u/hilarious_oscar — reddlx

For years I wanted to build my own app. I tried more than three times. Every single time, I stopped halfway — partly because of how long it was taking, partly because I'd hit a technical blocker I couldn't get past after work hours, and partly because the gap between "idea" and "shipping" felt impossibly wide.

This time was different. Three weeks of focused work and I shipped a real Android app to the Play Store. One I'm actually using daily to manage my own money.

What changed was AI coding tools. But maybe not in the way most posts about this topic describe.

Sharing my honest experience in two parts. Part 1 below. Part 2 coming separately.

THE TOOLS I USED, IN ORDER

I started cheap on purpose. I didn't want to pay for something I might abandon — again.

First few days: Gemini Studio (free). Useful for getting unstuck, asking conceptual questions, generating small snippets.

Next phase: GitHub Copilot. The autocomplete-style flow was great for boilerplate and pattern matching, especially in repetitive UI code.

Once I was confident this project was actually going to ship — not abandoned like the previous three — I upgraded to Claude Pro. The free tools had real limits. Sessions reset, weekly caps, dropped context. With my time pressure (vacation + evenings), the limits started costing me hours per day.

Eventually I bumped to a higher Claude Max when I needed to push through complex features faster.

The pattern that worked: pay only after the project earned my own commitment. Free tools are great for proving to yourself you'll actually finish something.

THE THING I DIDN'T EXPECT

Early on, the AI suggestions felt amazing. Code that worked. UI that looked good. Features built faster than I'd thought possible.

But once I had a working app and sat down to actually use it as a real user — not as a developer admiring code — I noticed something uncomfortable.

The UI looked good in screenshots. It didn't feel good in use.

Buttons were in awkward places. Hierarchy was off. Things that seemed clean on first glance felt cluttered when I navigated the same screen 20 times. The AI had given me competent generic UI. What I needed was UI specific to my product, my users, my use case.

So I sat down and went screen by screen. Asked harder questions. Pushed back on default suggestions. Worked iteratively to simplify what AI had complicated.

The lesson: don't ship the first thing AI gives you. The first output is a starting point, not an ending point.

Where AI saves you time is in the boilerplate. Where you still have to invest your own thinking is in the design judgment, the user empathy, and the dozens of small calls that turn a working app into a usable one.

That's the honest tradeoff most "I built with AI" posts skip.

Part 2 will cover what actually changed in my workflow over those 3 weeks, the mistakes I made, and what I'd do differently next time.

Open to questions in the comments. Especially curious — what do other devs do when AI's output looks right but feels wrong?

Hi all — first time posting here. Sharing my first ever shipped app, which I put on the Play Store this week.

It's called Spensy. It's an Android expense tracker that runs entirely on-device — no login, no cloud, no analytics, no ads.

I built it because I'd been frustrated for a while with how every popular expense app wants either SMS access to read your bank messages, or a cloud login that syncs your entire financial history to their servers. Many want both. I didn't want to hand that data to apps I couldn't audit, especially given how often apps change ownership over the years.

So I spent the last few months building one for myself. Used it daily, kept refining it, and eventually it felt good enough to share.

What it does:

- Tracks expenses across multiple accounts (bank, credit card, loans, cash, UPI)

- Monthly budgets with live warnings

- Daily spending limits based on income and budgets

- Lend and borrow tracking

- Encrypted local backups (your file, your password, never leaves your phone)

What it doesn't do:

- No sign-up, no account, no cloud sync

- No SMS permission, no contacts permission

- No analytics, no telemetry, no ads

Some things I learned shipping my first app:

- Going fully offline is architecturally harder than adding a backend — backups, schema migrations, multi-device, all need different solutions

- The Play Store submission flow ate ~20% of my total project time (Data Safety, screenshots, content rating, target API requirements)

- Building for myself meant I had a real user (me) pushing back against feature creep at every step

Solo dev, not a company. App is free. Indian audience primarily but works anywhere.

Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spensy.app

Open to any feedback — especially what's missing, what's confusing, or what you'd improve. This is genuinely my first attempt, so I expect there's a lot to learn.