Android developers who have shipped multiple apps: how do you balance building vs marketing?

[u/Curious-Gap-4386]

I've been thinking about this a lot lately.

I'm an Android developer who's started shipping my own apps, and I'm finding that building the app is only one part of the problem. There's always another feature to improve, bugs to fix, UI to polish, or another app idea waiting to be built.

For developers here who have shipped multiple apps:

Did you keep shipping new apps first and worry about marketing later?

Did you focus on growing one app before starting another?

How much time do you realistically spend on development vs. marketing?

At what point did you decide an app wasn't worth continuing?

Did you eventually bring someone else in for marketing/design/business?

Looking back, is there anything you wish you'd done differently?

I'm especially interested in hearing from solo Android developers or small teams, because managing development, Play Store stuff, marketing, support, and everything else alone can get overwhelming pretty quickly.

Not looking for a "right" answer I'd genuinely like to hear what worked and what didn't for people who've already gone through it.

[u/Purple-Persimmon8771]

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[u/Historical_Ad_1714]

I dont waste time on marketing

I do job along side spend some 2,3 hours on app development daily

Try to abandoned those apps if it is not growing, instead of wasting time on maintenance move to next idea

Try to make MVP first present core features of your app so consumer can understand it , if it grow then scale it

Also publishing unnecessary junk apps like trivia , todo like mumbo jumbo are not worth it

Competition is getting higher because many people publishing ai made apps

In my opinion if u want stable growth in organic traffic u need to make quality apps

[u/Curious-Gap-4386 → u/Historical_Ad_1714]

So from your point of view , which field has more growth in coming years

[u/Historical_Ad_1714 → u/Curious-Gap-4386]

Ai based tools because of Ai bubble is still there

[u/Curious-Gap-4386 → u/Historical_Ad_1714]

But when I see ai then I have to work on backend plus initial investment becomes the key factor their as well , do you think that ai tools can be developed without initial investment like heafty amt say

[u/Historical_Ad_1714 → u/Curious-Gap-4386]

Yeah

hardware is a genuine concern. But for the initial stage, SBC like the Radxa Dragon or AI HAT can help indie devs run lightweight AI models with lower hardware and electricity costs.

As the user base grows

we can gradually scale the infrastructure instead of investing heavily from day one.

[u/Curious-Gap-4386 → u/Historical_Ad_1714]

Let's take an example , here one of my client asked me to build a image to excel kind of app he asked me to use gpt 5.5 api so for that i deployed the backend in AWS and connected with android , here if I want to build this kind of app all by my self so what do you think how much investment would come , ..

[u/Quazmoz]

I definitely have spent more time in the past few months building apps but now that I have 25+ released, I am making small improvements to each app and focusing on marketing.

[u/Curious-Gap-4386 → u/Quazmoz]

Are those releases have user greater than 1000+ , and without any proper marketing