Building a daily selfie app with AI video generation

Daily selfie, the photo every day app.

I’ve been building a mobile app that helps people take a daily selfie and turn those photos into a video later on, so they can end up with a video covering any period of time — from one week to 10 years.

I initially thought this would mostly be a product problem. It turned out to be much more about execution and discipline.

From the outside, the app looks simple. Under the hood, it isn’t. It’s offline-first, stores a lot of photos per user, aligns faces across days, and runs video generation jobs on a separate backend.

It took longer than I expected, but I eventually got it stable and shipped.

Shipping felt good. Then reality kicked in.

The app worked, but users didn’t stick.

People downloaded it. Some took a few photos. A few generated a video. Then most disappeared.

Nothing was obviously broken. The flows were clean. The features worked. The videos looked good.

But this is a habit-based product, and habits are unforgiving. Liking the idea of something is very different from doing it every day.

I overestimated how much features matter early on.

I spent a lot of time building multiple video types, configuration options, flexible templates, and edge cases I thought I’d need later.

All of that might matter eventually, but it didn’t help someone come back tomorrow.

What actually mattered was much more basic: reminders that don’t get ignored, frictionless capture, a clear reason not to miss a day, and seeing the gap when a day is skipped.

I built those too — just later than I should have.

While I was building, it always felt like progress. There was always another system to improve or optimize.

Looking back, I was avoiding harder questions. Why would someone open this app on day 14? What’s the first win they feel? Is this a daily habit or an occasional tool?

Code gives fast feedback. User behavior doesn’t.

I’m not throwing the app away. I still believe in the core idea, but I’m stepping back and focusing less on adding features and more on understanding what actually drives retention in habit-based apps.

Features:

• Guided daily selfie capture
• Smart face alignment detection
• Ghost overlay photo alignment
• AI face morphing videos
• Classic selfie timelapse videos
• Creative video templates
• Template based video customization
• Music added to videos
• Date overlays on videos
• Custom photo collections
• Offline photo capture and sync
• Daily reminders with notifications

If you’ve built a consumer app that depends on daily behavior, I’d love to hear:

• what actually moved the needle for retention
• what you got wrong at first
• what you’d test first after launch

Website: http://selfietimelapse.com/
iOS : https://apps.apple.com/app/id6756184981
Android : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.diary.dailyselfie