Every indie dev needs a guinea pig.
We’re not big corporates. We don’t get staffed onto products that are roadmapped for months or quarters. That’s why we are human.
And being human means dealing with human things: the creative itch, the urge to try something new, the daunting thought of implementing a feature you can’t easily walk back from—especially in your top-grossing app.
You need more than a test Xcode project. You need something that’s out there, published on the App Store for people to download, use, and hopefully enjoy. You need the joy, thrill, and the learning when rubber meets the road.
A guinea pig is where off-shoot ideas go. It’s how you scratch that creative itch that pops up from time to time. It lets you try a new framework or technology safely, within a manageable scope, so you can harvest results quickly and build a real feedback loop.
I have a few guinea pigs of my own. Kodist is a free camera app that makes RAW photography on the iPhone. It’s not for the mass market like my other, revenue-generating camera app, but it’s unique. There are people who like it enough to tip me and get nothing in return. It also gave me the opportunity to rebuild an imaging pipeline from the ground up, and to experiment with newer image formats like HEIC and EDR—things that simply didn’t exist 5 years ago.
My latest guinea pig is Woolly, a gift card tracker. It gave me the freedom to explore iOS 26 design idioms. I used it to adopt the adaptive sidebar layout for iPad and iPhone, and to work through a localization process covering eight languages with the help of an LLM. Next, I’ll probably try SwiftUI accessibility and keyboard shortcuts. Most importantly, it scratched my creative itch so I could happily return to the apps I should be focusing on from a business perspective.
Lastly, you never know which guinea pig might turn into a hit—or even a cash cow. It’s a great way to diversify your portfolio and expose yourself to a new audience or a novel business model.
Your guinea pig doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to exist.
Sometimes the best thing you can do for your main product is build something else.