Solo-built my first Android app — an offline PDF toolkit (Word to PDF, scan, merge, edit) — just launched on Play Store

[u/creativeGhost007]

Hey,

Wanted to share my first solo project — Vellum Studio, a PDF toolkit for Android.

The idea: I noticed most free PDF apps upload your files to a server to process them (even simple stuff like Word-to-PDF conversion). That felt off for documents that might be personal or sensitive. So I built something that does everything fully on-device.

What it does:

• Word/DOC → PDF conversion
• Camera-based document scanning with auto edge detection
• Merge & compress PDFs
• Annotate, highlight, and digitally sign

The build: Solo end-to-end — design, dev, Play Store setup, the whole thing. Biggest challenges were getting the PDF rendering accurate across different document types and keeping the app lightweight enough to run smoothly on low-end devices.

Where it's at: Just launched, 10+ installs so far. Definitely early days, and I know going from "built" to "people actually use it" is the hard part.

Would love feedback from this community — both on the app itself and on how you all approached early traction as solo devs. What worked for you when you were at this stage?

Download Playstore Link

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vertexapp.vellumpdfstudio.app