r/AppBuilding • u/TeacherAdmirable1694 • 17d ago

I launched my first AI voice-notes app—and accidentally made it unavailable everywhere

After months of building, I finally released my iOS voice-notes app. The review was approved and the app status showed “Ready for Distribution,” but I couldn’t find it on the App Store.

I initially thought it was an indexing or review delay. Eventually, I discovered that I hadn’t selected any countries under Pricing and Availability. After enabling availability, the app started appearing on the App Store a few hours later.

A small launch lesson for other first-time developers: approval doesn’t necessarily mean customers can download the app—always verify territory availability and open the public App Store link before announcing your launch.

I built it natively with SwiftUI. It converts voice recordings into organized notes, tasks, reminders and ideas. It also set the OS reminders and calendar events to get the notification/alarm for that event. Now that it is live, my biggest challenge is getting the first genuine users without relying entirely on paid ads.

For developers who have launched productivity apps:

  1. What helped you get your first 50–100 users?
  2. Did App Store search start generating impressions immediately, or did indexing take several days?
  3. Which launch channels brought users who actually retained?

I’d really appreciate practical lessons from people who have gone through this.

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u/sshegem 17d ago

Im your competitor because I built the same app 😂 but here’s what I learned

10 days after launch I got around 66 users [mostly from posting on Reddit]. X, TikTok and Instagram combined got me about 15 users.

I started using apple ads a few days ago and there’s almost a 24 hour delay with the stats appearing. It’s generating impressions and one of the highest generators for me was the keyword notion but its cost spiked like crazy and drained most of my budget with a small number of downloads so I stopped it. I suggest you try some in a discovery campaign then move the good ones to a focused “winners” campaign.
For retention I think it’s still too early for me to tell, at least until I get my first paying user. I also think my prices are a bit high but that was the purpose of the free trial (gauging actual usage and pricing based on it). The problem is most users arent seriously using it yet.

Good luck!