Shipping with anti-engagement: a solo dev published the list of things they deliberately left out

On r/SideProject this month, a solo developer shipped a 3D fluid simulation fidget app for iOS and Android — Swift + Metal on iOS, Kotlin + OpenGL ES on Android — built over six months. The launch post lists what’s deliberately not in the app. The list is the interesting part:

• No streaks
• No challenges
• No notifications
• No login
• No analytics
• No subscription

In an app category dominated by mobile games and meditation apps that have spent the last decade optimizing exactly those engagement vectors, this is a pointed product statement. The launch text frames it directly: Open it, touch the screen, the fluid reacts to your input, close it.

What anti-engagement actually means as a ship strategy

Anti-engagement is not the same as low-effort. Every item on the developer’s exclusion list represents an active design decision that almost certainly cost trade-offs in retention metrics, paid conversion, or growth potential. Streaks and notifications are the highest-leverage retention mechanics in mobile; eliminating them is choosing to give up the retention curve in exchange for a different relationship with the user.

The philosophical bet is that the long-tail of users who are exhausted by engagement-optimized apps is large enough, and durable enough, to support a different product category. The empirical bet is that open, use, close produces enough satisfaction-per-session that the user comes back without being prompted — a recall-based usage pattern rather than a notification-driven one.

Why this matters for indie builders

Three concrete reads:

1. The exclusion list is the brand. The 3D fluid sim itself is technically impressive but not unique — there are dozens of fidget apps. The brand is the explicit refusal to do what other fidget apps do. That positioning is free, durable, and impossible to copy without abandoning the existing user base. It’s also the part most indie founders skip because it feels like leaving features on the table.

2. ’No analytics’ is the underrated move. Without analytics, the developer cannot A/B test, cannot prove retention, cannot optimize for engagement. They’ve also removed the temptation to optimize for engagement when it conflicts with user wellbeing. Indie founders almost universally add analytics because the cost is trivial and the upside seems large. The hidden cost: once analytics are in, every product decision gets evaluated against retention metrics, which structurally biases the product toward engagement-bait over time. Removing analytics is removing the gradient that pulls in that direction.

3. The top comment on the post is itself the test. One Reddit user wrote: ”here’s what I removed and why” sounds like a clickbaity engagement trick...? This is the inevitable critique — that even refusing engagement is a form of engagement marketing. The critique is fair but also misses the point: a marketing post that explicitly lists exclusions is still constrained by those exclusions in the actual product. The marketing can be self-aware; the product still has to deliver on the promise. The cynic gets the rhetorical point and misses the product point.

The broader takeaway: shipping with constraints — written down, public, refusable later only at brand cost — is one of the few moves that compounds in the indie market. The features you commit to omit are more defensible than the features you commit to add.