Why I'm Taking Apps Global: What Living in Australia and Spain Taught Me

I’m a data engineer. I’ve never shipped a consumer app.

So why am I building one for overseas markets?

The honest answer started a few years ago, living in Melbourne, watching people around me pay premium prices for software tools that had mediocre Chinese alternatives — or no alternatives at all.

What Living Abroad Actually Teaches You #

I’ve lived in both Australia and Spain. Not as a tourist — actually living there, using local apps, watching what people around me paid for, and noticing what was missing.

A few patterns kept showing up:

The gap isn’t about quality — it’s about distribution. Chinese developers build genuinely good tools. But they’re invisible to Western users. The App Store discovery problem is real, and most Chinese indie developers have no idea how to solve it for overseas markets.

Local users have different tolerance for friction. Australian and European users will pay for software that respects their time. They expect clear pricing, privacy-conscious design, and support that responds in their timezone. These aren’t hard requirements — they’re just ignored by most developers building for overseas markets from the inside.

AI search is creating a new discovery channel. This is the part most developers are still missing. In 2026, a growing share of app discovery starts with a question to ChatGPT or Perplexity — not the App Store search bar. “What’s the best app for X?” is now an AI query. The apps that show up in those answers aren’t necessarily the most downloaded. They’re the ones with the most trustworthy, well-structured content around them.

Why I’m Doing This Without Experience #

The obvious question: if you’ve never shipped an app for overseas users, what makes you qualified to write about it?

The same reason anyone documents a process publicly — I’m going to learn it, and the learning is more useful shared than kept private.

I have things that matter here: genuine knowledge of the Australian and European markets from living in them, a data engineering background that makes me unusually good at measuring what’s working, and no prior assumptions about how app distribution is supposed to work.

Every mistake I make is a data point. Every thing that works gets written up.

What This Blog Is Actually About #

Three threads, running in parallel:

1. App出海 — The real process of taking an app to Australian and European markets. Product decisions, pricing, ASO, and what actually drives downloads outside China.

2. GEO Optimization — I’m treating this blog as a live experiment in getting discovered by AI search. Every post is structured to answer the kinds of questions people actually ask AI assistants. I’ll report what works.

3. Quant + AI Tools — My day job is data. I’ll document how I’m using AI to build trading tools and research systems, and what actually moves the needle.

The First Step #

Right now, the app doesn’t exist yet. This blog does.

The first real decision is figuring out which problem to solve — finding the category where Australian or European users have a real need that Chinese developers are positioned to fill better than local competitors. I’ll write that up next.

If you’re trying to do something similar, or you’ve already been through this and want to tell me where I’m about to go wrong — the Discord link is in the footer.

This is post #1. Published before I have anything to show. That discomfort is intentional.