u/ResidentAccording256

I used to think I was doing market research.

I'd open the App Store, spend a few minutes scrolling through the Top Charts, convince myself I understood what people wanted, then move on to the next app idea.

Looking back, I was mostly just staring at a leaderboard and making up explanations in my head.

It felt productive.

It wasn't.

The thing I completely missed was that rankings are just snapshots.

They show what's visible today, but they don't tell you:

what's quietly gaining momentum

what's slowly losing traction

or what's only there because of a feature, paid acquisition, or a viral moment

Once I realized that, the questions I asked completely changed.

Instead of asking "What's #1?", I started asking things like:

Which apps have been climbing steadily instead of exploding overnight?

Which categories seem healthy over time instead of reacting to short-term trends?

Do downloads and revenue move together, or tell different stories?

Does the growth actually last?

One thing that surprised me was how often the "boring" apps turned out to be the interesting ones.

Some of them never appeared near the top of the charts.

But every week they'd move up a little.

No huge launch.

No viral post.

Just slow, consistent progress.

Looking back, those were often the products that had actually found a real audience.

The opposite happened just as often.

An app would suddenly jump into the Top 20, everyone would start talking about it, and a week later it was already falling back down.

If I'd only looked at that one day, I would've completely misunderstood what was happening.

That changed one habit for me.

I stopped treating rankings as answers.

Now I treat them as starting points.

A chart tells me where to look—not what to build.

Curious how other founders think about this.

Before you spend weeks (or months) building something, what signals do you trust the most?

User interviews? Competitor research? Reviews? Something else?

I like building small mobile apps on the side, and one thing I've learned is that coming up with an idea is the easy part.

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Figuring out whether it's actually worth building is much harder.

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After chasing a few ideas that went nowhere, I started spending about 30 minutes researching before I write a single line of code. It's become a habit that's saved me a lot of time.

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Nothing fancy, but these are the four things I check before deciding whether an idea is worth building.

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1. Check if people are actually downloading similar apps.

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No competitors doesn't always mean opportunity—it often means there's no real demand.

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2. Read the 1–3 star reviews first.

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That's usually where users reveal what's missing or frustrating. Some of my best feature ideas have come from those reviews.

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3. Look at publishers, not just individual apps.

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If the same publisher has multiple successful apps in the same niche, it often suggests there's enough demand to support more than one product.

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4. Ask yourself one question:

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Why would someone switch from the app they're already using?

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If I can't answer that confidently, I keep researching instead of building.

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This simple habit has probably saved me more time than anything else.

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Curious what everyone else uses for app market research. Any tools worth checking out?