A small Slovak company took three spots on Japan's sports chart with one speed-test template

A small Slovak company that started with a paint-color app turned an app that measured bowling speed for Indian cricket into "野球スピードガン" and sold it in Japan and Korea. Speed Gun: Ball Speed Radar is the newest package in this playbook: two and a half months live, 10k installs. It's not a hit. What's worth watching is how it squeezes onto the chart with very little volume. Below: how it works, why the volume is so small, and what you can take from it.

Japan sports chart, Nov 6

On Nov 6, Japan's Google Play Sports Top Free chart: #64 is "野球スピードガン:カメラで球速測定・ピッチング計測", #101 is "スピードガン:球速やボール速度を測定するレーダー", #103 is "クリケット・野球の球速測定スピードガン". The three apps have different names and different icons, but the same developer: Try the Colors s.r.o., registered in the small village of Biely Kostol in southwestern Slovakia.

#101 is the Speed Gun: Ball Speed Radar in this piece (package com.domingo.speedgun). In Korea it's called "스피드건: 구속 및 스포츠 공 속도 측정" and ranked #160 on the same day's Sports Top Free chart; in Mexico it's "Radar de Velocidad de Pelota".

What it is

An app that measures ball speed with your phone camera. You film a throw, mark the frame where the ball leaves the hand and the frame where it arrives, enter the distance, and it calculates the speed. The store page says it measures baseball, tennis serves, soccer shots, cricket, hockey, golf, "even passing cars". The Japanese description is a full translation, not a machine translation of a sentence or two.

Ad-supported, with in-app purchases, priced on Google Play at $4.99–$29.99. The parent app's one-star reviews in India are blunt: "₹299 weekly auto-charge... it charged me 2,000 rupees without any reminder," and the developer replied that refunds have to go through Google. So this series most likely makes money from a weekly subscription (an inference from the parent app's reviews).

Numbers: flat and very small

Third-party estimates: in September it ran 50–100 installs a day; from Oct 2 it rose to 100–350 and has stayed in that range since, with a single-day peak of 745 (10-30). No spike, just a slowly rising long tail. The early-October lift may be tied to Japan's autumn tournaments or the Japan–Korea professional baseball postseason, or it may just be a title update (inference, no direct evidence).

300 installs a day, why that's enough to chart

Because the bar for Japan's Android sports Top Free chart is absurdly low. On the same day, on the same chart, #65 TRACK HUB had only 265 total installs and #78 PickleballBear had 3,213. The rest of the chart is mostly team apps and score apps: large installed bases, few new installs. Many Japanese people use iPhones, few people install new sports apps on Android each day, so a few hundred global installs a day (only part of them from Japan) is enough to land around the top 100.

Once it's on the chart, people click through from the chart, and the ranking in turn helps search. It's a cheap little loop.

The real thing is the parent app

This company has 20 apps on Play with roughly 5.5M total installs. The biggest is Paint my Room from 2020 (wall color previews, 3.01M installs), then Lightbox tracing from 2025 (1.27M), and Music Tube, a background player that launched in August this year (420k, +77k a week). This speed-gun series came out of that:

1. In 2025 October, they first made Bowling speed Meter, aimed at measuring bowling speed in Indian cricket. By 11-06 it had 357k installs, 1,700+ reviews and a 4.5 rating. The top-liked review: "I didn't know I could throw 118 km/h" (India, 33 people found it helpful).
2. In Japan it was already being sold as a baseball speed gun: the Japan listing was titled "クリケット・野球の球速測定スピードガン:スマホで簡単計測", and reviews there said "いがいと1おもろい" (surprisingly fun) and "本格的" (legit), which the developer answered in Japanese each time.
3. On 2026 Aug 20, two new packages launched the same day: one baseball-only (Baseball Pitch Speed Radar Gun, "棒球測速槍" in Taiwan), and this one, a general all-sports version (Speed Gun), later joined by a softball version. The code is basically the same; what changes is the title, description, screenshots and default distance.

The two Aug 20 packages both sat around 11-06k installs, +10xx a week, by 2,2, with nearly overlapping curves. That suggests they split the same stream of search traffic rather than each being a strong product. Three packages each holding one search slot for "スピードガン", "球速" and "野球" is the whole point of the move.

Where users come from

• Store search (near-certain): a localized title per country stuffed with the words locals actually search. Locally built speed-test apps are rare on Japan's Android; the good Japanese one (MONOPOLEAPPS' "野球スピードガン!フォーム比較", 5,628 ratings) is mostly on iPhone, so Android search results aren't crowded.
• Cross-promotion within the developer's apps and "similar apps" recommendations (inference): the 357k-install parent app and the new packages sit on the same Japan and Korea charts, and Play's "more apps by this developer" passes along some traffic.
• Paid acquisition: no trace of this developer advertising found (not finding it doesn't mean it didn't). At a few hundred installs a day, mostly from ads and weekly subscriptions, large-scale buying wouldn't pencil out.
• Social and content: none. Nobody on X or TikTok was found talking about it. Japanese review site app-liv's "Top 3 speed gun apps" list from this year recommends only iPhone apps, and this one isn't among them.

Almost no one outside has noticed this company or this playbook.

Who it's competing with

This niche is old and crowded:

English-market coaches and parents recommend AI video speed apps like Rapsodo, Mind & Muscle, and PitchLab (see the Reddit r/LittleLeague threads). This developer's speed app isn't on any of those lists. On product (film a video, step frame by frame, enter the distance), there's no provable difference from the same-category apps since 2016.

If it were you

C: Learn from it, but copying this app isn't worth it. The app itself has a very low ceiling: 330 installs a day, weekly subscriptions, so one-SKU revenue is probably tiny (est.). Speed testing is already a category on Android with two million-install incumbents, plus this developer's own four packages crowding in. The valuable part is the playbook, not the product.

Who it fits: indie devs who already have one or two utility apps working, can do ASO, and can find native speakers to proofread titles and descriptions. What you'd learn: one template, split into packages by sport × language, and targeting low-barrier country × category charts.

Who it doesn't fit: anyone who wants to build a speed app from scratch to make money. You have no 357k-install parent app to funnel traffic, and you can't build a product difference; you'd most likely end up as the fifth same-category app, ranked 100 places or more down.

How to do it: apply this playbook to your own category. First get one single-feature utility working in a big market (here, Indian cricket). Then look at which countries call the feature what (in Japan: スピードガン, 球速), and open a package or at least a localized title for each term. Prioritize "country × category" charts where #100 only needs a few hundred installs a day: Japan and Korea Android category charts are examples, and other smaller-language markets are worth scanning too. If you really want an opening in speed testing, the only visible one is iPhone Japan: this developer's speed series has only a cricket version on iPhone, the Japanese iOS leaders have 5,628 ratings, and two new entrants appeared in July, both small (inferred, iPhone volume not verified).

How to acquire users: store search. Write titles and descriptions with the search terms locals actually use, use local sports scenes in screenshots (in Japan, youth baseball and high school baseball), and reply to every review in the local language. This developer even replied to "いがいと1おもろい".

When to start: no rush. This is long-term ASO work, not something that depends on one event. Japanese baseball interest peaks around the spring selection tournament (March) and the summer Koshien (August), so if you want to test speed apps, launch before March.

What would show you're wrong: ① if these two new August packages grow past 10k a week around the 2027 spring tournament, or enter the Japan sports Top Grossing chart, the niche is bigger than it looks and worth serious work; ② conversely, if they drop out of the top 150 of the Japan sports chart a month later, then even the low-barrier chart path only supports the parent app and the spun-off packages aren't worth building; ③ if Google Play tightens its rules on one developer using near-duplicate apps to occupy the same keyword set (the duplicate-content policy), this playbook stops working.

Sources

• Google Play: store pages for Speed Gun: Ball Speed Radar, Baseball Pitch Speed Radar Gun, and Bowling speed Meter in the Japan, India, and US stores (11-06); install counts and chart ranks come from Google Play daily data (10-29 to 11-06). The install history curve is an estimate from the third-party AppstoreSpy.
• Developer page: Play developer page (id 7945208132009026325); Slovak company registry finstat.sk (Try the Colors s.r.o.).
• Competitor scale: Google Play and App Store Japan store (11-06).
• Recommendations and discussion: app-liv.jp "スピードガンアプリおすすめ3選", mindandmuscle.ai, Reddit r/LittleLeague "Phone radar gun", pocketradar.com.
• Where "inferred" or "est." appears, it's an inference or estimate; no public revenue figures exist.