We Launched Planes.FYI on Apple TV — And the Internet Noticed

About a month ago, we shipped Planes.FYI for Apple TV. We expected a slow burn. What happened instead was a weekend that none of us will forget — and a lot of hastily scaled infrastructure. This is the short story of that launch, and what we learned.

The quiet plan

Planes.FYI started as a web experiment: a free 3D flight tracker that rendered live aircraft on a real globe, using open ADS-B data. iOS followed a few months later. Apple TV was something we kept talking about in Slack — the big, sitting-far-back, "ambient aviation in your living room" experience that nobody really had.

We built the tvOS app over a handful of weekends, ported our Metal renderer to the TV, and added a QR-code sign-in flow so you could pair your account from your phone instead of typing with a remote. The plan for launch was modest: submit to the App Store, post a few screenshots on Mastodon, see what happens.

Then Reddit happened

On launch morning, someone we do not know posted a short video of the app running on a 65-inch OLED to r/appletv. The headline was something like: "This free flight tracker is the perfect ambient app for Apple TV." By the time we saw it, the post had a few thousand upvotes and hundreds of comments. By the end of the day it had crossed the front page of the subreddit and was being reposted in r/aviation, r/flightsim, and r/AppleWatch (we are still not sure why that last one).

The comments did a better job of explaining the value than our own marketing did. People talked about leaving the globe spinning in the background while they worked from home. About kids identifying aircraft overhead in real time. About pilots using it as a small personal radar between trips. About retirees who lived near airports treating it like a fireplace channel.

“Finally, an Apple TV app that is actually designed for the 10-foot experience, not a scaled-up phone app.”

What broke

Flight tracking is expensive on the backend. Every active session is streaming aircraft positions from our servers in near real time, and Apple TV users tend to leave the app open for a long time — exactly the pattern we wanted, except our capacity planning did not expect it on day one.

• Our websocket fan-out briefly fell over under the new load
• Cold starts on two regions spiked and added noticeable lag for a while
• The QR code sign-in service hit a rate limit we did not know existed
• Our Firestore bill for the weekend was… educational

Nothing was permanently broken. A few hours of scrambling, some careful autoscaling tweaks, and a much more generous cache later, we were comfortably handling the surge. But it was a good reminder that launch day is always a load test in disguise.

What we learned

A handful of takeaways from the weekend:

• Apple TV users want ambient, not interactive. The most-used mode is simply leaving the globe running in the corner of the living room.
• QR-code sign-in is non-negotiable. Nobody wants to type an email address with a Siri Remote.
• People care about text size and contrast at 10 feet more than developers realise.
• Communities will market a genuinely good product for you. We had no paid launch budget. The post that did it was not ours.
• Plan for a 10x traffic spike even when your plan is to launch quietly. Especially then.

What is next

We are keeping the app free. That is a promise. Premium features (saved favourites across devices, higher-resolution aircraft models, extra airport detail) are optional and will stay that way. The basic 3D flight tracking experience on your Apple TV will not sit behind a paywall.

Since launch we have shipped a few updates based on feedback from that Reddit thread: a smoother auto-follow mode, better cinematic camera paths over interesting aircraft, and a much-improved low-light background for late-night viewing. More is coming — including an ambient "glass cockpit" mode we are quietly prototyping for the next release.

Thank you

To everyone who upvoted, commented, recommended the app to a friend, or just left it running on a rainy Sunday — thank you. This is easily the most fun we have had shipping a product in years, and it only happened because thousands of curious people decided to hit install on something they had never heard of. That is a gift.