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.