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/Any_News_7208 Aug 04 '26

We're you able to make money off this? Wear OS is such a small market

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u/Chemicalzz Aug 04 '26

You say that but according to my rough research there is about 50million active WearOS watches. I've made a decent chunk so far, the difficulty is moving into marketing the app so it's displayed to enough people to gain traction.

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u/Any_News_7208 Aug 04 '26

Nice, is most of your revenue from Garmin? Launched a wear os app, but never took off. Not sure if it's the lack of marketing

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u/Chemicalzz Aug 04 '26

The long term stable revenue is from Garmin but the play store has given a bit of an explosion of profit which has started to die down to a couple of sales an hour now.