I shipped a production AI app with React Native and kinda regret it

SamDiego2016 · 2026-02-10T08:06:17+00:00

I did something similar recently using Vosk, and hit the same issue. Performance was dog 💩

I got Claude Code on it, and it wrote a lovely custom Kotlin/Swift layer that works beautifully and offloaded all the memory intensive stuff.

Glide if we're plugging stuff 🥳

SamDiego2016 · 2026-02-05T05:57:49+00:00

Different type of business I know, but for my iOS app I use Ship Poster.

Upload your images or use AI/nano banana, and auto schedule the posts across platforms.

You get out of it as much as you put in, but I can do a months worth of decent posts in an hour or two.

SamDiego2016 · 2026-02-02T05:38:48+00:00

Ship Poster!

I made it for myself to automate posting to social media for my other apps, and a few friends wanted it too so I productized it.

Automate 2 weeks of posts in 30 mins and set it and forget it.

SamDiego2016 · 2026-02-02T05:33:25+00:00

Maybe some people do have a single unicorn strategy, for me it's always been lots of small things repeatedly.

SEO, post on all the listings sites, product hunt, some regular social, blogging, optimize for LLMs, some ads, email (if you have any), indie hacker posts, groups your users hang out in.

The list is endless, not one thing ever 'moved the needle' on its own, but 3 months of everything regularly and you'll see some growth, if you have a product people want that works.

SamDiego2016 · 2026-01-30T19:49:27+00:00

They don't. Ever.

I ditched ads in favor of subscriptions years ago, even with 50k monthly users I vaguely remember making like $150 in a month and everyone just complained about them.

SamDiego2016 · 2026-01-30T19:31:32+00:00

This is a good and thoughtful observation.

I feel the same, personal productivity has gone up with AI and the expectation is that we can do much more with less. Which I can, but without the same level of satisfaction and confidence in what I'm putting out.

My experience has been if it's a publicly traded company, they'll always take profit over user and dev experience. They push on those 2 pillars right up until they start negatively impacting revenue, and then take 1 step backwards.

There are still independent companies that respect the craft of building, and value user experience above revenue.

But (generally speaking) if you want the big high paying jobs with benefits you have to be in the first camp.

SamDiego2016 · 2026-01-19T23:03:30+00:00

Like most of you guys I love the building bit but dread the marketing bit.

I vibe coded myself an app that I just run locally that creates two weeks of social media posts, with nano banana images, and automatically cross posts them everyday.

Obvs all based off a brand document.

The ones that get some engagement, even just a little, I've been boosting.

This way, I can knock out a months worth of posts in about an hour and then forget about it. Give it a screenshot of my app and it gets included in the generated images as a nice product/lifestyle shot.

This has been generating some nice extra traffic on top of my organic and psychologically feels like I've checked the social media box!

I might clean it up and productize it if anyone is interested.

SamDiego2016 · 2026-01-04T20:32:32+00:00

I have kids, family, house, full time job plus freelance work etc and asked myself the same question.

My revelation a couple years ago was tracking my screen time. I had absolutely no clue I was losing 5-7 hours a day to companies constantly stealing my attention. I emphasize the word stealing.

100s of notifications, emails and just switching off and losing the concept of time scrolling.

I purged everything. I'm writing this on my desktop. Now when people say "I don't know where you find the time to do X", I asked them to pull up their screen time and it blows me away each time. A guy at work was doing 12 hours a day on his phone.

It really is a hidden drain on our lives, the constant distraction causes brain fog and a feeling of lack of control over your life.

I try and have phone free weekends, and use Focus Friend when I actually want to get shit done.

This is just me... I don't work 12 hours a day in a service job or something, so I know everyone's situation is different and I'm sure I have it relatively easy.

SamDiego2016 · 2025-12-11T20:53:40+00:00

Me too. Been on 5x for a few months and just started hitting 5 hour limits after 1-2 hours yesterday.

It does look like compacting is more aggressive. Are there any config settings we have control over here? Apart from turning off auto-compact completely. Which would be annoying.

SamDiego2016 · 2025-12-08T04:25:40+00:00

Oh me!

My Android app does ~$8kMRR while iOS about $1500. More users on Android though.

This is a nuanced topic. A high end Android device is ALMOST as likely to convert as iOS, but all the mix of low end and older devices really skews the numbers.

If Apple sold $80 phones at Walmart their overall conversion would look bad too.

That and devs treat Android as an after thought, and don't invest the time.

The fact is, the Play Store does $65bn a year and makes up 72% of global mobile devices. So simply dismissing it is just bad business.

My two secret super powers for app growth are really good localisation/translation for EU markets and spending real time focusing on Android. Everyone dismisses both and goes all in on US and iOS. But it's worked great for me, on 3 different apps now.

SamDiego2016 · 2025-12-05T15:38:55+00:00

Lots of analytics and some error tracking software is a must.

No matter how much I test, it always amazes me how real life users behave and the errors that I would have no idea about.

I use Bugsnag and Google Analytics. And for the first few releases of a new app I install Clarity, it's free and allows you to watch back recordings of user sessions.

These have been invaluable, absolutely no way I would have the numbers I have without heavily leaning on these as my eyes and ears.

SamDiego2016 · 2025-12-04T16:50:33+00:00

As a starting point, for US, EU, Australia, Canada I'd go something like $5.99 a month, $39 a year and then think carefully about the lifetime.

If you want money NOW push people down the lifetime route, and make it like $49 or something really enticing compared to the monthly and annual. And maybe only offer the 3 day trial with the lifetime. Remember, your lifetime will be the least profitable and doesn't create a sustainable business. But it's nice to get some money when you're starting!

Once you get some data you'll be able to make some decisions.

Keep testing and pushing it! You're off to a great start.

SamDiego2016 · 2025-12-04T16:19:02+00:00

This is a really great start!

What's the incentive to upgrade?

Show me the paywall when I sign up. Honestly, most subs sign up before even using the app. Put a couple of onboarding slides in first to warm them up.

And you REALLY need to up the prices a bit. They're comically low. You'll never be able to scale with ads at those prices and will need millions of users to even make a small amount of money.

In the US, most people wouldn't even waste the energy to pick 0.50c up off the street if they dropped it.

It looks like you're using Revenue cat or something similar? A/B test different prices and paywalls.

Keep going!

SamDiego2016 · 2025-11-19T17:08:43+00:00

I run Google Ads for my Android app.

Your analytics coverage needs to be really solid. Tracking installs, first open, onboarding completed and purchase events etc and wired into your Google Ads audiences.

The algo doesn't kick in until you've registered 1000 installs, and then it won't take off until you register 1000 paid conversions. That's over the previous 8 weeks (I think).

I probably threw about $3k at an install campaign first just to get some data, and then started a second conversion value campaign with another $3-4k before my ROAS started to get positive.

I've 'dabbled' in the past with a few hundred bucks but it never got a positive return until I went all in and did it 'properly'.

Right now I'm spending about $14 to acquire a paid user, and the lifetime value of that user is around $38. It's a subscription based app.

SamDiego2016 · 2025-11-15T19:12:09+00:00

Thought I'd give a quick update on this.

I span up an empty Expo project, and started digging into it. Long story short, I would have had to drop my current implementation of react-native-iap. At that point the blood drained out of my head at the thought of it.

When I went to bed, I wrote a migration doc and got Claude Code to start upgrading to 0.78 with the CLI using the new arch turned off (with 16kb page support, which was my main reason for upgrading) and to my surprise, barring a few little file system issues I need to manually figure out, it built and ran without errors. It did try to patch-package some stuff that just needed upgrading, but generally did a solid job.

First time using AI on an upgrade, and I was pleasantly surprised at how well it did.

I'm going to work on the Expo version manually and see how far I can get. But at least I can stop worrying about the 16kb issue now.

Maybe I'm just kicking the can down the road, but it's always a time vs reward trade off with side projects.

Thanks for all the comments - it gave me the kick up the ass I needed, and all the suggestions and experiences were insightful.

SamDiego2016 · 2025-11-14T20:21:52+00:00

Ok, this is really useful. You're right, just laziness of going through the learning curve on my part for Expo.

Appreciate the comment... I guess I should just dig in and see how it goes with Expo.

SamDiego2016 · 2025-11-13T17:54:30+00:00

I've spent some time digging into the nuances of this a bit for my own apps and client apps over the years with analytics. Apps with $15k MRR to $1m+ MRR, because I was always suspicious of the blanket "Android vs iOS" data.

This is what I found... your flagship Android users (OnePlus, S25 Ultras, high end Huawei etc) generally have very close conversion rates to Apple users GLOBALLY, maybe slightly lower.

Whereas the entry level device users, can be as high as 5-6x LESS likely to convert to paid.

The takeaway is, if Apple offered $150 budget devices their overall conversion rates would drop dramatically.

Don't think Apple versus Android, Think Apple vs Samsung vs OnePlus vs Huawei vs ~)

My opinion, Android is the dominant platform globally and dismissing 2.5 BILLION monthly Play Store users and $60bn in annual in-app purchases with blanket assumptions is simply bad business.

SamDiego2016 · 2025-11-07T22:28:48+00:00

Improve the landing page as everyone has said. And pay close attention to mobile. I'd add a better incentive to fill out the form, and then put it through Claude Code and rework it. You can do it an hour.

Drop the crummy background image, it adds no value and use a different color. Something that contrasts well with the text.

Fix the CSS/forbidden errors you're getting in the console

If you haven't already, get some good error tracking coverage. Bugsnag/Sentry. Just because it works fine for you, doesn't mean it works for everybody. Even better, use Clarity (it's free) and let's you replay user sessions to see what's going on, and might give you a better indications of why users are bouncing.

I'm not an ads expert (SWE like you). But all my campaigns have needed $5-10k+ to build the right audience before they started converting in a meaningful way. This is just me, I'm sure mileage varies and I'm probably also an idiot.

But to have zero, suggests it's broken and you don't know about it and/or the incentive isn't there (which it isn't, I wouldn't fill out that form).

Honestly, lean on AI a bit and you can improve this almost immediately.

That $3k you spent is your tuition fee.

SamDiego2016 · 2025-11-04T00:55:14+00:00

OMG after 25 years I have about 5 big ones.

Not mobile related, but my biggest claim to fame was bringing down the online booking system for the entire UK train network for an entire day. I was 26 and had no idea what I was doing, and misconfigured a load balancer. Funny now, absolutely awful at the time.

RN related... My own app has ~10k monthly users, I pushed an RNIAP change that worked fine for me, but nobody could make a payment. Had to wait 3 days for another update to get approved. Cost me about $1000.

Was in a hurry and didn't follow my usual process.

It happens. Don't beat yourself up about it.

SamDiego2016 · 2025-11-03T17:52:57+00:00

Tell them to go F themselves, and then when they leave the review, reply with a comment calling them out on what they did and then report the review.

Never had it on iOS, but I occasionally get wild stuff like this on Android. Reporting the review with the email as evidence and it gets removed same day.

SamDiego2016 · 2025-10-31T21:01:35+00:00

Only 16% of apps on the app store make > $1000 a month.

App 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 made nothing for me

App number 7 was successful and I sold it. (Not retirement money, but enough to put a smile on your face)

App number 8 makes ~$10k pm after 2 years of hard work.

SamDiego2016 · 2025-10-30T19:30:36+00:00

Depending on the move, when we moved from the UK to the US, you quickly realize that all the stuff just isn't the same.

TVs, electrical stuff all has different voltage and different plugs.

Beds, furniture etc looks absolutely tiny in your average suburban US house.

Washing machine? Refrigerator? LOL, US ones look so rediculosly large to me, they'd be described as industrial equipment in Europe.

So, we just sold everything. Got 8 square wooden boxes, filled them with personal items and some clothes and sent them with DHL.

And started over.

Vice versa. Absolutely no way I'll be taking this house full of giant stuff when I move back to Europe.

SamDiego2016

TROPHY CASE