"How do the people at King Saud University study this hard?": a Saudi university student's tree-planting app holds a top-3 Top Paid spot on the back of university leaderboards

A Saudi developer took Forest's tree-growing mechanic, localized it into Arabic, added prayer times and a "university vs. university" study-hours leaderboard, and sold it for SAR 4.99 as a one-time purchase. Two months after launch it reached #1 on the Saudi Productivity Top Paid chart and ranged from #2 to #4 on the overall Top Paid chart. It spent almost nothing on ads. It relied on making students want to push their own university up the rankings. Below: what it is, where the numbers come from, how much it might earn, and whether this playbook travels to other countries.

A video that tagged King Saud University

On Sep 19, 2026, the TikTok account @azr3app posted a video captioned "علمونا كيف مذاكرتكم كذا يا طلاب جامعة الملك سعود", meaning roughly "Students of King Saud University, teach us how you study to get like this." From the comments, the screen shows the in-app university leaderboard with King Saud at the top (inferred). By 11-06 the video had 220k views, the highest on this account.

Almost every comment is about school rankings, and almost nobody talks about the app itself. The most-liked comment (776 likes) reads "طلاب البترول مو لاقين وقت يحملون التطبيق 😂", roughly "Petroleum University students are too busy to even download the app 😂." Further down: "جامعة الطائف ما بدينا اختبارات" (Taif University, we haven't started exams yet, just wait), "وين جامعة الباحه" (where is Al Baha University), and "بنرجع بالصدارة" (we'll take the top spot back). Others asked "فورست وش مقصر فيه" (what's wrong with Forest) and "ليش سعر التطبيق 5 ريال" (why does the app cost 5 riyals).

Two days later it posted "جنون جامعة القصيم بالمذاكرة" (Qassim University has gone crazy studying), which got 68k views. From mid-September to mid-October this account kept posting the same format: pick a university, praise its ranking, and invite students from other schools to argue in the comments.

What it is

The app is called ازرع | Azr3, where "ازرع" means "plant". It is iOS-only and Arabic-only and was listed on 2026-09-02. The developer, Mashal Mohammed (مشعل محمد), has only this one app, and the last line of the store page reads "صُنع في السعودية" (Made in Saudi Arabia).

The mechanic is almost the same as Forest. You start a focus timer and put the phone down, and a tree grows in an oasis when time is up. Leave early and the tree dies. On top of that it adds four things:

• Prayer times: Prayer times are calculated using the Umm al-Qura calendar. No new timer can start during the call to prayer, and the prayer break doesn't count against your break allowance. One 11-01 five-star App Store review says "خاصية التوقف للصلاة فوق التقييم", roughly "the pause-for-prayer feature alone deserves a perfect score."
• Saudi localization: The map is "the Kingdom's Oasis", divided into five regions: Najd, Asir, Hejaz, Eastern and Ola. It grows native plants, and the decorations include Saudi sweets. The copy is in Saudi dialect, and dates can switch to the Hijri calendar.
• Screen Time app lock: You can set fixed blocks for work, study or sleep to lock distracting apps, even without running a timer.
• Study rooms and leaderboards: A synced study room holds up to 40 people. Rooms can enable a "shared fate" rule, so if one person quits, every tree in the room dies. The leaderboards cover universities and cities, and the 1.3 version added a high-school "region vs. region" board. After each session it generates a "group photo" with everyone's avatars and a winner card you can share to Stories in one tap.

It costs SAR 4.99 (about $1.3) as a one-time purchase, with no subscription and no ads. In-app it sells "بذرة" (seed) packs: 120 seeds for SAR 4.99, 400 for 14.99, and 1000 for 29.99 (App Store Saudi storefront page, 11-06). The top tier is 49.99. Seeds are probably for unlocking skins and companions (inferred).

How big it got

• Charts: From 10-28 to 11-06 it sat daily at #2 to #4 on the Saudi overall Top Paid chart and #1 in Productivity Top Paid. The third-party chart tracker AppWinners shows it at #1 in Productivity Top Paid from 10-19, and it first charted on 09-21.
• Ratings: total ratings are 10-28, 210 of them (almost all from Saudi Arabia), and 11-06 is 435, with an iTunes average of 4.76. 11-01, 11-02 and 11-03 added 34, 66 and 59 new ratings, then it settled back to 21 to 24 a day.
• Versus Forest: Forest has over 20,000 cumulative ratings in Saudi Arabia, but only 15 new ones in the last 7 days. Azr3 added 224 over the same period, roughly 15 times Forest's pace.
• Other countries: It reached #17 on the Bahrain overall Top Paid chart and #128 in Egypt, but both storefronts have zero ratings, so these are incidental chart entries.

The early-November rating spike lines up with the 10-30 release of 1.3.0, its largest update since launch. In those same days the official TikTok videos only pulled a thousand or so views each, so TikTok wasn't driving the volume. The likely cause is that the new version added a rating prompt, and it coincided with Saudi university midterms (inferred).

How much it earned: No public revenue figures exist. A rough estimate using typical App Store rating-to-download ratios puts paid downloads somewhere between a few thousand and twenty thousand, which means one-time purchase revenue of roughly $5,000 to $25,000, with seed pack revenue on top (estimate). For a solo side project that's good money, but still far from a big business.

Where users come from

Mostly its own TikTok account. @azr3app has 3,110 followers, 50.6k likes and 52 posts. Every post carries #اكسبلور #مذاكرة #جامعة (the For You feed, study, university) plus an unrelated trending meme tag, #الشعب_الصيني_ماله_حل, to piggyback on recommendation traffic. The top-performing videos:

(TikTok, 11-06 stats)

After late October, single-video views dropped to a few thousand up to about ten thousand. The account also posted a photo carousel titled "طالب جامعي يطور تطبيق ازرع" (a university student develops the ازرع app), with 6,395 likes and 358 comments. The "a student made it, a Saudi made it" identity is itself part of the pitch.

Then students shared it on their own. rancore01 (21k followers) 10-12 mentioned the app in a university vlog that got 120k views; g.read21, gege.ahmedd, haninsdiaries, and several other student accounts tagged the official account. Whether any of this was paid, I can't tell. 10-12 the official account also tagged Muteb Alarifi, who runs an influencer marketing agency and has 1.3M subscribers on Snapchat. Whether they paid him to promote it is also unknown (unverified).

A recommendation on X the day after launch. 09-03, X user بسّام (@punkive) posted "🌱🇸🇦 ازرع | Azr3 تطبيق سعودي يساعدك تركز" (a Saudi app that helps you focus), listing the prayer times, app locking and studying with friends point by point. Before posting he teased it: "If I bring you a very cool app that will go down in history and is especially useful for students, how much would you trust me?"

A Reddit user called it "the Saudi Forest". A post in r/SaudiForSaudis was titled "تطبيق ازرع (Forest سعودي)", and a commenter said it was made by a Saudi and done well, with a monthly ranking for each university.

Store search brought in almost nothing. The website and help center specifically say "if you can't find it in the store, search azr3", which suggests Arabic name searches don't surface it. I found no evidence of paid ads.

Why it, and not Forest

Functionally it is Forest. Users switched mainly for three reasons:

1. Prayer pausing solves a real problem. With a generic focus app, a Saudi student praying five times a day can break the timer and kill the tree. Azr3 builds prayer into the timer rules. A global product like Forest would never build that for a single market.
2. The university leaderboard both acquires and retains. One 10-31 five-star review reads: "جربت كثيييير تطبيقات بس هذا كان الاول خصوصا انو في ترتيب جامعات… صار عندي روح المنافسة واني ابي ارفع جامعتي", roughly "I've tried so many apps, but this is the best, especially because of the university rankings. I got competitive and want to push my university up." For users, the leaderboard is a reason to keep studying. For the official account, every university is a topic to tag and a fight to start in the comments. The product mechanic and the content strategy are the same thing.
3. "This is our app." Five regions, native plants, Saudi sweets, dialect copy, "Made in Saudi Arabia." The phrases "تطبيق سعودي" (a Saudi app) keep showing up in reviews and comments.

Timing and price helped too. The early-September launch landed on the Saudi back-to-school season, and the early-November rating spike hit midterms (inferred). The Saudi overall Top Paid chart has a low bar: half of the top 10 are older games like Minecraft, Pou and Geometry Dash, so an app getting dozens of new ratings a day can crack the top three. At SAR 4.99 one-time with no subscription, students buy without much hesitation, and sitting high on the Top Paid chart is free exposure in itself.

It also updates often: 3 months and 1.3 versions, and the 1.3 release notes list dozens of changes. One review says "في تجدد مستمر" (it keeps getting updated).

Who it's competing with

(Figures from the App Store Saudi storefront)

Before it, Saudi Arabia already had several Arabic focus apps, and none of them gained real traction. I haven't seen anyone copying it yet. The people who know about it are mostly in Saudi student circles: there's no press coverage, the developer hasn't disclosed revenue, and the only external mentions I could find are a few student TikTok accounts, one Reddit thread and one X recommendation.

If it were you

In one line: The Saudi slot is already taken by this app, so what's worth copying is the playbook. Build a tree-growing focus app with prayer times and a school ranking for another market with many Muslim students who identify with their schools. But be clear-eyed that a single country's ceiling is probably a few thousand dollars a month.

Who it suits: One or two people who can build for iOS (you'd need the Screen Time APIs, Live Activities and synced rooms), and who are from the target country themselves or have university students there. The official videos need to be shot in the local dialect, and you need to know which two schools have a rivalry. According to the official account, the Azr3 developer is a university student too, and that is hard for outsiders to fake.

Who it's not for: anyone who wants to go head-on with it in Saudi Arabia. It has first-mover advantage, student word of mouth, and the "made by Saudis" identity going for it. Anyone planning a global English version: Forest and Focustown are already there, and once you strip out the prayer times and school rankings, the product has no real differentiator. Anyone hoping to make big money from subscriptions: students push back hard on subscriptions, and one of its selling points is "no subscription."

How to build it: copy the mechanics as they are. Grow trees, watch them die, study rooms, shared fate. Change three things for each target country: the prayer calendar (Egypt uses the algorithm from the Egyptian General Survey Authority; Indonesia and Malaysia use their own religious affairs ministries), the school system (universities and high schools both need rankings; Azr3 1.3 only added high school students later), and local visuals and dialect. Pricing: in Gulf states (UAE, Kuwait, Qatar), copy the low one-time purchase price. In markets with low willingness to pay, like Egypt, Indonesia, and Turkey, switch to a free download and monetize through seed packs and skins (inferred). Launch the leaderboard on day one, and rank by school. That's the growth engine for the whole product.

How to get users: open an official TikTok account and name one university's ranking in every video: "How did the students at XX University get this good?" "YY University just caught up from behind," then let the students fight it out in the comments. Find the first seed users in student groups and student unions at a few universities, so schools are already competing on the leaderboard from the start. In the first few days after launch, find an X or TikTok account with a local student following and get them to post a recommendation. Put Latin letters in the store name so users can still find you in search.

When to launch: follow the school calendar and exam season. If you're building for Egypt or the Gulf states, the best time to launch is before the 2027 January final exams. If you miss that, the next window is the start of the second semester in February. Study routines shift during Ramadan, so you could also release a Ramadan-specific version (inferred). Indonesia and Malaysia have different academic calendars, so look up local school schedules separately.

Signs you've misread the opportunity: ① Azr3 itself releases an Egyptian or Gulf version, or Forest adds prayer times and Arabic local content, and the gap is gone. ② Azr3's rating growth in Saudi Arabia stays at single digits per day for a long stretch, and it drops out of the top 20 on the paid chart. That means the school-ranking buzz only lasted one semester and didn't keep people. ③ In your first 10 videos naming schools in the target country, the comments don't have students arguing with each other. That means local students don't care about school rivalry the way Saudi students do, and this growth tactic won't work.