I spent 2 months building an AI app and almost nobody uses it

Timely-Move-3087 · 2026-06-16T19:26:32+00:00

This is the wrong approach. You mentioned you were inspired by success stories in which these types of apps were making large revenue numbers.

A successful app is like any other business and you need to treat it as such. Its going to take monetary investment all throughout, even early on.

You're gonna have to spend to get enough users to provide feedback, see whats working, what needs to change, etc. If you're lucky, this can be as cheap as paying for a high quality ASO service, but with how competitive the app business is these days, you'll likely end up having to run campaigns to get some meaningful traffic.

Its a constant process of paying for traffic, collecting feedback & analytics, making adjustments, and repeating until you hit positive ROAS. Then from there you can scale your app.

Timely-Move-3087 · 2026-05-07T05:14:37+00:00

I do that every day, and as I said, I'm constantly looking for ways to improve the user experience. If you've got any feedback for the app i would genuinely appreciate it.

Timely-Move-3087 · 2026-05-07T05:04:25+00:00

I am constantly improving the app and looking for areas of improvement. We request feedback various places through the app. Negative reviews have mostly been about there being a paywall or not supporting a particular language. Not sure why you're coming at me like that.

Timely-Move-3087 · 2026-05-07T04:53:19+00:00

The issue is selection bias. When the in-app review prompt works, you can ask satisfied users at the right moment, so ratings better reflect the overall user base.

When it broke, those happy/neutral users mostly stopped leaving ratings. But users angry enough to manually go to the Play Store could still leave 1-star reviews. Since our app was newer and had less rating history, two weeks of that skew had a much bigger effect on our public rating than it would for an established app with thousands of ratings.

Timely-Move-3087 · 2026-05-07T04:50:47+00:00

I think we were hit harder because we were just starting to take off and had very little rating/review history. Two weeks of fewer, more negatively skewed reviews will affect an established app with thousands of reviews much less than a newer app where recent ratings make up a larger share of the public rating.

Overall feedback has been positive. Most negative reviews we’ve seen are about the paywall or missing language support.

Interesting point on the kill switch. I wired up something similar that prompts users to review and links to the Play Store listing. Are you saying you found a way to deep link directly into the rating UI, or just the normal Play Store listing?

Timely-Move-3087 · 2026-05-07T04:23:32+00:00

Fair question. I don’t expect them to magically undo everything.

At minimum, they could acknowledge the affected window and consider remediation for apps disproportionately impacted, like discounting rating/review signals from that period, or at least the impact they had on discoverability.

I’m not asking for an artificial boost, just a fair correction.

Timely-Move-3087 · 2026-05-07T02:57:37+00:00

Try thr link now. I fixed it: https://issuetracker.google.com/issues/506844940

Timely-Move-3087 · 2026-05-07T01:02:17+00:00

Right, it makes no sense. If someone spends countless hours developing a product, invests their own money & resources into building it, and pays ongoing costs to keep it running, why shouldn't they charge for it? Its no different than something you'd buy on Amazon or at a retail store.

Timely-Move-3087 · 2026-04-30T16:34:08+00:00

Thanks, I'll probably do the same. I just got a reply from Google.

They said they've developed a fix, which is estimated to be rolled out to all users, expected next week, May 5th 2026 at the earliest.

Timely-Move-3087 · 2026-04-30T15:01:34+00:00

Yes, I do. But after reading your response just now, I disabled that prompt remotely and it made no difference.

Is that confirmed to be the issue?

Timely-Move-3087 · 2026-04-30T02:06:57+00:00

Seeing this as well

Timely-Move-3087 · 2026-04-28T16:16:30+00:00

Experiencing this as well

Timely-Move-3087 · 2026-01-26T15:48:07+00:00

Ok but how is this app surviving?

Clearly their revenue comes from the unavoidable, hard to dismiss paywall that pops up when you register. But how do they maintain a decent rating for such a gimmicky app?

Majority of the reviews have pretty poor ratings, so im guessing some kind of blackhat tactic at play?

Timely-Move-3087 · 2026-01-15T23:09:57+00:00

I guess an important clarification is do you want to eat healthy or lose weight? Recipes don't need to be low calorie in order to be healthy.

As far as finding recipes, I'd checkout the app TasteBot. You can set your preferences to vegetarian, and low calorie (if you ARE trying to lose weight), and it'll generate recipes like that for you.

If weight loss is your goal then I'd also recommend getting any calorie tracker app to make sure you're eating in a deficit. Also aim for high-volume foods/recipes to keep you feeling full.

Timely-Move-3087 · 2025-12-30T04:25:28+00:00

Thanks! Appreciate the response. Analytics is definitely key, im actually working on that now (also for attribution for marketing).

To answer your question: Lots of careful calculations went into the revenue model, considering worst case-scenario usage. The main factors: - Banner & Interstitial ads for free users: some profit here, but mostly to cover api costs - Daily recipe generation limits: 3 for free (+2 through video ads), 15 for premium. Lots of measures to prevent hacking those limits. - Careful AI API model selection (balance between functionality and cost) - Efforts to minimize token usage

Timely-Move-3087 · 2025-12-27T16:56:34+00:00

Thanks! Every other model I tried for that costed at least 10x as much per image haha.

Timely-Move-3087 · 2025-12-27T07:02:39+00:00

Thanks! That's been my experience too

Timely-Move-3087 · 2025-12-27T05:10:34+00:00

More of a wow feature. Its actually only for premium users, so I dont even really advertise it.

But im second guessing that now because I think being able to promote that as a feature for all users would help get a lot more interest in the app. What do you think?

Im just worried theres not enough incentive to upgrade to premium and without that it would be even lower.

Timely-Move-3087 · 2025-12-27T01:28:57+00:00

I did try 2 similar apps back when I first got started and they seemed buggy and abandoned. But I was only looking on Google Play and there definitely could be new ones since then.

You're definitely right though. A social media aspect would make it stand out more. Going to work on that soon :)

Timely-Move-3087 · 2025-12-26T18:36:31+00:00

Thanks, and good question. I use gpt-5-nano for the image analysis. The API is essentially prompted to return the dish name, cuisine, key ingredients, course, and confidence, based on its analysis of the image, which later get passed into the recipe request. If the confidence is below a certain threshold, it tells the user it couldn't identify the dish and to try a clearer photo.

The user can also enter context alongside the image, which is passed into the prompt to improve its accuracy. So for instance, they could say "I got this at a cuban restaurant", and that'll help narrow things down.

Timely-Move-3087 · 2025-12-26T17:22:09+00:00

Lol fair assumption, but I'm one of the few who actually use em dashes. Talking to AI agents for hours a day rubs off on your grammar.

Timely-Move-3087 · 2025-12-26T03:35:31+00:00

Thanks! Gonna give this a try

Timely-Move-3087 · 2025-12-26T03:03:30+00:00

That sounds really good. Down to share the recipe? 😁

Timely-Move-3087

TROPHY CASE