What My Failed Apps Taught Me About Building Products

I have released a few apps on the app stores. Most of them were small-scale applications. They were not built for learning purposes. These apps had fewer than five pages and only one or two features. Pop-up advertisements were shown to users on almost every page. That was okay. I did build these apps mainly for ad revenue. But there was a problem. Most of them had very low retention. They didn’t really make money, and they didn’t give me meaningful experience either. That said, not all of my apps were built casually. I did put real effort into a fortune-telling app and an emotion tracking app. They were more complete technically, but the planning and features were driven mostly by my assumptions, not by actual user needs. In that sense, they also failed. Interestingly, a very simple Korean language learning app that I built with much less effort is still generating around three to four dollars per month. At some point, I felt that even if I made no ad revenue at all, I just wanted the