30k views on Reddit, top comment: “garbage spyware”. What I learned from shipping my first side project
I’ve been writing code professionally for more than 10 years. Backend, frontend — the full stack. Full-time jobs, real products, real users. But never anything of my own. Not because I kept quitting — I never even started. I just never had an idea I cared about enough to spend my evenings on.
Then I got tired of showing up to empty skateparks.
The problem was embarrassingly simple
Skating alone is fine. But skating with other people is better - you push harder, you learn more, the session has energy. The problem: you never know who’s at the park until you get there.
My usual workflow was texting 10 people, getting 3 responses, and still having a 50/50 shot of arriving to an empty park. Sometimes I’d drive 20 minutes and find nobody. Sometimes I’d skip a session because it seemed quiet and later find out half the local crew was there.
I built Sesh Radar to solve this. It’s a real-time map that shows which skateparks are active right now. Your phone detects when you arrive via geofencing and marks you as present. Friends get notified. You can see which parks near you have people before you leave the house.
Three months of evenings and weekends. Rails backend, React Native frontend. First real thing I’ve shipped outside of work.
The Reddit post
I launched quietly. No ads, no influencer outreach, no press kit. I wrote a post on r/skateboarding explaining the problem and what I’d built. Honest, no hype.
The results after 24 hours surprised me:
30 000+ views
44 comments
34 shares
More installs in a single day than the entire beta period combined
Skaters immediately started adding missing parks to the map
That last part genuinely moved me. People were fixing the product in real time because they wanted it to exist. That felt like validation I hadn’t expected.
The top comment: "garbage spyware"
The concern was geofencing. The assumption if an app uses location, it must be tracking you continuously.
I wrote a detailed reply explaining how geofencing actually works. It doesn’t run continuously - it registers a boundary with the OS and gets woken up only when you enter or exit that boundary. Apple specifically does not approve apps that do continuous background tracking without a legitimate purpose. The app isn’t watching you between parks. It doesn’t know where you drove, when you left, or anything else.
The double standard nobody talks about
Strava tracks your full GPS route in real time. Snapchat has a live location map of your friends. Find My broadcasts your location to everyone you share it with, constantly. Nobody calls this spyware. They're features.
But when an unknown indie developer ships something with geofencing, suddenly it's a surveillance tool. When a solo dev uses AI to help write code - the way every developer does now - suddenly it's not a "real" app.
I've been a professional programmer for 15 years. This app works exactly like the tools people use every day without thinking twice. The difference isn't the technology. The difference is trust — and trust is earned by brand size, not by behavior.
When Strava asks for location, you know Strava. There's a brand, a privacy policy that got scrutinized, a reputation at stake. When a side project called Sesh Radar asks for location, you have nothing to go on except the ask itself.
The technical explanation I gave in the comments was accurate. It just didn't have the trust to land.
This is the real challenge for solo developers in 2025: you're not just competing on features. You're competing against a decade of people's accumulated skepticism about apps they've never heard of. You have to earn trust that established apps got for free by being established.
What I actually did about it
I added a dedicated section to the landing page explaining exactly how geofencing works, what data the app does and doesn't store, and why. Plain language, no legal boilerplate.
I should have had it from day one. Transparency isn't just ethically right — it's a product decision. If your app touches anything that sounds sensitive, address it before users ask. The question is coming.
The AI thing
I used AI tools to help write this app. Same as I always do at my work for real projects.
There's a real difference between "used AI as a tool" and "prompted an app into existence without understanding it." I understand every line of this codebase. I debugged it, refactored it, made product decisions, and took responsibility for it.
But I'm not sure that distinction is visible from the outside. The perception of AI-generated output has become a proxy for “low effort” in a way that doesn't map cleanly to how developers actually work.
I don't have a good answer here. Maybe the answer is just shipping more, being more present in the community, and building a track record. Maybe trust is just slow.
What I'm still figuring out
The 30,000 views were real. The installs were real. The people spontaneously adding parks to the database — real.
The "garbage spyware" comment was also real, and it still sits at the top.
I think the interesting question isn't "how do I get better PR" — it's "how does an indie developer build enough baseline trust that technical explanations actually land?" I haven't figured that out yet.
What I do know: the problem I built this for is real. The people it's meant to help exist. And one hostile comment thread doesn't change either of those things.
The app is seshradar.io if you're curious.
the trust gap is real but framing it as binary misses it — its compounding. ran a hosting biz 2002-2020 and every new server we shipped looked sketchy to someone bcs we were unknown. only thing that worked long term: show up in the same subreddit/forum over months not days. one launch post = stranger asking for permission. 20 posts of helping ppl debug their setups first = someone who happens to also build a thing. landing page transparency is necessary but it lands diff when reader already recognizes your handle.
The 34 shares are worth more than the 3,000+ upvotes for where you are right now. Sharing means someone put their name behind it and sent it to someone specific, which is a much stronger trust signal than a passive upvote, especially when trust is your actual constraint. On your question about building baseline trust: the people spontaneously adding parks to the map are the clearest answer you already have. That behavior, made visible on the landing page as something like 'X parks added by the community this week,' does more work than any privacy explainer, because it shows real people using the product the way you intended, voluntarily.
The "trust is earned by brand size, not by behavior" line is the real insight in this post. It's not a PR problem — it's a sales problem where you have no prior relationship with the buyer and they have no framework for evaluating you except pattern-matching to things that scared them before.
Your technical explanation was accurate. It just had no trust to land on. That's not a failure of explanation — it's the actual condition solo developers are building inside. The fix you made (transparency on the landing page) is right, but it's a floor, not a ceiling. The ceiling is what you're already doing: shipping in public, writing honestly about what went wrong, building a track record that makes the next launch land differently.
The people who added parks to your map in real time — those are your early evangelists. They're the trust proxy until you have brand size. Making their behavior visible ("X parks added by the community this week") does more trust work than any privacy explainer, because it shows the product being used the way you intended, by real people, voluntarily.
Keep going. The 30k views were real. The "garbage spyware" comment says more about the commenter's prior experience than your product.
Read this twice. The "trust is earned by brand size, not by behavior" frame is the sharpest articulation of what indie devs are actually fighting against in 2026, and I don't see this framing very often. Bookmarking it.
I'm sitting one stage behind you on the same curve. Tonight I tried to post a zero-link validation question in r/SideProject from a 4-year-old dormant account and Reddit auto-filtered it in under a minute. Couldn't even reach the "get the hostile comment" stage. So the trust wall starts earlier than I realized: it's not just "will users believe my product is safe", it's "will the platform let users see your post at all". Different mechanism, same root cause.
On the AI thing, I keep wondering if the only durable signal indie devs have to prove craft is to publicly show the messy parts: the rejected PRs, the bugs you debugged for 2 hours, the architecture call you reversed. AI can scaffold, but it doesn't sweat. Maybe brand size is the lazy proxy and visible struggle is the actual signal. Curious if you've thought about this angle, given Sesh Radar's geofencing transparency move was kind of pointing in that direction.
Your framing of the real question resonates — it's not a PR problem, it's a trust deficit problem, and those need different solutions. One angle worth considering: the people spontaneously adding parks to your map are actually building trust for you in real time. Surfacing that on your landing page ("X parks added by the community this week") turns passive user behavior into a social proof signal that does a lot more work than a privacy explainer alone. On the AI thing — I think explicitly framing what you decided vs. what you prompted, right in the launch post itself, is underrated; most of the skepticism is really just asking "does a human stand behind this?" and that framing answers it directly before the question gets asked.
The double standard you described between established brands and indie developers is a masterclass in modern product psychology. When Strava logs every heartbeat and GPS coordinate, it’s a 'feature.' When an unknown builder uses basic native OS geofencing to solve a real, hyper-local friction, it's instantly branded as a 'surveillance tool.'
You can provide the most precise technical explanation in the comments, but as you beautifully put it, technical logic doesn't matter if there isn't baseline trust to land it. Adding that plain-language explanation to the landing page is a great pivot. Transparency isn’t just an ethical choice anymore; it’s a core feature requirement for solo builders to fight accumulated internet skepticism.
This is a strong lesson because the pushback was not really about geofencing mechanics. It was about trust arriving before the explanation.
For a location-based consumer app, especially one from a solo developer, users decide emotionally before they read the technical details. If the first frame feels like “radar tracking people,” even accurate privacy explanations have to fight uphill.
The product idea itself makes sense: show skaters where there is already energy, help parks feel alive, and reduce wasted trips. That is community and session discovery, not surveillance. I’d make that distinction much more visible in the brand and landing page.
Sesh Radar is clear, but “Radar” may be accidentally reinforcing the exact privacy fear you are trying to overcome. A softer, more community-first brand shell could make the same product feel less like tracking and more like finding live sessions.
Auryxa .com would fit that direction better if you want the app to feel more trusted, polished, and consumer-friendly while still leaving room beyond skateparks later. The product does not need to change. The first impression around it does.
For this type of app, naming is not cosmetic. It directly affects whether users feel safe enough to give location access before they understand the technology.
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