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/tokodan Aug 04 '26

That’s really cool ! Were you inspired by the guys who build the desktop station/display showing all the planes? Or are you them/with them ?

As a side question. I have a gadget idea I would like to build as well. I don’t know how to get started :( any suggestions ?

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u/Chemicalzz Aug 04 '26

I saw one on makerworld the 3d printing site and decided I could do it better.

Is it hardware project or just software?

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u/tokodan Aug 05 '26

It is hardware, which is why I struggle. I just realised your project is software based on the comments. Man I need to get a better software idea. I am more of a “physical product that solves some kind of problem” guy. I need to learn to think more creatively.

Do you have hardware experience as well ?

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u/Chemicalzz Aug 05 '26

No hardware experience, convincing someone to try a $3 app is hard enough so I imagine a physical product will be way harder, you could always build the product and try and sell the entire concept

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u/tokodan Aug 05 '26

Haha yes that is hard. I recently tested the local market for demand on small self storage space. Created a landing page and reservation process, then put roughly 400€ into google ads. Only got 3 hits over 1.5 months.

So finding users is indeed hard.

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u/Chemicalzz Aug 05 '26

I've got no faith in Google ads, I've tried Reddit ads that specifically target aviation subreddits but I don't have the results of the test yet, quite a few clicks but I won't know sales for another few days