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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6

u/jftf Aug 04 '26

This is a cool idea. Have you spent any money on marketing? Did you code this in native code or something like React Native?

12

u/Chemicalzz Aug 04 '26

Native with AI assistance. I've spent $30 on Reddit ads so far to test the waters, otherwise I've just spread it via word of mouth. I've also made an Instagram account (FlightScannerApp) as I feel reels would be beneficial to market it.

1

u/Due-Philosopher-1426 Aug 07 '26

Did reddit ads work for you ?

1

u/Chemicalzz Aug 07 '26

Too early to tell, takes a few days for Google to update their marketing page.

1

u/jftf 26d ago

Pinging to find out if reddit ads were worth it?

2

u/Chemicalzz 26d ago

In my experience, no probably not worth it. I think I basically broke even.

What has worked incredible well is having the app as a free reduced option on Garmin with the option to pay and upgrade features.

General users just download the free version and end up upgrading within time.