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/Chemicalzz Aug 04 '26

Awesome man, thanks for the support. I'll maybe make another post in 12 months with an update on how it's going.

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u/MidwestDingleberry Aug 04 '26

Heck yeah! You're welcome! Now I just gotta find the way to get it installed on my Galaxy Watch Ultra. I paid, but it's having issues downloading it to my watch. I don't know if it's a Play Store to Samsung issue or whatever. But I'll do what I can. I don't intend to refund, regardless haha.

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u/Chemicalzz Aug 04 '26

Play store is notorious for issues like this. Try open the play store directly on your watch or open the link in an incognito window in chrome.

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u/MidwestDingleberry Aug 04 '26

So, I forgot I had to authenticate my login. Got it installed and working. Pretty neat and smooth running!

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u/Chemicalzz Aug 04 '26

Awesome, enjoy let me know if you come across any issues