An app factory making hundreds of millions a year launched a "small talk coach" app: Noticed didn't take off, but it shows how long the window for indie developers is

Turkish app factory Codeway put Noticed on the shelf in Oct 22, a subscription app that teaches small talk and more charismatic speaking. It copies a category that an independent team publicly shared revenue for half a year earlier. Two weeks later, Noticed has only 25 ratings and its chart rank is slipping. This piece explains what it is, why it appeared on the chart, who actually made money in this category, and whether you should get in.

Two weeks, 25 ratings, and a fixed-template update note

On the morning of Nov 6, Noticed shipped version 1.0.4. It's the fourth version in 15 days since launch, and the release notes match the earlier ones word for word: "This version fixes bugs and improves performance… Leave a review on the App Store." That same day it gained 10 ratings, reaching 25 total with an average of 4.5 (public Apple API, 11-06). The day before it added only 3, and the day before that 1.

Yet its rank is falling. On the US App Store education free chart, it was #127 on Nov 2 and #202 on Nov 6. The Android version launched on Oct 19, reached 2,342 installs by Nov 6, and ranked #197 on the Google Play US education free chart.

Rank is falling, but ratings bunched up on the two days a new version shipped. This looks more like a "rate us" prompt in the new version, or a small paid test starting (inference). It doesn't look like users found it on their own.

What it is

A "communication skills training" app. The title is "Noticed: Communication Skills", subtitle "Small Talk & Speech Coach". It has three things:

• A course path: reading, video lessons, flashcards, quizzes;
• "Small talk games": watch a real-person video of a conversation, then answer "what should you say here?";
• "Voice analysis": speak a passage into your phone, and it tells you whether you spoke clearly and naturally.

Monetization is the Noticed Pro subscription, $9.99 a month or $79.99 a year. The store description repeats communication skills, small talk, charismatic, leadership skills. It's a classic keyword-stuffing move for search ranking.

Who's behind it

The App Store seller is listed as "DEEP FLOW SOFTWARE SERVICES - FZCO", a Dubai company that looks new. But the same app on Google Play has package name com.codeway.softskill, with the developer listed as Codeway Technologies. Codeway's older products Cleanup and Learna also name this same Dubai company in their privacy policies (cleanup.photos privacy policy).

Codeway is headquartered in Istanbul. Its LinkedIn claims 400+ people, 60+ apps, and 600M cumulative downloads. The growth blog The Growth Hacking Lab estimates its annual revenue at $1 to $150M, and Meta has published an ad case study on it. Under the same developer account, the cleaning tool Cleanup ranks #41 on the US overall top-grossing chart, and the English-learning app Learna ranks #84 (11-06). Since June it has launched roughly one new app a month: June finance, August GLP-1 weight-loss log, Oct 5 translation, Oct 22 Noticed, Oct 23 scanner.

So Noticed isn't a small team's debut. It's a test run from a large factory's assembly line. Learna's formula of "video courses + exercises + voice feedback + subscription" with a different topic is exactly Noticed.

Why it made the chart

It comes from the factory's standard launch playbook, not from user word of mouth:

The "PREMIERE" tag makes it look like an Apple editorial pick, but it isn't. It's the label for an In-App Event, which developers can apply for themselves in the dashboard. The upside is that events can be indexed by store search and may show up in search results and featured spots. Running two events at launch, one for the debut and one riding "Career Development Month," is a trick anyone can use.

It didn't rely on social media. Searching "noticed app" or "small talk app" on TikTok turns up nothing about it, and nobody on X has mentioned it in the past 90 days (11-06). Codeway's usual playbook is to run Facebook ads from a same-named Page for each app. For example, the scanner app it launched in Oct 23 had 79 ads running by Nov 3. Noticed's Page hasn't turned up, so either it hasn't started advertising or the ads haven't been seen (unverified).

In a category with a low barrier to entry like education, these moves alone can get an app into the top couple hundred of the Top Free chart. Breaking out is still a long way off.

Who validated this category: an indie app that grew from ten-minute story videos

Codeway zeroed in on this category because someone had already made money from it.

On Jun 12, 2025, an indie dev named Charles posted a TikTok: "Grinded for three months, and it's finally live." The app is Gleam: Social Intelligence, pitched as a "social skills gym" that trains chatting, dating and interviews through real-life scenarios. By Nov 6, it had 12,081 ratings in the US store, 116 new ones in the last 7 days, and ranked #147 in the Education free chart.

Its growth came from long TikTok videos. A case study by Social Growth Engineers from Apr 9 says Gleam's downloads rose from 30k to 30k in 70 days, monthly subscription revenue passed $100k, "driven by ten-minute storytime videos." This format is still running: a fictional story from Sep 13 (about a socially anxious guy slowly learning to talk to people), nearly 10 minutes long and tagged #gleampartner, got 520k views on TikTok. The founder later said in a YouTube interview that it hit $140k in a single month with 400k users.

Lining up the timeline: Gleam launched in June 2025, its revenue was publicly broken down in April 2026, and in October a large studio moved in. About 6 months passed between the case study going public and a big studio following.

Who it's competing with

Filtering the US App Store by names containing small talk, communication skill, charisma, social skill, speaking coach or rizz turns up more than 200 apps, most of them new this year. Here are the ones with real volume:

Add ChatGPT's voice mode and free or ready-made practice tools like Yoodli, and users who want to practice speaking already have plenty of options.

Noticed's only slightly distinctive product choice is "watching real actors perform casual conversation videos before answering questions." There are no reviews yet to judge whether that improves retention: the store page shows only one five-star short review. Where it really differs from indie developers is behind the scenes: paywall testing, large-scale Meta ad buying and multilingual localization (Learna is already running ads in Vietnamese and Spanish). Codeway has all of these ready to go.

If it were you

C: You can learn from it, but following it isn't worth the cost. Noticed itself hasn't taken off yet, but the English social-skills space it sits in already has 200+ apps, one publicly shared revenue case study and at least two big studios. Copying Noticed means a small team competing for ad spend against a studio that earns over $100M a year.

Who it suits: a small team of 1–2 people who can make long TikTok story videos or find a group of creators to collaborate with; developers whose native language isn't English and who have firsthand experience of local social situations (workplace small talk, dating, drinking with colleagues).

Who it doesn't suit: those who can only write code and want to rely on ASO and organic store traffic; those who want to head-on build "Gleam II" in the English market.

How to do it: If you must enter, don't go after Noticed. Look at what Gleam hasn't done: switch languages and scenarios, for example Japanese workplace small talk, Korean dating openers or Chinese dinner-table conversation. Build practice around local real-person scenario videos, and price subscriptions one tier below the US. On features, Noticed and Gleam have already made "course + practice questions + voice feedback" standard, so there's no need to reinvent that.

How to get users: Follow Gleam's approach, not Noticed's. Make 5–10 minute "socially anxious to confident" story videos, bring in the app naturally at the end, and post them with creator collaboration tags. On launch week, set up in-app events: one for the debut, one riding that month's topic. It costs nothing.

Deadline: From the public breakdown of this category to big studios rolling it out across languages took about half a year. Codeway's Learna is already running Vietnamese and Spanish ads, and if Noticed gets more budget, the next step will likely be more languages. If you want a non-English version, it's best to launch before spring 2027 and get a first video that actually drives traffic.

Signs you've misread this: ① Noticed climbs back within the next two weeks, reaches the top 50 of Education Top Free, or starts showing up heavily in the Meta ad library: this means Codeway has decided to scale up, the paid-acquisition ceiling in this category is higher than expected, and the English market still has room for players with budgets. ② Noticed drops off the charts within a month and stops shipping updates: this means the studio tested it and gave up, possibly without ever running the numbers on paid acquisition, so small teams should be even more careful. ③ In the language you plan to build in, a local team has already turned the same category into thousands of ratings with story videos: that gap is already gone.