Finding a mobile app idea - How to do it?
Hi guys to me the most difficult part of building an android apps is coming up with an idea of what to build. To me it feels like there are almost no android apps that I can build that are unique since it feels like almost any android app idea I come up with, someone else has already built it or used my idea. What is your guys advice on this situation especially when I'm trying to build an app with the goal of attracting a lot of users?
Discussion
(3 comments)
3 months agoAndroid Engineer @ RobinhoodWell aren't most popular products like that? Even though they're dominant in their product domain, they weren't really first. Maybe you can look to take an existing app someone else built, see where the issues are, and just built your own version that fixes them?
11 Likes- 3 months agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
Jonathan more or less nailed it - Making better versions of existing apps was exactly my bread-and-butter strategy behind getting 3,000,000+ users on my Android side projects.
Here are the 2 most popular apps I have ever built:
- Random Name Picker (1,000,000+ users) - I built this back in 2015. This was a long time ago, but there were easily 25+ apps already that did something similar when I launched it. I improved on those apps by having no paywall or ads, making the UI cleaner (this was when Material Design was fairly new), and expanding the feature set (e.g. allowing users to maintain multiple lists).
- Random Number Generator (650,000+ users) - I built this back in 2016. Again, a long time ago, but there were easily 50+ apps that did something similar back when I released the v1 of this. And again, I conquered this app space by making the app free/ad-free, making the UI very clean/intuitive, and expanding the feature set.
Another thing you might have noticed: These aren't super complicated apps. You don't need to build something mega-genius to get users: Just build an experience that fulfills a basic need and is pleasant to use.
I actually gave an entire masterclass about how to come up with effective side project ideas here: [Masterclass] How To Come Up With 100k+ Users App Ideas You Can Build For Free
If you still can't come up with an idea and want to follow someone else's, I made a repo of my ideas here (some are outdated though): [GitHub] Software Project Ideas
24 Likes - 3 months agoTech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
There are tons of ideas!!
Don't aim for originality; aim to build something people will use. These 2 are different, and often in tension with one another.
A simple algorithm to follow:
- Take an existing app with 10K+ downloads
- Remove some features
- Remove all ads
Now you've found something which is simple to build and has provable value to at least 10K people. Congratulations :)
(don't pick a marketplace and don't pick anything with a cold-start problem)
10 Likes
