For people who want to paint models on the train, a £2.99 app: Miniature Studio hit #36 on the UK Top Paid chart in two weeks

UK indie developer Jake Ellis built an app that lets people "really paint" Warhammer-style miniatures on their phone, released in Oct 22 as a one-time £2.99 purchase. In Nov 6 it ranked #36 on the UK overall Top Paid chart and #4 in Iceland, and it appeared on overall Top Paid charts in 15 countries. It has no ratings on the App Store, no press coverage, and 85 followers on TikTok. How did it get there, and could you build one? The sections below walk through it.

The starting point: wanting to paint on the train with nowhere to put the paints

The website explains how the app came about in three lines: "It started on a train. Wanting to paint. Nowhere to put the paints."

Anyone who plays with miniatures gets this. A 28 mm figure needs primer, base coat, layering, washes, drybrushing, and highlights, and a pot of Citadel paint costs four or five pounds (estimated). Get a color scheme wrong and you have to strip it and start over. "Can I test this color scheme on a computer first?" has come up every year since 2021 on r/minipainting, r/resinprinting, and Facebook groups like Eavier Metal, and no good answer existed.

Miniature Studio's answer: spin a 3D model on your phone or iPad and paint on it directly with your finger or an Apple Pencil.

What it is

• Freehand painting on 3D models: primer, layering, washes, Contrast-style effects, adjustable drybrushing, and one-tap spraying of a whole model.
• Real paint names: Citadel's Base / Shade / Layer / Contrast / Dry lines, Army Painter's Warpaints Fanatic and Speedpaint, and Vallejo's Model Color and Game Color, searchable by paint name or code. Up to four paints can be mixed in ratios to make a new color, and recipes can be saved.
• 能导入自己的模型:STL 文件在手机上本地展 UV、上底漆,USDZ 也能直接打开。玩 3D 打印的人手里都有一堆 STL,这一点正好对上他们。
• Offline, no sign-up, one-time purchase: the website says "One-time purchase. No subscriptions or in-app purchases." £2.99 in the UK, $2.99 in the US. English only, requires iOS 18 or later.

The developer is active: the first App Store version is already 1.5 (it had run a free TestFlight beta before), and in Nov 6 they shipped 1.7, adding layers, opacity lock, and iCloud sync across devices.

How much it grew

App Store charts by country, 10-28 to 11-06.

Two things to keep in mind:

• A top spot in a small country's chart means little; #36 in the UK is what counts. A few sales can get you onto the overall Top Paid chart in Iceland or Luxembourg. #36 in the UK suggests roughly tens of sales a day, and worldwide perhaps tens to a couple hundred a day (inferred, since Apple doesn't publish download numbers). At £2.99 each, that's tens to hundreds of pounds of revenue a day.
• The home market is the UK and Europe; it never made the US overall chart, only #5 on the Graphics & Design paid sub-chart. Warhammer's parent company Games Workshop is British, and the UK is also the biggest market for miniatures, so the distribution fits.

Where the users came from: from Nov 2, two TikToks a day

The timing of the chart run is clear. The official account @miniaturestudioapp posted "Check out our FREE beta now" in Oct 18, which got only 249 views. Starting in Nov 2 it switched to two posts a day, each opening in a standard sales voice:

• 11-03 "Less than a pot of paint. A whole lot for your hobby.": 8,483 views
• 11-04 "Where has this app been my whole life?!": 10,371 views, 333 likes, 52 shares
• A few others: "WHO was going to tell me there's an APP specifically for miniature painting?!" "POV: Your paint collection keeps growing…" "I dare you to try Miniature Studio and not love it." Each got a few hundred to over a thousand views.

(TikTok, 11-06 view)

11-03 and 11-04 both passed 8,000, and 11-05 was the first to put it on the overall Top Paid chart, which also brought it into 11-06 countries' charts 15. An account with 85 followers hitting 10,000 views, with ad-style copy, suggests it may have been boosted with paid ads (inferred, no ad records found, and not finding them doesn't mean there were none). The matching Instagram account has 418 followers and posts in sync with TikTok, with a "almost here" teaser before launch.

The most common question in the comments on these videos is one thing:

i can't find it in the play store... andriod when? is it on android?

The website says the Android version is coming "Later in 2026," with no set date.

There's no discussion on Reddit or X, no press coverage, and no sign of an Apple feature. For now, this is one person, two social accounts, and a few dozen short videos a month.

Why this one

1. The need existed, but no one had done it well. The closest competitor, impcat, launched in 2020 at $2.99, but it stacks colors in four steps (base, layer, shade, highlight) over photos or 2D zone maps, using only the official models you can't freely paint on. In the US it has 51 ratings averaging 2.6. Miniature Studio passed it on the UK overall Top Paid chart within two weeks of launch (during the same period impcat appeared on the overall chart only once, at #146 in Ireland 11-01).
2. It's obviously made by people who know the hobby. The paint names, lines, washes, and drybrushing all match, so insiders trust it at a glance and are willing to pay £2.99 right away.
3. Pricing takes no thought. "Less than a pot of paint" puts the app's price next to something they buy every week. One-time purchase, offline, no sign-up also speaks directly to the community's dislike of subscriptions, and there are threads in the hobby asking for "paint management apps without subscriptions."
4. The short videos reached inside the community. Tags like #warhammer #warhammercommunity #modelpainting pushed the videos to people already watching miniature content.

Who it's competing with

"Free-hand paint a 3D model on your phone, using real paint names" was basically empty. Games Workshop's own App only covers rules and army lists. Haven't seen anyone copy it yet. The same week, a UK indie dev put out Pocket Paintbox ($4.99, digital watercolor on your phone). The idea is similar: package a hands-on hobby into a phone app, sold as a one-time purchase, but that one isn't about miniatures.

Risks

• Small market. Miniature painting is a niche community, not a mass market. At £2.99 one-time, a few dozen sales a day is a decent side income for one person, not enough to fund a team.
• No repeat purchases. One-time purchase means no renewals. Future revenue depends on a constant stream of new users.
• Trademark risk. It uses paint names from brands like Citadel, and the website explicitly says it's "not official and not licensed." Games Workshop is notoriously strict about IP, so this is a sword hanging over it (inferred).
• No user feedback yet. 0 ratings and 0 store reviews. Whether the AI import works well and whether people stick around can't be judged yet.

If it were you

Verdict: worth a try, but don't just clone the iOS version. The empty spaces are two: Android, and other hands-on hobbies. The ceiling on this business is low, so it suits a solo side project.

Who it's for: developers who can do 3D rendering (Unity, Godot, or native Metal/Vulkan) and handle mesh UVs and texture painting; ideally people who play with models, embroidery, nails, or pottery themselves and can name the community's materials and techniques.

Who it's not for: anyone aiming for a mass market, a subscription model, or a team. Users who know the hobby will leave if the paint names or techniques are wrong.

How to do it:

1. An Android version is coming first. TikTok comments keep asking for Android, and the original dev said "later in 2026," with no date set. The existing Android option impcat is 2D, and ColorMinis is a casual coloring game. Neither is this. The core is three things: 3D model brushes (layering, washes, drybrushing), a real paint library, and STL import. Pricing one-time at around $2.99, same as the original.
2. Build it for another hobby. The same idea is "bring the trial-and-error cost of a physical hobby into a phone app": weathering and washes on plastic kits, thread matching for embroidery, nail color testing, glaze tests for pottery, tattoo design trials. Pick one where materials are expensive, mistakes are hard to undo, and the community has standard names for its materials.
3. Do what it doesn't do well. Community recipe sharing, tutorial mode ("paint it like this finished piece"), and one-tap shopping lists for the paints once you've picked colors. None of these exist in it today, and the last two could link to paint purchase pages.

How to acquire users: copy its approach. Brand accounts on TikTok and Instagram posting two videos a day, with openers in a product-pitch voice ("Where has this been my whole life", "POV", "Less than a pot of …"), anchoring the app price against a physical price, and using community hashtags. In a small community, one video reaching 10K views is enough to push a paid app onto the UK chart. Reddit's painting subreddits and Discord servers can supplement this, but follow their rules.

Timing: for the Android segment, move before the original dev ships Android, roughly before the end of 2026. After that you're going head-to-head with an established original that already has word of mouth. The approach of swapping in a different hobby has no such deadline.

Signs you've misread it: ① it falls out of the UK overall paid top 200 within two weeks and never comes back, meaning the volume came from one wave of videos and can't sustain itself; ② the first ratings average below 3.5, with complaints about lag or models not importing, meaning 3D hand-painting on a phone doesn't work well yet; ③ Games Workshop sends a letter or the app gets pulled, meaning using real paint names is a dead end; ④ the original dev ships Android within November, and the window for copying the Android angle closes at position 1.

Data and sources

• Charts: App Store overall paid charts by country and the Graphics & Design paid subchart, 10-28 to 11-06; version, price, and ratings: App Store page (11-06).
• Website copy, pricing, Android plans, and the non-official disclaimer: miniature-studio.co.uk (11-06).
• TikTok video copy, view counts, and comments: @miniaturestudioapp public profile (11-06); Instagram @miniaturestudioapp (11-06).
• Competitors: App Store pages for impcat, Plumage, and Pocket Paintbox; Google Play page for ColorMinis; BrushForge author's Medium article (2026-09); IGN coverage of BrushHammer.
• Demand threads: r/minipainting, the Facebook group Eavier Metal.
• Daily unit sales, whether paid acceleration is used, and Games Workshop's stance are all inferred. No public data.