How to check an app idea before you build it

Building takes months. Looking takes an hour. Most ideas that fail in the stores fail for reasons you could have seen before writing code: the niche was full of strong apps, or nobody was looking for it, or ten others launched the same thing that month.

This is a routine you can do in about an hour. It will not tell you that an idea will work. It will tell you what you are walking into.

The routine

1. 1

   Say the idea in the user’s words

   Not “AI-powered wellness companion” but “sleep sounds” or “water reminder”. Write down two or three phrases a person would type into the store. If you cannot, the idea is not clear enough yet.

2. 2

   Search both stores

   Type each phrase into the App Store and Google Play. Open the first ten results. These are the apps a new user compares you with.

3. 3

   Look at how strong the top ten are

   For each, note the number of ratings and the date of the last update. Ten apps with hundreds of thousands of ratings, all updated this month, is a hard market. A top ten with apps last updated two years ago is an opening.

4. 4

   See what launched lately, and how it did

   How many apps for this idea came out in the last month? More important: did any of them get anywhere? If twenty launched and none passed a thousand downloads, new apps are not breaking through. If a few took off, the niche still has room.

5. 5

   Read the bad reviews of the leaders

   Open the one, two and three star reviews of the top three apps. Complaints that repeat are your feature list: the thing users want and are not getting.

6. 6

   Decide what would make yours different

   One sentence: “Like X, but for Y” or “Like X, without Z”. If the answer is “the same but nicer”, the leaders’ ratings will beat you.

Signs of a good niche

• People clearly search for it: the store suggests the phrase as you type.
• Some of the top ten are old, rarely updated or badly rated.
• New apps have taken off there recently, so the stores still give newcomers a chance.
• The same complaint shows up across several leaders’ reviews.

Signs to stop

• Every app in the top ten is from a large publisher with huge rating counts.
• Many new apps launched lately and none got anywhere.
• The store does not suggest the phrase, and the results are about something else.

Doing it faster

IndieTower’s Niche Explorer runs steps two to four for you. Type the idea and press Check niche: you get a verdict (Room to enter, Competitive or Crowded), the competitors with their ratings, and what launched in the last 30 days. Checks are free.

Gaps answers the fourth step for every niche at once: it ranks niches by how well apps launched in the last 30 days did. The score describes those 30 days. It is not a forecast.

For step five, the review gap finder reads the reviews of up to five competitors together and lists what their users complain about and ask for. It is part of the Indie plan. How to check an idea, step by step.