Kasspian’s honest read
Hard by default — app store discovery is brutal and retention is worse, so a standalone mobile app only wins with a sharp hook and a way to be found.
Who actually pays
Consumers or niche professionals who'll either pay a subscription or tolerate ads — but only if the app earns a daily-or-weekly habit, because one-and-done downloads don't sustain a business.
Riskiest assumption
That people will find the app and keep opening it. Discovery on the stores is pay-to-play or luck, and most apps lose the majority of users within days of install — habit is the whole game.
Cheapest test first
Build the core loop as a rough prototype or even a no-code app and put it in front of 20 target users for a week. Watch whether they come back unprompted; day-three retention tells you more than any survey.
Mobile apps look approachable and are quietly one of the harder consumer businesses. The stores are saturated, organic discovery has mostly collapsed, and paid install costs can swallow your margins before you've proven anyone wants it. On top of that you're renting your relationship from Apple and Google, paying their cut and living by their rules. None of this is fatal, but it means 'just build an app' is a plan with the hardest parts left out.
If you pursue it, your edge has to be specific: a sharp wedge into an existing audience you can reach without paying for installs, plus a loop that earns a real habit so retention and word-of-mouth do the work the stores won't. Solve distribution and retention first, on paper, before you fall in love with the build. Plenty of app businesses succeed — they almost never succeed by accident.
This is the read on the category. Your version isn’t the average — get the honest call on your exact idea, with live market data, in about 90 seconds.