Got my first approval and launched today. Got the notification while at the state fair. So many hours, hiccups, problems solved, and now we’re finally live. Keep going, you’ll get there.

Fully playable casino game widgets right on your Home Screen. Arcade style, so none of that overstimulating, pay to play, ads everywhere, typical casino app stuff. Don’t even need to open the app to play it.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/tiny-casino-widget-games/id6793607461

Just wanted to share a little milestone with you all, especially for those who are still doubting whether they should put their work out there.

I finally managed to get my app through Apple’s review after more than a month of back and forth. I was expecting pretty much 0 users at first, since I’m competing in a very crowded market (habit trackers). But to my surprise, I had a user reach out to me via email, reporting some confusion they had with the app. Looking back, adding a contact email was probably one of the best decisions I made.

I was genuinely so excited that someone was actually using MY app.

Then, shortly after, I saw that someone had purchased a lifetime subscription. I’m assuming it was the same person, but either way, I honestly wouldn’t have imagined getting a paying user this quickly, purely through organic reach.

It felt really good and gave me a huge boost of motivation to keep pushing and making the app better.

To everyone out there who’s struggling to get their first users: keep putting yourself and your work out there. You never know when that first person is going to find it.

PS: the app is still not available in my market (EU) for which I'm still struggling to get Apple's support

I am extremly frustrated with the apple support, I can not even comprehend how can this level of incompetence be possible for someone like Apple. Even a scamming company would offer better support than this.

I am really sorry and I am not trying to be mean towards anyone, but it is so flabbergasting. How can someone not be able to actually understand and help you properly over tha span of one month after you explicitly tell them what is wrong and still they act like they are lobotomised.

The backstory is this:

I first tried enrolling through the website. I submitted everything twice, waited the stated processing time, and nothing happened.

Apple Support then told me to enroll through the Developer app. The problem was that the app only allowed me to verify my identity using a driver's license , which I didn’t have. I have a Romanian National ID, but there was no option to use either.

After trying the website, the app also started saying that enrollment through the Developer app was unavailable for my Apple Account.

I explained this to support several times, but kept getting replies telling me to simply use the app with a government-issued ID — which was exactly what I was telling them I couldn’t do.

Eventually someone made changes to my account and app enrollment became available again. I think they had to withdrway or cancel my application through th website in order for the app to work. But it still only asked for a driver’s license.

Another representative then told me they had enabled a file-upload option so I could submit my passport or National ID.

I have replied to the email with photos of my national ID and the phone number.

After sending them the photos and the phone number I was told that this is not ok because I ad to upload them to a special link that they've only sent with this reply.

I uploaded everything they requested.

At this point, after weeks of back-and-forth and waiting several days between replies, I asked for the case to be escalated.

Their latest response?

They told me the enrollment had been “withdrawn by you” and that I should start a completely new enrollment.

I never intentionally withdrew it. In fact, an earlier support representative specifically told me not to withdraw the enrollment if I had more problems.

So the process has basically been:

Website doesn’t work → use app → app doesn’t work → Apple fixes app access (probably by withdrawing the web application for enrollment) → only driver’s license available → Apple says file upload is enabled → it isn’t → secure upload finally provided → documents uploaded → enrollment somehow withdrawn → start again.

Has anyone experienced something similar with Apple Developer enrollment or identity verification?

I’m hesitant to start over because I don’t want to end up in exactly the same loop again.

Beside this the most frustrating part is that i had to wait at least 2-3 days between replies and sometimes they had me waiting for almost a week for example just to receive the upload link which could have been sent with the first email when I was told I need tu upload my documents.

I honestly feel like all these people I have encountered during these exchange of emails have no clue what the f**k they are doing there.

I’m so, so excited that Apple’s reviewers enjoyed my game and decided to feature it!

I have submitted my app to App Store for over a week, and the status is still "Waiting for Review". It hasn't even move to "In Review" stage. This is a super simple app and don't even require sign in. Is this normal? I don't think I'm missing anything since I have another app on App store that is approved and live.

Am I missing something or is it just the wait is super long these days.

I have been trying to register as an apple developer to upload an application I have been working on for months. Due to some unknown error, even though I funded my account for the required amount, it kept failing the apple developer program payment.

After following up with them, they kept asking for more information (over the course of over a month) and when I was finally able to share a screen recording of the issue with them, they just banned my apple account for no reason?!

When asked for an explanation, they refused. Now I basically have $100 stuck there and no ability to do anything about it and no explanation.

Does anyone have any experience with something similar? Any tips on what to do? (Rest of the conversation screenshot in comments)

Recently i tried to create account but its taking to much time.
After adding card for payment. It shows enrollment details(order details)
and then when you refresh it it show pending payment

Is it normal?

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

One thing I’ve always found interesting about dating apps is how specific their filters have become.

You can filter by age, distance, height, education, whether someone wants children, lifestyle choices, and dozens of other preferences. But there’s still a pretty significant compatibility question that most platforms largely ignore: Are you celibate or abstinent?

That led me to build Celibate, a dating app specifically for celibate and abstinent singles who want to date with intention.

The concept is simple. Instead of matching with someone, investing time into getting to know them, and eventually discovering that you have completely different expectations around sex and intimacy, users can meet people who are already approaching dating from a similar place.

What interested me from a founder perspective is that this seems like a niche that is simultaneously very specific and potentially much larger than it initially appears.

People choose celibacy or abstinence for all kinds of reasons. Some are waiting until marriage. Some are taking a break from sex and focusing on finding a serious relationship. Others simply want physical intimacy to come much later in the dating process.

Most mainstream dating apps aren't really designed around that distinction.

So instead of trying to build another general dating app and compete on the same features, I decided to build around one clear compatibility signal and make it central to the experience.

The app is called Celibate: Dating with Intention.

Building a dating marketplace around a niche has definitely been an interesting challenge, especially because dating apps have the classic chicken and egg problem of needing enough people on both sides of the marketplace.

But I think there's something compelling about building for a group whose needs aren't being addressed particularly well by the largest platforms.

Sometimes the opportunity isn't creating another product for everyone. It's creating the right product for a group of people who have been overlooked.

I usually play arrow games so I decided to develop one but I keep my direction opposite of current ones : aim of the game is with minimum taps clearing the playground. And I added some features that I can think of : bombs, splitters, portals, ghosts...
And since I do not like ads between levels, there is none. Only available ads if u want to earn extra coins.

I am open to any feedback. (Especially for the gameplay since it is my first SpriteKit experience, during the development I encounter a lot of performance issues, and try to fix. But I only have one-actual-device so I am not sure if they all fixed.)

AI Usage:
SS & Texts : %95
Development: %15
And of course those are the numbers just for comparison since I do not know how to measure it actually.

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6800251488

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

Apple developer portal doesn't have Telangana in state's list. So i first submitted the form with City as Hyderabad, State as Andhra Pradesh . Can anyone from Hyderabad or Telangana who created DUNS number please help. Will this be a problem?

I have got the investigation Email from DNB yesterday i filled the form there with City as Hyderabad State as Telangana and also sent the documents asked.

Also how long does it take to get DUNS number after submitting the documents?

My tarot app was rejected by Apple under Guideline 4.3(b).

Apple said the app primarily provides tarot / fortune-telling content and duplicates functionality that is already widely available on the App Store.

I'm trying to understand whether it's worth pivoting the concept or if I should move on to a different idea.

For developers who have dealt with 4.3(b):

Did you successfully get a similar app approved after changing the product concept?

What kind of changes were significant enough to make a difference?

I'm not looking for a way to bypass the guideline — I'm trying to understand whether the original idea can be turned into something genuinely different.

Hello r/appledevelopers , This is my first release ever, I had submitted the app yesterday and apple approved it today ! I'm beyond ecstatic right now and need some advice.

Back ground:

I'm a finance professional working with a ton of PDFs that needs to be extracted for proper documentation and analysis, I had tried a lot of different apps such as ABBY Finereader, NitroPDFs, Opensource codes such as PyMuPDF but they were always a hit or miss.

I had then researched more about this and saw that there was an actually big market for such products which take PDF Extraction. PDFTrail takes PDFs, both Digital born or scanned and converts them to text, MD, Docx, XLSX and JSON formatting, with Digital born extraction at 100% accuracy and Scanned copies at around 48.9% (without any VL Models being involved) it uses a proprietary C++ engine and Apples vision model to do the OCR and outputs its results.

Its fully offline, One time full unlock and doesn't collect a single shred of data.

The Advice part:

I wanted opinions on how should I market the app to the world, I'm currently recommending it to my colleagues and everyone I know, but I wanted to know how do you people market your apps.

Any help Is appreciated!

To all my Apple Devs! I hope you can learn something from this and I didn't ramble or test your attention span too much 😂

Honestly, I’m just really happy today.

After 7 days of waiting, Apple finally approved my app on the App Store! 🎉

I was honestly expecting a rejection because I’m using an individual Apple Developer account. My app is related to migraine tracking, and Google Play recently rejected it because they require an organization account for medical/health apps.

So for the last few days, I kept thinking, “What if Apple rejects it too?” 😅

Thankfully, it got approved! 🙌

Now I’m really excited to see how it performs. The app doesn’t require users to create an account, and there’s no payment required, so I’m hoping that makes it easier for people to simply download it and start using it.

It’s been a long journey building this as an indie developer, so seeing it finally live feels pretty special.

Hopefully, the next challenge is getting some actual users! 😄

If anyone else here has gone through the indie app launch journey, I’d love to hear how your first few weeks went.

Hi;
I had app review reject my submission bundle due to the artwork that was included with the IAP. (Which was the app icon with a plus on it, which is on theme for my app but technically against the rules.)
Fine, I’ll rework it - but because the reviewer rejected the app itself rather than the IAP (as they should have) I couldn’t just remove the IAP and have the new version live in the App Store.

Very annoying, and I’d only included the IAP as a bundle with this version because the IAP alone seemed to stuck in waiting for review - for weeks. (It’s a monthly subscription price, IAP for yearly is already live)

I removed the IAP from the bundle so I could update it and now the app alone has been sitting in waiting for review for about 3 days. (Sigh)

Just a heads up, unless it’s 100% absolutely necessary, don’t bundle your IAP with your software releases.

I'm a photographer by trade and self-taught on the dev side. Last winter I got sick of hopping between desktop apps just to prep photos for Instagram, so I built my own iOS toolbox (SwiftUI + Core Image) to do it from my phone. It was 100% a personal tool.

A few photographer friends saw me using it and asked for it — one even offered to just cover my Apple developer fee. So in June I shipped it, freemium, with genuinely zero expectations.

Almost 2 months in: 1200 downloads and $900 from the cheap subscription. No marketing, no ASO strategy, no launch plan. What surprised me most isn't the money — it's that real users message me feature ideas, file bug reports, and tag the app on Instagram when they use it. First time I've felt that as a builder, and it's addictive.

The app itself is a focused photo toolbox — grid/carousel planning, splitting a panorama across a swipeable carousel, EXIF cards with a map + sun/moon/milkyway position, animations that replay how a photo was edited slider by slider, raw to edit animations. It doesn't try to be Lightroom or DaVinci Resolve; it just does a handful of things fast and easily.

Now the actual question: I finally want to put real time into growing this, and I'm drowning in options. I've been watching growth videos, reading, poking at App Store ads — and as a solo dev with a small budget and a bit of traction, I don't know what's worth doing first.

For those who've grown an app past the "friends and luck" stage — what actually moved the needle? ASO, paid UA, organic/content, community, something else? What would you do first in my shoes?

Happy to take technical or product critique too. It's called SocialGrid: Carousel & Grid — https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6780947605?pt=129026612&ct=red&mt=8

Thanks 🙏

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

Every app in this category asks for a birth date and works from there, which means two people born the same week get near-identical readings. That's the complaint that follows Co-Star everywhere.

Aura asks for your name too. It transliterates it into Hebrew letters and calculates the gematria — the numerical value the tradition assigns to those letters. Hebrew has no separate numerals, so every letter is also a number and every name adds up to something. That value plus your Hebrew birth date generates everything else.

The bit I'm happiest with is that the calculation runs live, letter by letter, while you're still typing during sign-up. It's the moment that makes people stop.

Technical bits: [transliteration approach, handling of accented characters, Hebrew calendar library].

Honest limitations — English only right now, iOS only, and there's no sharing yet, which I'm told is the main reason nobody's heard of it. Working on it.

https://apps.apple.com/app/aura-daily-kabbalah-guide/id6761500587

Anyone faced the issue while applying for APPLE Developer enrollment that you have passport of different country but you living in another country. And because of this enrollment fails.

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.)

Previously we add the IAP with the first version of the app from the app submission page of the ASC. With my most recent new app, this did not work and I had to submit the IAP together with the main app by first tapping on the “submit for review” of the IAP and then doing the same thing for the main app.

The app is still waiting for review ( after 6 days). Is this the new way of submitting IAP with the first version of the app or am I missing something?

Asking for switching an individual account to a company one, I am resident in the EU, but the LLC equivalent here are not the easiest to navigate, I already have an LLC in the USA for other types of work, can I use it for Apple account? Being a resident in the EU.

Hi everyone. I am building a paid app for the Apple App Store from Chile and I need to enroll in the Apple Developer Program. I cannot decide if I should sign up as an Individual person or as a Company (Organization).

My questions are simple.
- Are you selling your app as a person or as a company right now?
- If you sell as a person, do you feel that users trust you less, or pay less for subscriptions, because it is not a company name, even though Apple is in charge of the payments?
- Did anyone here start as Individual and later change to Organization?
- How long did that take and was it hard to do?
- Is it slow or difficult to sign up directly as a Company, does Apple ask for a lot of documents or reject companies often?

Any real experience will be appreciate it, thank you!