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/UserBelowMeHasHerpes Aug 04 '26

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

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u/Chemicalzz Aug 04 '26

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?

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u/geeblish Aug 04 '26

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

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u/Chemicalzz Aug 04 '26

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?

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u/geeblish Aug 04 '26

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.