He Got Creeped Out. Then He Shipped An App.

Pawel Szydlowski is a 30-year-old software developer in Poland. Last month he put an app on the App Store called ZuckOff. It tells you when someone near you is wearing camera glasses.

By this week it had roughly 5,000 users and two spots on the Hacker News front page on the same day, one of them at 590 points.

He did not raise money. He did not have a co-founder. He had a feeling, and he did one unglamorous thing that almost nobody does, which is the actual lesson here.

Camera glasses broadcast Bluetooth signals, the same way headphones or a smartwatch do. Those signals have patterns. ZuckOff listens for them and tells you when a known pair of glasses is nearby and roughly how far away it is.

That is it. It reads what is already being shouted into the air.

There is a free version that scans when you open it, and a paid tier called ZuckOff Pro that keeps watching in the background and sends a notification when glasses appear even if the app is closed.

The app has spread to places nobody planned for. Music writers noticed people using it on dance floors at shows.

Szydlowski told Business Insider he was unsettled by videos of people using camera glasses to record and identify strangers who had no idea a camera was pointed at them.

So the idea did not come from a brainstorm, a list of trending markets, or asking an AI for startup ideas. It came from being bothered by something and then refusing to just be bothered.

This is the most reliable idea source there is and teenagers are sitting on a pile of it. Something at school is annoying. Something about a game is unfair. Something about how a shop works makes no sense. Most people complain and move on. A very small number write down the complaint and then ask what would fix it.

The complaint is not the business. The complaint is the raw material.

Here is the detail I want any teenager reading this to notice.

To build a detector, he needed to know exactly what these glasses sound like over Bluetooth. Nobody publishes that. So he bought several models of smart glasses, sat down, and catalogued the Bluetooth fingerprint of each one. Then he wrote software that compares what your phone hears against that catalogue.

That is boring work. It costs money. It takes a weekend at minimum. There is no clever shortcut and no tool that does it for you.

And it is the entire product. Anyone can write the app around it. Almost nobody will do the cataloguing.

Most business ideas die at exactly this step. Somebody has a good concept, reaches the part that requires unglamorous effort, and quietly decides the idea was not that good after all. The willingness to do the boring middle is the thing that separates a person with ideas from a person with a product.

The model here is worth explaining because a lot of young builders think apps make money from downloads. They mostly do not.

ZuckOff is free to download. The free version answers the question "are there glasses here right now?" That is enough for someone who is curious once.

The paid tier answers a different question: "tell me whenever glasses show up, even when I am not looking." That is for someone who is worried regularly, not curious once.

That is the whole trick. The free thing solves the occasional problem. The paid thing solves the ongoing one. If your free version is just a crippled version of the paid one, people feel manipulated. If it solves a real, smaller problem completely, they upgrade when their problem gets bigger.

Worth saying plainly: 5,000 users with some fraction paying a few dollars is not retirement money. It is a real, working, small business built by one person, which is a much more useful thing for a fifteen-year-old to aim at than a unicorn.

ZuckOff tells you camera glasses are nearby. It cannot tell you whether they are recording. Every article about it says so, because he says so.

He could have left that out. "Know when you are being recorded" sells better than "know when a device capable of recording is within range." He chose the accurate version.

That decision buys something. When a reviewer or a privacy forum digs into the app, they find the limitation already disclosed, so there is nothing to expose. Compare that with a product that oversells, gets caught, and spends the rest of its life arguing.

For a teenager selling anything, from cookies to a lawn service to a piece of software: describe what it does, not what you wish it did. You will lose a few sales at the start and you will keep customers for years.

The generic advice is "learn to code and make an app." That is not a plan. Here is one.

Pick a thing that bothers you personally, not one you think would be popular. You need the annoyance to survive the boring part.

Write one sentence: who has this problem, and what do they do about it now. If the current answer is "nothing," ask why. Sometimes the answer is that nobody cares enough.

Find the piece of the work that has no shortcut. Cataloguing glasses signatures. Calling forty local businesses. Timing a bus route every day for two weeks. That is where the product is.

Ship something embarrassing and small, to five people you can talk to.

Then decide what the paid version answers that the free one does not.

If your teen wants the plan written down somewhere rather than living in their head, a school notebook, a shared doc, or a structured planning tool like Foundra that walks first-time founders through problem, customer and pricing will all work. The format matters far less than the fact that the sentences exist.

There is a privacy discussion sitting right underneath this and it is worth having with a teenager directly, because camera glasses are now a normal thing to encounter.

A few points that land better than a lecture. Recording indicator lights exist and people have tampered with them; Meta disabled thousands of pairs after discovering that. A device being present does not mean it is on. And being recorded in a public place is often legal, which is precisely why an app like this found users.

The useful takeaway for a teenager is not fear. It is that when technology changes what is normal, somebody has to build the tools that let people push back, and that somebody can be one person with an App Store account.

• ZuckOff was built by one developer, launched last month, and reached about 5,000 users. No funding, no team.
• The idea came from being bothered by something real, not from searching for a market.
• The core work was buying several pairs of glasses and cataloguing their Bluetooth signatures. Boring, unavoidable, and the reason the product exists.
• The free tier answers an occasional question. The paid tier answers an ongoing one. That is a clean freemium split.
• He publicly states the app cannot confirm recording is happening. Accurate claims are cheaper than repaired reputations.
• A workable teen version: pick a personal annoyance, write one sentence about who has it, find the part with no shortcut, ship to five people.

Does the app actually work?

It detects Bluetooth broadcasts from glasses models in its catalogue and estimates distance. It cannot detect a model it has never seen, and it cannot tell you whether a camera is switched on.

Do you need to be a great programmer to build something like this?

You need to be a decent one, and more importantly patient. The hard part was the research, not the code. A teenager who can build a basic app and is willing to do tedious data collection is in range.

Is it legal to detect someone's glasses?

The app reads Bluetooth signals that devices broadcast publicly, similar to how your phone sees available headphones. That is different from intercepting private communication.

What age can someone publish on the App Store?

Apple requires developers to be at least 18 to hold an account, so a younger teenager typically publishes through a parent's account or an organisation account. Plenty of young developers ship this way.

How much money does an app like this make?

Nobody outside the company knows. With around 5,000 users and a small paid tier, the sensible assumption is a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a month at most. That is a real outcome for one person, not a life-changing one.

What if my teen's idea already exists?

Almost every good idea already exists somewhere. ZuckOff was not the first attempt at detecting nearby devices. It was the one that got the catalogue right and shipped it in a form people could use.

1. ZuckOff is a free app that sees Meta glasses before they see you, Wired Middle East, September 2026
2. A Polish developer built an app that detects nearby Meta smart glasses over Bluetooth, The Next Web
3. Zuckoff app can now use your phone to check for nearby Meta smart glasses, Digital Trends
4. ZuckOff: know when a camera is in the room (official site)
5. ZuckOff app detects Meta smartglasses, Slashdot, September 17, 2026
6. ZuckOff, an app to detect smartglasses from Meta and others, Privacy Guides community discussion