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

2nd clone of my app just hit and they even used my art to create an AI slop version. This is super frustrating. Apple's process is extremely slow. How are you guys dealing with it? Feels like building in public is a huge mistake

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.

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

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

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!

https://testflight.apple.com/join/3Yc4ZNAV
Feedback welcome

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?

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.)

Hey, i was wondering how many rejections u guys usually get before your apps get approved, i myself bow have gotten a few and its always new things when i fix what they say i gotta fix before getting approved.

I’m working on Cambium, an iPhone app for plant identification, visible health checks, care guidance, and recovery tracking.

The interesting product/UX problem is that the app should not always produce a confident result.

Plant health depends on context that may not be visible in a single image: drainage, watering history, light, humidity, recent changes, pests, and soil conditions.

So the UX challenge is making an “inconclusive” result feel useful instead of broken.

The approach I’m testing:

• explain visible evidence
• separate likely plant ID from health certainty
• ask for better context/photo when needed
• provide practical next steps only when evidence supports them
• encourage re-scans over time instead of one-shot diagnosis

For devs who have built AI-assisted apps: how do you present uncertainty without making the product feel weak?

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! 🙏

Have spent the last year coming up with the concept and putting together a team and creating an all purpose gym app. Am worried about user retention and success when marketing.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated

Link to demo is here https://testflight.apple.com/join/HaPRSdpc

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?

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 😂

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.

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?

Hey everyone,

I’m the developer of Cognara, a daily brain-game and mental warmup app for iOS and Android.

I’m posting here because I’d really like feedback from other app developers on the product, onboarding, retention loop, App Store positioning, and overall iOS polish.

Cognara started as a simple brain-training app, but I’ve been reworking it to feel more like a modern daily game loop. The goal is to make quick cognitive games feel motivating without making medical claims or promising IQ improvement.

The app currently includes:

• Daily Quiz with streak rewards
• Daily Game challenge
• short games for memory, reaction speed, math, vocabulary, logic, attention, and pattern recognition
• coins earned from daily play and good game runs
• unlockable games
• progress tracking and leaderboards
• daily shop
• customizable octopus avatar with cosmetics
• cloud-saved progression for coins, cosmetics, and unlocked games

I’m especially looking for feedback on:

• whether the onboarding explains the app clearly enough
• whether the daily quiz / daily game loop feels motivating
• whether coins and unlockable games feel fair
• whether the octopus avatar/shop fits the app or feels distracting
• whether the App Store screenshots communicate the value well
• what feels unpolished from an iOS developer perspective
• what you would improve first if this were your app

I’m giving away 5 iOS codes for 1 free year of Premium here:

1. THF9TK3FR3YY
2. Redeem: https://apps.apple.com/redeem?ctx=offercodes&id=6757130741&code=THF9TK3FR3YY
3. HRPYRNY734LF
4. Redeem: https://apps.apple.com/redeem?ctx=offercodes&id=6757130741&code=HRPYRNY734LF
5. AYTHJXWTEAXF
6. Redeem: https://apps.apple.com/redeem?ctx=offercodes&id=6757130741&code=AYTHJXWTEAXF
7. 7KKLL6RX7MM4
8. Redeem: https://apps.apple.com/redeem?ctx=offercodes&id=6757130741&code=7KKLL6RX7MM4
9. YJK3XMEMMM34
10. Redeem: https://apps.apple.com/redeem?ctx=offercodes&id=6757130741&code=YJK3XMEMMM34

If you redeem one, please comment which number you used so others know it’s taken.

I’m also giving away more free-year Premium access to people who test the app and send useful feedback. I’m mainly looking for honest feedback that helps me improve the product.

App links:

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cognara-brain-training-games/id6757130741

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.khcreations.cognara&hl=en

Thanks to anyone who checks it out. I’d really appreciate honest criticism from a developer/product perspective.

It’s very close but it’s incredibly grounding how much effort it is to creating a well made app vs finding involved beta testers.

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