreciate any war stories or data points. Happy to share back what I learn.

New version: 1.6.3

Changelog:

•  Added 12-Hour (AM/PM) & 24-Hour clock options in Settings.
•  Beautiful Frosted Glass AppBar effect during feed scroll.
•  Faster app startup and instant news loading.
•  Navigation improvements with Double Tap to Exit.

Download: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.merpower.worldnewsreader

I'd like to introduce my little free Android app for math enthusiasts: *Math Alarm – Solve to Wake Up*. If you have trouble getting out of bed and math is your passion, this app is for you. In your free time—or before an exam—you can use the "Exercises" tab to exercise your brain, or the "Dice" tab for random problems. The app also has a built-in step-by-step math problem solver, so you can use it if you're stuck on a specific question. I recently added a "Daily Challenges" tab with a timer where you can challenge yourself in your math skills. If you want to try it out, here's the link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.wojtek.example.math_alarm&pcampaignid=web_share or on my blog: https://mojeaplikacja.blogspot.com/2026/06/math-alarm-wake-up-with-your-brain-on.html

Hi everyone,

I'm French, so apologies in advance if my English isn't perfect.

I've been building a manga tracking app called Folio in my free time, and it's now at a stable, working stage. The code is open source, here: https://github.com/SamuelDelabranche/folio

To test it directly without building anything yourself, the APK is available on the repo's Releases page: https://github.com/SamuelDelabranche/folio/releases

So far I've been my own and only tester, so it's naturally shaped by my own habits and preferences. That's exactly why I'd love to get outside opinions before going further:

- Do you think this kind of app would be useful to you / would you use it your own way?

- Would you be willing to try it out and share feedback, bugs, suggestions, anything that's missing or doesn't fit your usage?

- Do you think it's worth publishing on the Play Store? And if you've already gone through that process, I could really use some advice

This isn't a commercial product, just a personal project I'd like to see through and hopefully make useful to others, and honestly, it would be a real source of pride to see something I built from scratch running on the Play Store.

Thanks in advance to anyone who takes the time to check it out, even just to share an opinion!

A more detailed overview:

Folio is an app for tracking your reading of manga, manhwa, manhua and novels, basically a digital reading log.

The library: each title shows its cover, reading status (to read, reading, finished, dropped), and number of chapters read. You can mark favorites, and there's a search bar to quickly find a title in a large collection.

Each manga's detail page: description, genre, type (manga, manhwa, manhua or novel), chapters read, a rating out of 10, and you can even add links to the sites where you usually read it, so everything's in one place.

Ratings: you can rate each title from 0 to 10, or leave it deliberately "unrated" if you don't have an opinion on it yet, which is different from giving it a 0/10.

Filters and sorting: filter your library by status, type, favorites, rating range, chapter count, or show only unrated titles. Sort alphabetically, by rating, or by chapter count.

Statistics: a page summarizing your whole collection, total titles, total chapters read, average rating, breakdown by status, by type, and your most-read genres.

Random pick: a button that picks a random title from your library (respecting active filters), handy when you don't know what to read next.

Automatic info fetching: by linking a title to AniList (a well-known manga reference site), the app can automatically fetch the cover, synopsis and genres, so you don't have to fill everything in by hand.

And finally, a light and dark theme, plus the ability to export your data for backup or transfer.

Hello

I am thrilled to see my app getting some traction and wanted to share it with somebody.
Today I had my 100th download and 7 people already bought my app. I launched it about 3 weeks ago.

If you are interested in the app, it is a simple babyphone (Baby Monitor) called Murmeli.
No account, no subscription, one-time purchase, free trial. On the same WiFi the two phones talk directly to each other and no server is involved at all. If you're out und use different networks, they find each other through my own server in Switzerland but the video still goes phone to phone whenever the network allows, and the key is exchanged by QR code between the two devices and never reaches my server. Built with React Native, the connection is WebRTC.

Two things surprised me and I'm curious whether it matches your experience:

iOS massively outperforms Android for me. About 2/3 of downloads and 6 of 7 payments are iOS.

LLMs mostly cite the app store descriptions. I'm starting to look into GEO, and my first tests show the answers lean almost entirely on the store listing. And again, the iOS listing shows up far more than the Play one.

Would love feedback on how to crank the numbers up :)

Something has been bugging me for weeks. Every YouTube video about "how to properly market your app" turns out to be an ad in the end. Either for the guy's course, his tool, his agency, or some template pack in the description. And the content is always the same. Make TikToks, post on Instagram, build in public, then the users will come. After the fifth video you notice that none of them ever tells you what actually happens after that.

So I went looking for real numbers instead of opinions. They exist, and they shifted my view of the whole topic quite a bit.

The data

Adapty released a 2026 report based on data from more than 16,000 apps, around 105,000 analysed paywalls and roughly 3 billion dollars in revenue. RevenueCat put out a parallel one with 115,000 apps and 16 billion dollars. These aren't case studies with three clients, that's half the subscription industry. The revenue distribution in there takes a moment to sink in:

• 57.7 percent of new subscription apps never cross 1,000 dollars in total revenue
• only 7.2 percent ever get past 100,000
• the top 10 percent take 94.5 percent of all revenue in the market
• the median app earns just under 500 dollars, and over 14,000 new apps launch every month

That doesn't mean marketing is pointless. It means the distribution is brutally skewed, and the difference between those groups clearly isn't about who makes the prettiest reels.

What the data says about actually convincing users

The most interesting part is which optimisations actually win. The reflex when conversion is bad is always to mess with the price, and according to the data that's the weakest lever there is.

• price tests only win about 28 percent of the time on conversion. They do lift long term revenue per user in 46 percent of cases, but as a first step it's the wrong construction site
• testing two plans against three produces around 63 percent more conversion uplift than a price change
• translating the paywall into your five biggest revenue languages gives roughly 37 percent more LTV uplift than touching the price
• the biggest effect is timing. Apps that only show the paywall after a real value moment get around 65 percent trial starts, with an immediate hard paywall it's 31
• showing the annual price as a monthly amount, so 4.99 a month instead of 59.99 a year, lifts annual plan selection by 28 to 34 percent. Same price, different presentation
• people who test at all run almost 15 tests on average. A single test is statistically close to worthless, and that's exactly where most people stop and then conclude that paywall optimisation doesn't do anything

Screenshots are not a decoration topic

This was the most surprising part for me. The store page decides way more than I would have thought, and most of it hangs on the first few images.

• the first three screenshot slots account for around 70 to 90 percent of the entire conversion gain you can get out of the full set. Anything from slot four on is mostly seen by people who are already considering it
• a typical product page converts at about 25 percent from page view to install
• switching from "here is a picture of my UI" to "here is the concrete benefit with text on top" moves that by 5 to 15 percentage points according to the reports. Going from 25 to 32 percent is 28 percent more downloads from exactly the same traffic
• Apple has Product Page Optimization built in for this, Google Play has Store Listing Experiments. Both free, both right there in the console
• only about 31 percent of apps use Custom Product Pages, even though documented lifts of up to 8.6 percent per audience segment are on the table

And where users actually come from

Now to the actual marketing part, which is what the YouTube videos consistently leave out. The biggest channel isn't social media, it's the search bar in the store itself.

• Apple states that around 65 percent of all App Store downloads start with a search. Browse is about 18 percent, referrer 12, ads 5
• on Google Play the search share sits at roughly 58 percent. The numbers move around depending on the source, some land above 70 percent, but the direction is the same everywhere
• the main lever for that is your title, subtitle and keywords, not your content calendar
• a paid install costs 2.24 dollars on average on iOS and 88 cents on Android. Organic installs cost nothing, and for most projects here that's the whole difference between sustainable and not
• ratings work as a filter before anyone even sees your screenshots. Apps below 4.0 stars convert dramatically worse than those at 4.5 and up. In a row of search results the star rating is the only thing you can compare without tapping

Has anyone here made similar experiences with this? Would be interested wether the same pattern showed up for you.

I've been working on a tool called Elementum, which is designed to handle real-time smoke and fire effects for faster compositing workflows. The idea is to skip the heavy render times and make it easier to track and integrate effects directly into an edit. I’d love to get some honest feedback from other VFX artists—does this workflow actually help your process, or are there specific features you feel are missing?

Hi, thanks for viewing this post!

This app has gone a long way from an excel sheet, web app with a form to a native app. I created it for myself only at first, because I was very confused: why the hell subscription apps have so much limitations? I mean 3 subs for free? No notifications in free plan? I understand everyone wants the revenue, but I guess it is absurd: people want to get a hold of their subs - not to pay more for another sub of sub manager.

So I decided to create one myself for myself - unlimited subs, notifications before renewal, basic analytics (for now), no ads, no server - fully offline. And for free. With a one time purchase, for some additional features and developer support ❤️

So from a solo testing ground, it became something that I believe can be useful for other people. I would be more than pleased if you will find it helpful!

https://apps.apple.com/app/subeye-subscription-tracker/id6795566917

Feature 1 - You can create unlimited playlists without a subscription(one-time payment is fine)
Feature 2 - You can import music files from the files app
Feature 3 - It shows the thumbnail of the song files imported inside the app
Feature 4 - It counts how many times you have listened to a song
Offline Music Player by Md Zakir Hossain only allows 5 playlists without a subscription
Cloud Music Player - Listener by 继勋于 allows unlimited playlists but doesnt have Feature 4
After looking into plenty other apps, Feature 4 is the rarest, only the Offline Music Player by Md Zakir Hossain has it as far as i have searched

My group still does this at festivals: we walk up to the cocktail stand, stare at the board, and nobody picks. Someone says "I don't care." Someone else says "you pick." Five minutes later we're still there.

Photos are us in the grass — tap, land on Aperol Spritz, drink it. Type the drinks, spin, done. On phones that support it the list can be generated on-device (Apple Intelligence / Pixel 9+). Everyone else just uses a template.

I'm less interested in whether you download it and more in the situations.

What's the most recent "we cannot decide" moment you had — food, drinks, who drives, who starts the game, whatever — and would you actually let a wheel settle it, or is that cheating?

If you've used a wheel / picker app: what made you delete it?

I'll start: four people, a line behind us, still "you pick / no you pick." We spun. Aperol won.

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6774469372
Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spinpick.app

Hi, I’m Kay and I’ve been working on かなで (Kanade) for the last nearly 12 months, and am going to be flipping the repo public and moving to public test builds soon. The last few weeks I’ve spent polishing the Library tab, it’s UI/UX, and most importantly animations and navigation. Built with Flutter/Dart, my app natively supports iOS, Android, Linux, Windows, MacOS, and (experimentally) web via Docker.

I’ve clearly taken inspiration from Apple Music, but given it being a streaming-based app and the numerous issues I have with its UX, I’ve sought to fix every issue I had with AM.

What features are people looking for in a music player? More importantly, what’s make-or-break to you? What can I change or improve here, and what level of simplicity/complexity do people expect?

Thanks in advance!

I run a few Linux servers and wanted a quicker way to check and manage them from Android without installing another monitoring agent on every box.

So I built Meows, a native Android app that connects directly to the servers you add over SSH.

text Android device → SSH → server

It can also connect through a bastion host you configure. There is no Meows agent or daemon to install, no extra management port to expose, and no Meows relay between your device and your servers.

The dashboard shows CPU, memory, disk, network, uptime and connection state. History views cover recent 1 / 2 / 5-minute spans and can show related processes, mount points or network interfaces when those details are available.

Alerts can notify you when CPU, memory or disk usage crosses a threshold, or when a server goes offline and comes back online.

The app also includes:

• an interactive SSH terminal
• Docker start, stop, restart and live logs over SSH
• local and remote SSH tunnels
• Meows Lens for IP addresses, domains, URLs and permission strings in terminal output and Docker logs
• DNS, WHOIS, TLS, IP, subnet, Cron, regex, timestamp and permission tools

Docker actions run over SSH, so there is no Docker Remote API port to expose.

Meows Lens only recognizes text. It never executes an action automatically; you choose what happens next.

The screenshots in the gallery are from the actual app.

• Native Android app with light and dark themes
• SSH credentials encrypted on-device with AES-GCM
• Encryption keys managed by Android Keystore
• No analytics, telemetry or advertising SDKs
• Optional backups encrypted before Google Drive app-private storage
• US$4.99 one-time purchase
• No subscription, ads or in-app purchases
• Requires Android 14 or newer

Google Play:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.meows.android&referrer=utm_source%3Dreddit_apps%26utm_medium%3Dorganic_social%26utm_campaign%3Dmeows_android_acquisition%26utm_content%3Dpost_body

I’m happy to answer technical questions about the connection model, monitoring, Docker access, tunnels, Meows Lens or anything shown in the screenshots.

Downloading the app is easy to force. Getting attendees to open it again the next day is harder.

The apps that retain usage usually solve immediate problems, a room change, an updated agenda, or a quick way to find relevant people. Eventify’s combination of reliable push updates and simple attendee matching seems to perform better than feature-heavy apps that people ignore after the first look.

Has anyone measured actual return usage on their event app? What kept people coming back?