[{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m starting a side project: building music apps for Android and iOS. The first one will be a metronome. This blog will document the entire process — the decisions, the mistakes, and what AI tools actually contribute versus what they promise.\nWhy a metronome? A few weeks ago, I watched a professional drummer at a gig. He had a metronome app running on his phone, taped to his kit. No fancy time signatures, no accent patterns, no visual conductor — just a steady click and a flash. One beat, one sound, one light.\nMost metronome apps don\u0026rsquo;t work that way. They want you to configure 4/4 versus 3/4, set accent patterns, choose different sounds for the downbeat. That\u0026rsquo;s useful for practice, but for a live gig, a drummer just needs a reliable pulse at the right tempo for each song.\nThat\u0026rsquo;s the app I want to build: dead simple, rock solid timing, with a setlist feature so you can line up your songs and their tempos for a gig.\nWhy this will be hard The app stores are full of metronomes. Many are free. Some are excellent. Nobody is searching for \u0026ldquo;yet another metronome app\u0026rdquo; — so the product has to be good enough that people find it through the setlist/gig workflow angle, or it won\u0026rsquo;t be found at all.\nI\u0026rsquo;m a solo developer with about 30-60 minutes per day to spend on this. I\u0026rsquo;m an engineer, not an app developer by trade. My monthly budget for everything — AI tools, hosting, app store fees — is 40 EUR.\nWhy I\u0026rsquo;m doing it anyway Three reasons:\nFirst, I use music apps every week and I have genuine opinions about what they get wrong. Cloud dependencies, subscription models, over-designed interfaces — I want an app that runs offline, costs a one-time fee, and respects the platform\u0026rsquo;s design language.\nSecond, I want to seriously test whether AI tools can make a solo developer competitive. Not \u0026ldquo;AI wrote my app\u0026rdquo; competitive, but \u0026ldquo;AI handled enough of the grunt work that one person could ship something polished.\u0026rdquo; This blog will be honest about where that works and where it doesn\u0026rsquo;t.\nThird, I want to find out if it\u0026rsquo;s possible to earn anything at all with a small, focused app in a saturated market. My expectation is that it probably isn\u0026rsquo;t — but I\u0026rsquo;d like to be proven wrong.\nThe rules I\u0026rsquo;m setting for myself No cloud dependency. The app runs entirely on the device. No login, no account, no server calls while it\u0026rsquo;s running. No subscriptions. One-time purchase for the paid version. Native apps. Kotlin for Android, Swift for iOS. Music apps need precise timing; web-based wrappers won\u0026rsquo;t cut it. Platform-native design. The Android version should look like an Android app. The iOS version should look like an iOS app. No cross-platform design compromises. Budget ceiling. 40 EUR/month, all in. What\u0026rsquo;s next Over the next few days, I\u0026rsquo;ll be setting up the project infrastructure: this blog (Hugo on GitHub Pages), email, development environments. Then I\u0026rsquo;ll define the MVP feature set and start on the Android version.\nI\u0026rsquo;ll also start looking at the competitive landscape seriously — not just \u0026ldquo;what\u0026rsquo;s out there\u0026rdquo; but \u0026ldquo;what do real musicians actually complain about in existing metronome apps.\u0026rdquo;\nIf you\u0026rsquo;re reading this later and the blog has more than five posts, it means I stuck with it. That alone would be worth documenting.\nThis is post #1 of an ongoing development diary. The blog is currently meant to be private and intended as project documentation.\n","permalink":"https://blog.musicapps.eu/posts/2026-04-04-why-a-metronome/","summary":"Starting a solo app project with AI assistance, a 40 EUR budget, and realistic expectations.","title":"Day 1: Why I'm building a metronome app (and why it probably won't make money)"},{"content":"I\u0026rsquo;m Karl-Ernst Kiel, an engineer exploring whether a solo developer with AI assistance can build and ship useful music apps on a shoestring budget.\nI play keyboards in a band and occasionally drums. I use music apps daily — metronomes, ear trainers, setlist managers — and I have opinions about what they get wrong.\nThis blog documents the entire process: technical decisions, AI experiments, failures, and whatever comes out the other end.\nContact: karl@musicapps.eu\n","permalink":"https://blog.musicapps.eu/about/","summary":"About this blog and its author","title":"About"}]