I spent hundreds of hours on this, so there is still some friction.

If I told you the exact market and use case, I'd still have a decent head start, but indeed, someone without a job could invest more time than I do. People in a cheaper location can work for far cheaper than I can afford to.

With head start I don't meant that the idea is so novel that I need to keep it a secret. However, I believe that if there is an established app that does the same thing, and your app cannot beat it on quality, it will be hard to attract users.

Hundreds of hours doing what? If you're not reviewing the code, then what are you doing, just planning features? Because that would be trivial to copy in a fraction of the time by just feeding screenshots of your app to one's AI of choice.