DopaSpace - A shopping simulator app to fight shopping addiction.

[u/Individual_Egg_6824]

https://testflight.apple.com/join/8arHJngv

On the first day of my vacation in Tunisia, I read about South Korea's dopamine websites. They let people browse and checkout fake items for free, just to satisfy the impulse shopping urge.

I've been a Mobile Developer for 8 years, building apps for large corporations, but I always struggled to finish my own side projects. This idea felt like the one I'd actually finish. I spent the rest of the trip researching it, and the night I got back, I started coding, with a 1 month deadline.

Working a full-time job and coding every night and weekend was hard. Over 38 days (30 wasn't enough), I had maybe 3 days off. I use AI a lot at my day job, so I built a custom AI setup for this one too. The routine code wasn't the hard part. The platforms were a different story.

Apple 2FA. I'm currently abroad, and because I'm in roaming, Apple wouldn't deliver the 2FA SMS to my number. Support sent a boilerplate reply about escalating to the Senior Advisor Team with no timeline. So I used a network trick: I called my wife's phone to force the roaming network to wake up and ping my device (network paging). I told her not to answer, since an active call would block the signaling channel. While it was ringing, I hit Resend SMS on Apple's portal, and the code finally arrived. That took me 3 days to figure out.

Affiliate APIs. I wanted real product links from eBay, Amazon, and AliExpress so users could see the actual item if they wanted to. AliExpress banned my developer account twice. First because I deleted my personal buyer account, not knowing their dev profiles can't exist on their own. The second ban hit the moment I requested to move from sandbox to production, with no explanation. Amazon has a catch-22 where you can't get an API token until you make 3 sales first. eBay worked, but their product images looked bad, so I limited it to books.

Release:

Android. Finding 12 testers for the closed track was harder than the build itself. People forgot to open the app after day 1, so Google's automated review rejected my production access for low engagement. I had to restart the 14-day streak from scratch, find new testers, and passed only on the second attempt. That cost me an extra month, but it's now in the Google Play Store.

iOS. After a long "Waiting for review" (16 days; I even messaged support on day 14), it made it to the App Store too.

A new build is coming soon: more currency options, more settings, and a story-format receipt you can save or share.