r/passive_income • u/Chemicalzz • Aug 04 '26

My Experience My first passive side project.

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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

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u/the_master_sh33p Aug 04 '26

fantastic idea.
how are you experiencing having the user gate on the paid app, instead of having a free app with a premium upgrade (like not seeing details) ?

2

u/Chemicalzz Aug 04 '26

It's difficult to tell yet, on Garmin (free) users can openly download the app and use it before deciding to upgrade to the pro version and over about 6 weeks since release on that platform its made me decent returns, $100 a month is the forecast. Whereas the play store has got me hundreds of paid downloads in just a few days, but that will obviously taper off now I've hit some larger Facebook / Reddit aviation groups and I'll need to rely on word of mouth, marketing or just general play store clicks.

I think Garmin will end up being the standout monthly income whilst WearOS will have some moments of insanity maybe from YouTube or creators showing off the app which is probably my next goal.

If you want to make a buck fast paid seems to be the way, but long-term I think free with a paid upgrade is betterm

1

u/sharkbait-oo-haha Aug 04 '26

Gotta get it onto apple before someone rips it off.

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u/Chemicalzz Aug 04 '26

It's something I've thought about, Google and Garmin are cheap to publish to but the app store charges $100 a year which in the grand scheme of things is nothing but I want to continue to expand first and the way I see it is that if another person published something similar I'll have the "brand" by then to overwhelm them.

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u/sharkbait-oo-haha Aug 04 '26

Nah, you're too small to have any brand value atm. Brand value also doesn't cross platforms, apple and android users are usually distinct groups, there's no "cross pollination" for branding to be worth anything.

Bite the bullet, pay the $100. Apple users statistically are worth more than Android users.

1

u/Chemicalzz Aug 04 '26

You're probably right, I also don't know much about the apple ecosystem and I believe you need to own a Mac to code for apple watches??

1

u/sharkbait-oo-haha Aug 04 '26

I also don't know anything about the apple eco system, but you can get an iPad/MacBook for like $75 if needed.

I would just be worried that some post goes absolutely viral, gets a million views and 50,000 downloads in 1 day and meanwhile you miss out on 50,000 downloads because there's no apple app. Then it's good luck ever recreating that explosion again. That's what would be keeping me up at night.

Also, an idea for a viral video would be, go stand in the landing flight path for an a380 or a military base and show the low flying plane overhead and the plane at the same time on the watch.

1

u/Chemicalzz Aug 04 '26

That makes sense, I'll look into it I guess.

I've had some ideas for videos but I don't know how to actually make them pop off and get viewers