How to come up with an abundance of app ideas?

Copying is a great strategy 😅 just look at popular apps and figure out how you can simplify them (e.g. remove ads, only solve one hero use-case) while keeping the same core.

At a high-level, it was a combination of:

1. Time (I built those apps across ~10 years)
2. Being easily annoyed with suboptimal UI/UX 🤣

To help with #2, my recommendation is to not just be complacent with Big Tech apps and assume you can't add value on top of them. In particular, "addition by subtraction" is very powerful. Big Tech apps will often have 100+ features and do them all sort of okay. You can add value by creating an app that just extracts 1 to 3 of those features and does those extremely well.

A personal example from me is Google Maps. It's great for real-time navigation and location discovery, but it's pretty bad at saving very specific locations (the feature is buried many clicks deep). It's particularly bad at saving raw locations that are just lat/long. I remember being annoyed that I couldn't save the random location where I parked, so I made a simple location saver app and got ~1,000 downloads.

To go deeper, check out my side project course: Build Side Projects With 500k+ Users: Coming Up With An Idea