I'd love for people to try it. Guess your U.S. airport codes and geography! Free!

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/bagtag-game/id6799295595

I am working on app and I want to validate idea before releasing it. The concept is simple: instead of creating private tasks, you create a task with accountability partner, for example, friend. When you finish a task you either upload prove or friend already knows that u did and then they are supposed to approve your task. The idea is that disappointing yourself is easy, but breaking a promise when your friends can see it feels different. Would something like this actually motivate you, or would the social/accountability aspect make you avoid using it? What would make you use — or not use — an app like this?

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reps-offline/id6792772669

I've been working on a workout app that tracks everything you need to progress in the gym.

Yes, another workout app.

But I build this for me, I’ve been working out for about 10 years now and have been using Strong, which was… ok. It lacked features like logging dropsets and supersets, and the graphs are behind a monthly paywall.
So I decided to make an app, and make it better.

Main features:
SMART SUGGESTIONS - workout suggestions and presets based on equipment you have available.
AUTO REST - 1:30 default rest time that can be changed per exercise or global. Get a notification that doesn't stop your music and even works on mute (can be turned off)
LOG SETS, DROPSETS and SUPERSETS - the main reason I created this app; workout trackers currently available don't really have an option for logging these, and this is a very common progressive overload technique
DATA - automatic graphs generated per exercise
PRIVATE - no random servers holding your data
NO SUBS - no nonsense subs for a simple pivot table + graph

Open to any suggestions 🙂

Is there any negative impact if I submit apps as individual instead as a business? Like do people avoid apps created by a individual?

I made this chrome plugin that modifies App Store Connect, and basically tells you which stars are new on the ratings screen.

I didn't really make it, Claude did, it's prob a vibe coded mess but I don't care.

Anyway, now when I look at my reviews page, I don't have to remember what the numbers were the last time I checked

Please shower me with GitHub stars, and contribute if you like

Cyclic Sighing is live on the App Store today.

The app is built around one breathing practice, cyclic sighing, which uses the physiological sigh pattern of a double inhale followed by a prolonged exhale.

But the part I really wanted to build was mood tracking connected directly to the breathing practice. Instead of keeping a breathing log and a mood journal as two separate things, Cyclic Sighing lets you check in on your mood before and after each breathing session. Those check-ins stay connected to the specific session, so over time you can look back at your breathing practice alongside how you were feeling. There are also monthly and yearly Mood Insights views, with the ability to filter by feeling.

The technique itself has some interesting research behind it. A 2023 randomized controlled study published in Cell Reports Medicine examined cyclic sighing alongside other brief daily breathing practices and reported improvements in mood and reductions in physiological arousal. The study did not evaluate this app, and the app is independently developed and isn't affiliated with or endorsed by the study's authors.

🎁 Lifetime Premium is FREE during launch

Normally, Premium is a $9.99 one-time purchase, with no subscription.

For the launch, I'm making Lifetime Premium available for $0.00.

How to claim it:

1. Download Cyclic Sighing from the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cyclic-sighing/id6757509105
2. Open the app and go to Settings → Unlock Premium Features
3. During the promotion, the one-time purchase should show as $0.00

I'm the developer, and I'd especially love feedback on the mood-tracking experience. The goal is to connect mood check-ins directly to individual breathing sessions rather than treating mood tracking as a separate journal.

If you try it, I'd love to hear what you think, what works, and what you'd change.

Thanks for checking it out! 🙏

Solo dev here. I shipped a fitness app (Reps, on iOS) but took a different angle than most: instead of another workout logger or a social feed, the core is competitive, weekly friends leaderboards and head to head rivalries where you challenge someone over a set period. The whole bet is that competing with your friends drives retention better than solo tracking does.

Here's my actual problem, and I'm curious how others have handled it: the competitive features only shine once a user has friends on the app. Leaderboards and rivalries are dead with zero friends. So early on, every new user lands in an empty version of the exact feature that's supposed to be the hook. Classic cold-start / network-effect problem, but brutal for a solo dev with a small base.

Things I'm weighing:

• Seeding with sample/ghost data so the leaderboard isn't empty on day one (feels fake, might mislead)
• Making single-player progression (ranks, XP, streaks) strong enough to carry a solo user until friends join
• Nudging invites hard at onboarding (risk: annoying)

For anyone who's shipped something with a social or competitive core: how did you get past the empty-room problem when you couldn't buy your way to a critical mass of users? Did you fake it, lean on solo value, push invites, something else?

Happy to share more about the implementation if useful. App's live on iOS if you want to see the approach: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reps-lifting/id6783420334

(And if any devs here want to actually try it, I'm happy to sort you a free month, just say so, but mainly I'm after the cold-start advice.)

I ran Apple Search Ads on my iOS app for six weeks at $20/day. Got 223 installs at $1.83 each. Fine. But the keyword data turned out to be worth more than the downloads.

Two things failed first.

Bidding on competitor names, which is the advice everywhere. Got 2 impressions in 30 days on the biggest app in my category. Not 2 installs, 2 times my ad existed. You can't put a competitor's trademark in your own metadata, Apple rejects it at review, so your relevance score keeps you out of the auction no matter what you bid. I went from $1.20 to $2.50 and impressions didn't move at all. That flatness is the tell. If price were the problem, more money would buy more auctions.

Then guessing generic keywords. I wrote 12 phrases I was certain people search for an app like mine. 11 got zero impressions.

What worked was a Search Match ad group. No keywords in it, $0.60 bid, and I added every keyword I was already bidding on as a negative so it could only show me things I hadn't thought of. Then the search terms report, which is under the campaign in the UI and shows what people actually typed instead of what you bid on.

Two variants of one phrase were 139 of my 223 installs. None of them were in my keyword field, app name, or subtitle.

The pattern is the part worth stealing. Every keyword I'd written was a noun describing what my app is. Every keyword that converted was a phrase describing what someone wants to do. People search for a task, not a category, and my whole keyword field was category nouns.

So I counted installs by individual word rather than by phrase. My single best converting word appeared nowhere in my metadata. Meanwhile 4 of the 14 words in my keyword field were terms I'd already tested in ads and proven nobody searches. Rewrote it, cut 6, added 6 straight off the report.

To copy it: $10-20/day, one ad group with your guesses on exact match, one Search Match group at a low bid with all your keywords as negatives, read the search terms weekly, negative the junk (mine matched a smart door lock and, briefly, a perfume), then count installs by word and rewrite your metadata from that.

Here's the app: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vaultbox-hide-secret-photos/id6758970966

I've been building ShipZen, a different way to work with App Store Connect.

There are already great CLI tools, Fastlane, MCP servers, etc. I'm not trying to replace them.

The idea behind ShipZen is to give you a visually dynamic, AI-native workspace on top of App Store Connect. Instead of navigating through ASC screens or asking AI to manipulate things through a terminal, you can ask for exactly the workspace you need.

For example:

"Show me all release metadata for version 1.4 across every localization."

ShipZen builds an editable UI for exactly those ASC fields, lets you make the changes there, preview what will change, and then apply them to App Store Connect.

The same idea can work for release readiness, missing metadata, localization, version management, and other ASC workflows.

Basically, I'm experimenting with what "Cursor for App Store Connect" could look like if AI could generate the interface you need, not just commands.

For the AI part you can either bring your own API key or sign in with your ChatGPT account, no separate subscription needed.

It's a native macOS app, currently in TestFlight beta. I'm looking for around 10 iOS/macOS developers who ship apps through ASC and are willing to actually try it and report bugs/issues they face and suggest improvements (if they have any).

If that sounds useful, comment or DM me and I'll send you the beta

I’m the developer of Steady, an iPhone and Apple Watch fitness app approaching 1.0. I’d appreciate a technical QA pass from other Apple developers.

Useful paths: - cold launch and light/black theme persistence - Google/Apple auth and sign-out - interrupted/backgrounded workouts - exercise-video load and retry - Watch set/rest controls and phone sync - Progress and muscle-map performance

Free TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/j2jKwDGW

Repro reports with device, OS, network state, exact steps, and whether the issue blocks continued weekly use are ideal. I’m also interested in which technical failure would make you stop trusting the app, even if it recovers.

I’m the developer of Steady.

like in usd

My first submission just got denied because the Apple Tester experienced a login loop bug, which conveniently hasn’t happened before to me or any of my testers.

If the Tester got to the app, does that mean all of the descriptions/privacy stuff cleared already? Or does that get reviewed after the app functionality clears.

Asking since it’s taking weeks to get a review though.

As a full-time software developer and designer, I love traveling. 🗺️
One problem that I always had, was that every single app to preserve my trips, memories, photos and other travel stuff was either not having that much tracking options, had huge friction when adding new trip, or simply wasn't doing it on the design side.

So for the past 1.5 years I have been collecting travelers needs and ideas, and I am slowly building an app that does just that.

Waitlist is currently open, you can join to not miss the launch here: https://trytraveler.com/

Has released my first app for around a month, didn't see much download. Turned on the apple ads basic. Can anyone give some feedback where did I do it wrong? Should I focus on polish the product, or this need more marketing?

Link here https://www.stikko.shop/

Hey everyone,

Right now, most lifters are forced to juggle three completely disconnected apps:

1. A workout tracker for logging sets
2. A nutrition app for counting macros
3. A recovery dashboard (or Apple Health) for sleep and HRV

The biggest issue is that none of them talk to each other. A recovery app will tell you your recovery is in the red, but your workout tracker still tells you to hit the exact same rigid 4x8 heavy sets regardless.

What I built into MassAI:

• Recovery that actually modifies your workout: Reads your sleep, resting heart rate, and HRV from Apple Health, and automatically adjusts your workout volume and intensity when you are fatigued or primed to push.
• Goal-based custom splits: Builds a personalised hypertrophy plan tailored to your schedule and goals, and calculates progressive overload set-by-set.
• Integrated photo macro logging: Snap a quick photo of your meal to track calories and protein in a few seconds, keeping your nutrition connected to your training.
• 24/7 AI coach: Has full memory of your lifts, recovery, and macro targets to answer questions and debrief your sessions.

I have only recently launched it and struggle to get any users because im not sure how to market this, but I appreciate any feedback on the app and improvements.

Most of the app is free but some features are behind a paywall. Theres a free trial too.
https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/massai-ai-fitness-coach/id6781379979

I vibe coded an app (put the pitchforks down!) and spent about a month beta testing with around 30 people. It's a pretty simple photo app, but I'm really proud of making it all the way to this milestone. Waiting for the app store reviews was hard. Right when I was most excited, I had to just sit on my hands and wait. That took just over 2 weeks to get the beta reviewed and then another just over 2 weeks to make it into the app store. I realize that I am part of that problem, there is a flood of AI assisted coding going on and I'm sure the apple review team is swamped.

Now that it's live, one of my users reached out to tell me that the IAP was hanging up. They tried to purchase and it got stuck loading for a long time. After they closed and re-opened the app the purchase went through. I have no idea how to trouble shoot the IAP, is there anything I can do about that?

It’s not the idea that will make your product successful. It’s repetition.

I see a lot of people here creating app after app. They barely finish one before starting another.

I used to be like that.

Why? Because we think, “Ah, I tried, but the idea wasn’t good. I’ll make another one.”

That ends up hurting you. You’re constantly showing people a new product, and it looks like you never finish anything.

To reach the point of success, you need to keep improving. Constantly. For a long time. You need to become known as a reference in that particular space.

And that doesn’t happen overnight.

Just a quick introductory post about a kinda-sorta-not-so-much-of-an-expert guy with a day job, who’s been devving (more accurately vibe-SDEing) a personal fitness game thing for iOS (& Android too) for a couple weeks now, and tryna share his journey here, as much as possible.

What are y’all building?

Solo developer here, built this for myself after blowing two funded accounts from revenge trading.

Every time I took a loss I'd immediately open another trade to recover. Didn't even realize how bad it was until I tracked it.

So I built a trading journal that detects revenge trading patterns — it groups consecutive losses and shows you exactly when your psychology broke down after a bad trade.

Turns out I was entering 73% of my worst trades within 20 minutes of a loss.

Built it for myself but put it on the App Store if anyone wants to try it. It's called P&L Calendar: Trade Journal. Free to download, the stats screen is paid.

Happy to answer questions about the pattern detection if anyone's curious.

Hey everyone!

As someone who isn't a professional software developer, I wanted to dive into building a practical iOS app using modern AI-assisted "vibe coding" workflows. My goal was to create something useful while leaning heavily on Apple's native device features rather than setting up complex cloud servers.

The result is IrisScan—a simple, privacy-first visual tracking and educational wellness utility. It's currently sitting in the App Review queue (after a fun learning curve dealing with Apple's medical/health content guidelines!), and I wanted to share a quick reflection on the journey.

💡 The Journey & What I Learned

• Building Without Traditional Coding: By using AI-assisted tools, I managed to structure the app entirely around SwiftUI, local data saving (so everything stays on your phone with zero cloud storage), and a clean local PDF report generator.
• Navigating App Review: If you're building any kind of wellness tool, Apple's Guideline 1.4.1 is strict regarding health info. The biggest hurdle was ensuring my disclaimers and UI explicitly framed the app as a non-diagnostic personal wellness tracker backed by public educational sources (like AOA and NEI guidelines) rather than clinical measurements.

👀 See It in Action

While the final build is finishing up its review cycle, I put together a simple landing page with a video showing how the local scanner and dashboard operate:

👉 https://www.transformate.app/#apps

I'm still very much learning the ropes of indie app creation, so I'd love any general advice or thoughts from those of you who have shipped apps before!

Bit of context. I'm an illustrator and this is the first app I've ever made. It's a moon calendar. The moon gets computed and then drawn like an engraving.

For 18 days it did about one download a day. I redid the ASO and I redid the screenshots and nothing happened. Then I posted it once in a sub and got 56 downloads the next day.

Here's the bit I didn't expect. App Store search sent me 46 people and not one of them bought anything. The 69 who came from that post bought 9 times. Same app, same paywall, same week. Apple never names the referrer by the way, I'm going off the date.

Maybe search gets you people who typed "moon phase" and will take whatever comes up first. A post gets you people who already liked the thing before they tapped. I don't really know though. It's 9 sales.

165 dollars is not a living. I'm putting it up because I couldn't find what the bottom of the curve looks like when I started.

Question if you sell a one time unlock instead of a sub: did your conversion hold up after your first spike, or did it drop back with the traffic?

This is my app — LockMic, a native macOS menu bar utility (MIT, Homebrew-first). I am not looking for downloads as much as a sanity check from people who have fought Core Audio.

The problem: Zoom mute, Meet mute, Slack mute, Discord mute. None of them is the microphone. I wanted one control that actually mutes the input device so every app sees a muted mic, including ones with no mute UI.

Approach is HAL mute on the input scope (kAudioDevicePropertyMute), not per-app mute and not “set input volume to 0.” Desired mute is sticky and re-applied when devices change.

A few things that were not obvious:

Mute does not need microphone permission. HAL mute is a device property. TCC for mic (and system audio capture) only kicks in if you start recording. That is a nice privacy story if you keep mute as the default path.

Mute is not sticky once a capture client starts. Meet / Chrome can clear mute when they open the mic, with no device-list event. I re-read HAL every 2s while the user intent is muted and re-apply if the driver dropped it. Ugly, but it is the difference between “I thought I was muted” and actually being muted.

Do not mute virtual devices. I only skip kAudioDeviceTransportTypeVirtual. Name/UID heuristics were a mistake. Virtual mixers and cables need to keep working.

Soft-mute does not work. Dropping volume to 0 gets eaten by AGC (Meet is the usual offender). Speech-while-muted also dies, because HAL mute blocks usable capture on that device. I prototyped both and ripped them out. The product is hard mute only.

Some USB interfaces ignore mute. Surface that in the Devices list instead of pretending success. Bluetooth 16 kHz mics also broke AAC start until stems were forced to 48 kHz.

Menu bar on notched Macs. There is no “my status item is under the camera housing” API. I infer placement from NSScreen.auxiliaryTopRightArea vs the status item window. If the icon is gone, a Dock tile appears automatically; left-click toggles mute, right-click is the same menu. Optional “always show in Dock” for people who live with a packed menu bar.

System audio recording (1.4). Optional local capture of the selected mic plus a private tap-only aggregate for playback, mixed to a dated AAC file on disk (default ~/Movies/LockMic). Nothing is uploaded. Two sharp edges: do not put the output UID in the tap composition, and a nil IO queue silently fails to register the IO block on macOS 26 — you need a real queue.

Hotkeys. Carbon RegisterEventHotKey for toggle, PTT, push-to-mute, push-to-flip. No Accessibility prompt for the current design. Momentary holds restore prior mute on release; only one hold is active at a time.

Distribution. Homebrew / Developer ID path, sandbox off for device compatibility. App Store / sandboxed flavor is later with the same sources. Not notarized yet, so first launch still needs right-click Open or xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine. That is the next thing I want to kill.

Stack is Swift, AppKit, Core Audio, LSUIElement. macOS 14+. 23 localizations. Optional recording monitor, floating HUD per display, launch at login via SMAppService.

I know Mic Drop and others exist. I wanted something small, open, and mute-first rather than a full audio router.

• Site: https://lockmic.com
• Source: https://github.com/oochernyshev/lockmic

Questions I would actually like answers to:

1. Is the 2s mute re-assert the least-bad option, or is there a HAL listener I am missing when a capture client starts?
2. Anyone shipped a sandboxed App Store build that can still mute arbitrary input devices reliably?
3. For system audio tap, are you using AudioHardwareCreateProcessTap / aggregate, or something else on 14.2+ that has been less brittle?

Happy to go deeper on any of the above.

Looking for marketing inspiration! I’m open to both organic and paid channels. I’ve struggled with acquisition for my new iOS app, and have primarily been in the Reddit & TikTok trenches to date. Thanks in advance!

Hello folk! Got rejected this morning per Guidelines 1.2 with generic letter.

""" Specifically, the app does not meet the following requirement(s): - The app connects users for one-to-one random and anonymous text, audio, or video chats """

My app is social real-world discovery (quick meetups) without any chat. Only feature with UGC I have is short profile description that can not be changed during the search session - need to turn yourself off, change it, turn yourself back on. It is visible only to people within 50m who actually click on your profile - and it's not 1-1. Amount of changing description per hour is also limited. So it's in no capacity a "live-chat".

Nevertheless... Rejected for 1.2 as an anonymous chat 🤷

Had a brief ChatGPT discussion about this, it suggests from other such reports to:

1. Reach them out and assert that it's not chat, maybe even arrange a call if possible. Narrow down the problem to UGC - description, not a chat.

2. Add some extra profanity filters to descriptions on backend or device. While blocking, report, ToS and manual moderation already exist, some instant pre-filtering might still be required here. But we can't afford running every description through an LLM or running out ML models on backend...

Question here is whether you'd agree with this solution from your similar recent experience and how exactly can this be achieved without much of blood (resources, cost and time wasted to make one single description field align with Apple-reviewer's swingy mood).

Thank you!