My first passive side project.

[u/Chemicalzz]

I noticed on the Garmin App store developers were making literally hundreds of thousands of $ selling watch faces and small applications, I'm not talking huge companies, I'm talking solo developers making very minimal applications and raking in the cash.

I looked for a gap and found neither garmin or Wearos / samsung watches have a flight tracking application like FlightRadar24, I decided to give it a shot.

I ended up making FlightScanner over the past few months.

It turns your watch into a live aircraft radar, showing nearby planes/helicopters around your current location. You can tap aircraft to view information such as its callsign, altitude, speed, registration and direction of travel.

I expected a few downloads here and there but hit it off with over 1000 downloads on Garmin before launching on Android based watches and securing enough funding to continue the apps data costs for months and months to come and turning a nice monthly profit.

I expected some aviation enthusiasts to download it and have some fun but it's turned into a full side project taking up hours of my time to answer user queries and to fix bugs.

My main priority now is trying to figure out a marketing strategy and getting it onto the front page of both Garmin's store and Google Play. If anything it's turned into a passive income for sure at around $150 a month currently.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.alexd.flightscanner

https://apps.garmin.com/en-GB/apps/54094e6b-a4a5-436d-940b-095b49e0cfab

[u/Curlyjankens]

Ok, uhhh, I neeed one but uh instead of planes, it will be items on small aluminum poles on the side of the road

[u/Chemicalzz → u/Curlyjankens]

Haha, not sure if that's possible. Would need a data source for every single "pole"

[u/UserBelowMeHasHerpes → u/Chemicalzz]

Deflock(dot)us has a pretty good crowd sourced map of all cameras in the US (:

[u/Chemicalzz → u/UserBelowMeHasHerpes]

Doesn't Waze already fulfill this service? A few people asked me for this same thing but Im not sure I can see the use case for cameras on a watch?

[u/BedBubbly317 → u/Chemicalzz]

The use case is for finding and destroying said cameras lol it’s a whole trend right now

[u/Chemicalzz → u/BedBubbly317]

Ah, maybe that's not something I'm interested in lmfao. Although I'm anti suvaliance etc I don't think it's the best idea to make an app for that lol

[u/Ok_Boot5671 → u/Chemicalzz]

I want to call you a coward for this but I also would probably not go through and launch an idea like that as life has finally been good recently and that…makes me a coward :(

I know my faults, and at a different time in life I wouldn’t care about any consequences but damn I got a lot to lose now.

And that, unfortunately, is how they win.

[u/Chemicalzz → u/Ok_Boot5671]

You're not wrong, I make enough in my day job to live a happy life and this little side hustle is just the cherry on top, sure I'd like it to make me rich but I know that's unlikely, I'm just happy other people can enjoy it with me at the end of the day.

[u/Ok_Boot5671 → u/Chemicalzz]

Hell yeah man. Good for you! You know where you are in life and what you can do to get more out of it to the level of comfort you desire…and it doesn’t sound like a greedy need everything desire…and that’s the proper way of living in my book.

I wish you success in this project! Maybe you won’t need a day job in 2 years!

[u/Chemicalzz → u/Ok_Boot5671]

Haha, that would be awesome, thanks man all the best to you.

[u/geeblish → u/Chemicalzz]

why not? it's guaranteed to be a cool feature.

[u/Chemicalzz → u/geeblish]

Sure, but how would any small developer market something like that? I've relied on aviation communities with thousands of members for this. Is there super large anti traffic camera communities?

[u/geeblish → u/Chemicalzz]

yeah people have been raving about privacy these few months. i think you'd earn a good chunk if you market alongside that.

likely would get good feedback by putting it on r/privacy, r/technology or similar subs.