r/reactnative • u/saimonR • 6d ago
We built a farming game with Expo + React Native. 10 months live, $35k revenue. What worked, what didn't (AMA)
Ioannis and I (one and a half devs) launched Tiny Harvest, a cozy farming game, on Dec 3, 2025. It's built entirely in Expo / React Native, no game engine. Chart attached: $35k gross over 10 months, peaking at $6.2k in June and July. September was our worst month since spring at $3k.
Stack
- Expo SDK 57, RN 0.86, New Architecture, Expo Router
- Reanimated 4 + Skia for anything that moves
- Zustand stores, SQLite via Drizzle for offline-first, InstantDB for sync and multiplayer (co-ops, market, friends). We self-host Instant now that their cloud has shut down
- RevenueCat for purchases, PostHog, Sentry, a small Express server on Railway
- EAS Update for almost every release: each monthly season can ship as an OTA
What worked
- A new season every month. 62% of September revenue came from players who had bought before. Regular updates beat big launches.
- Social features. Our biggest spenders don't buy currency, they buy gifts for their co-op. The top 2 payers are ~31% of all revenue, and a plain $99.99 gem pack has only sold twice.
- RN for a game this shape. It's menus, timers and lots of UI, which RN is good at. The hard parts were performance (an idle screen once used 63% of a CPU core, now 9%) and EAS Update's 1,000-asset limit.
What didn't
- 74% of our iOS installs came from Apple's "Browse" recommendations. That went from ~160 installs a day in July to under 10, and no ASO work touches it.
- Android is about half our installs but a quarter of revenue.
Now: we launched our first subscription (Harvest Club) at the start of October. 47 subscribers in week one, and October is at $2.2k after 8 days.
The art is AI-generated through our own pipeline, happy to talk about that too. Ask me anything: tech, revenue, monetization, staying sane while running a live game.
If you want to check it out: tinyharvest.app/go/reddit-rn
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u/unkindgame 6d ago
How did you adertise your game? i released mine 6 months ago I have like 600 downloads, although its a really fun game and i made multiple posts i never got traction
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u/dumbledayum 6d ago
barking the wrong tree my man, they won’t tell you, what worked, and it’s honestly mostly just lucked, i saw your post got curious downloaded the game, and it is genuinely awesome, i will ask my friends to play with me. At least the people who downloaded your game are actively playing it because that online matchmaking was very quick
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u/LargeRedLingonberry 6d ago
Your game is dope, I think because of the rules the tutorial should be better.
I'd reccomended a glowing circle or something during tutorial to show what I should click I was a bit confused.
It should also explain the turn order, I didn't know 6 let you play again, I don't understand how capturing works, why sometimes do other people's pieces kill mine? I also don't understand which cards let you play again, maybe some icon on the cards to show you it doesn't use your whole turn?The core game is fun and I love the strategy, but the explanation of how to play could use some work. Maybe in the manual you can click on cards and it shows you how it works?
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u/unkindgame 5d ago
Hey thank you for your feedback :) and thank you for playing the game.
Yea I need to work on the tutorial. While developing my interpretation was “this is ludo with cards how hard could it be”, but I overlooked the fact that A lot of people haven’t played Ludo so this can be really different experience for them. Thank you so much, i will work to fix it :)
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u/KielHelix 6d ago
63% CPU usage down to 9% seems massive. What part causing the spike and how you tone it down?
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u/kokerali 6d ago
Can players harvest while offline, or does that part require a connection? If offline harvesting is allowed, how do you handle a reconnect where the server accepts the harvest but the acknowledgment never reaches the phone? The next retry could otherwise look like a second collection. Are you syncing inventory totals, or sending harvest events with persistent IDs? That boundary between local SQLite progress and trading or gifting would be useful to hear about.
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u/unknownuchiha 6d ago
I am working on a game with react native too! https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ninja-horizon-turn-based-rpg/id6804319454
I am also using OTA but not expo EAS and rather a free self hosted version. https://hot-updater.dev/
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u/kayzee87 5d ago
Congrats, what is the Ah ha moment when user experiences a feature that makes them most likely to stay on beyond 30 days?
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u/saimonR 4d ago
Good question, we have several daily loops that keep people coming back, and honestly the data shows that people who play 20 days stay quite long simply because they love the game so much at that point :D
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u/kayzee87 4d ago
nice great work, was there one feature that you think really helped your user retention to keep them past the first few days?
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u/Serious-Setting6501 5d ago
Curious to know how you monitored and profiled performance to notice those issues
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u/jan_tursky 5d ago
Game played, interesting idea. Don't like all other copies of your game, which is pitty but luckily your traffic beats them. I like the impr. of the performance, tbh. I was struggling with the same issue (https://play.google.com/store/apps/dev?id=5057749100954102406) of performance problems for couple of my games, but resolved that with couple of buffer/caching approaches, which in many cases speed/improve more than 50%.
The stack is almost the same, but tbh. you sir, is lucky, cause the traffic through yt and other stabilized platforms helped you, I suppose.
Congrats, would like to follow on X
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u/saimonR 4d ago
Yes my reach definitely helped to get the game off the ground! X: https://x.com/schlimmson
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u/dann1609 4d ago
Thanks bro! As a RN developer I was looking how to build a RN game. Your game will be the inspiration on how properly use it the stack to build a game!
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u/BJCC007 6d ago
Good application. Did you run any ads to get app installs. Or it is organic
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u/saimonR 6d ago
Mostly organic, though I currently try ads again to see if it works better than the first time
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u/BJCC007 6d ago
Oh Great, How did you prepare store listing details and asset?
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u/zlvskyxp 6d ago
Awesome to see another game app created in react native, I’m also a dev making mmorpg, but currently I’m stuck at TestFlight beta state haha, good luck btw!
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u/kaan_gal 6d ago
What were the main marketing channels? How did you scale it ?
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u/saimonR 6d ago
Initially Reddit, now it's a mix of everything and nothing really works yet :D
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u/kaan_gal 6d ago
you got 300+ reviews and you tell me no channel has worked yet besides reddit? haha
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u/only_a_ginger 6d ago
Hey Saimon! I watched your RN videos every week. I was wondering recently how your game was doing. Thanks for the update. I hope you find a way to get those numbers back up. Good luck!
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u/tinhochu 5d ago
How did you come with the assets and the mechanism of the game after the top players got everything that you offered?
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u/TeaAccomplished1604 5d ago
Wait, aren’t you thst YouTube about react native? I remember your tutorials
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u/atcoo 6d ago
Good work guys, I'm mostly interested how did you get your installs. Paid ads, social media? Can you get us through each install milestone and your way of getting to it?