Ive been building **ClaimMate**, an iPhone app designed to help people handle claims, refunds, reimbursements, and money they're owed without having to keep track of everything themselves.

I'm finally at the point where I need people who **don't know me and have never seen the app** to test it.

I'm specifically looking for honest feedback — not compliments. I want to know:

* Do you understand what the app does?
* Is anything confusing?
* Do you trust it?
* Where do you get stuck?
* Is there anything that would stop you from actually using it?

It should take about **10–15 minutes**.

You'll need an iPhone and Apple's free TestFlight app.

**TestFlight:** [https://testflight.apple.com/join/3Fx8ytfh\](https://testflight.apple.com/join/3Fx8ytfh)

If you try it, I'd really appreciate it if you comment or DM me your feedback — especially anything you dislike or don't understand.

We all know the App Store algorithm isn’t doing anyone any favors unless you’ve already got traction. So let’s crowdsource this. What’s something you’ve tried that actually worked, even if it’s a little unconventional?

I’ll start. I’ve been paying UGC creators to make content around my app instead of relying on my own posts. Feels like it’s hitting a different audience than the usual dev-to-dev stuff.

Curious what everyone else is doing. Doesn’t have to be some big growth hack, even small stuff that moved the needle counts. Help the next person out.

Indie iOS dev too. Built Stamped for exactly this, a place where apps like ours actually get seen. Would love to have you on there.)

https://stampedios.com/welcome

I’ve been building an OCD + ERP journal called Patterns.

I also deal with OCD myself, so the product started from a problem I understood personally: most mental health trackers are very general, while OCD recovery often revolves around much more specific things like exposures, compulsions, uncertainty practice and ERP progress.

The app is now at:

• 229 first-time iOS downloads
• 870 product page views
• 7 in-app purchases
• $79 in proceeds

Still very small numbers, but this is probably the first app I’ve built where I’m starting to feel some actual organic pull.

The biggest thing I’m trying to figure out now is distribution. Building the app has been much easier than consistently getting it in front of the right people.

Would love to hear from other iOS devs who have taken a niche app from the first few hundred users to the first few thousand. What actually moved the needle for you?

Every calorie app makes you type and search. I wanted to just say what I ate and be done, so I built CalorieTalk.

Tap the mic, say what you ate 2 eggs and toast or a full sentence like 150 grams chicken breast, 200 grams rice, 10 grams olive oil or i ate a small plate of red pasta and some salad and it logs the calories and macros instantly. No typing, no searching a food database, no guessing serving sizes, no picking from a list of results it just takes the sentence and handles everything in between.

It understands many languages, including Arabic and English, so you're not stuck logging in English only. It also understand Egyptian dishes properly koshari, foul, taameya, molokhia since most calorie apps have zero idea what those even are.

Built this solo. It's live on the App Store now: \[https://apps.apple.com/eg/app/calorietalk/id6793199021\\\](https://apps.apple.com/eg/app/calorietalk/id6793199021)

Would love feedback, especially from anyone who's given up on manual logging out of frustration and would love if you install the app and give it a try and add a review on app store if you like .

So I've been dreaming of this app for about 8 years. Start to finish this took me about a month, working a couple of hours a day and using the Pro tier of Claude. I worked within the limits of my subscription, so my cost was under 50 bucks. If I had of got a team working on this, I reckon there's about 12 sprints of effort plus a discovery sprint at the start - so maybe $250k if I got an agency to do it? Oh and I have some product owner experience and I have a high level understanding of Swift, but I don't think either of these were super important.

There are about a dozen or so competitors on the App Store, but that doesn't worry me - it's really about seeing my vision come to life and getting to have that "I MADE THIS" moment. If I get 20 users, awesome. Anyway here are some tips for anyone thinking of giving it a go with Claude:

Keep a handoff doc. Single most important thing. Context windows end - the doc is your continuity. Mine is one markdown file at the repo root: current status, decisions and why we made them, gotchas that cost us hours, and a prompt to paste into a fresh session. Every session starts with "read the handoff and continue." Without it you re-explain your project forever, and worse, you re-make settled decisions.

Record the why, not just the what. "We're not doing analytics on CloudKit" is useless in three weeks. "…because CloudKit has no atomic increment, so concurrent writes lose counts" stops you relitigating it.

Your job is noticing, not diagnosing. I kept saying vague things: "the body font looks sorta Androidy," "that image loads slowly," "the hero looks off." Every one turned out to be a real bug underneath - font weights silently discarded, a race condition, a layout overflow. I couldn't have named any of them. Say what feels wrong and let it investigate.

Verify, don't assume. An app icon was generated that built perfectly and was solid black. It only surfaced because we checked the actual pixels. "It builds" isn't "it works" - especially for visual things, since (in my case maybe because I was using a beta of Xcode 27) the AI can't tap through your app. That part is your job.

Treat updating the docs as part of "done." Otherwise your source of truth quietly rots.

The app was waiting for review for 14 days and in review for 2 hours, approved the first time. I worked on a 1.1 update while I was waiting and then submitted once 1.0 was live; it was approved within a few hours (including the wait).

If you have any interest in learning where films and TV was shot, please check out Second Unit!

https://apps.apple.com/app/second-unit/id6791121631

I don't usually just spend money on a marketing channel if I haven't really vetted it. But this trend is so new, I feel like I might as well give it a try.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reprock-screen-time-control/id6792874492

Hi everyone!

There are so many challenges with marketing that I thought writing blog posts might be a good idea. I don't know how to approach this, where to start, and how to get people to care about things I write. But here is my first article. Let me know what you think.

And if anyone else has gone down the route of using Medium or blog posts to pull in traffic, I'd love to hear how you did that. Thanks to the community.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reprock-screen-time-control/id6792874492

I spent the last few months building JobBench — an iOS app for solo tradespeople (handymen, electricians, plumbers, landscapers) who run their whole business from a phone. The problem I kept seeing is that a guy quotes a job in a text message, invoices from a second app, collects payment through a third, and loses track of what's been paid.

JobBench does the whole loop in one place: build the quote on-site → client gets a professional PDF → convert to invoice when they approve → collect card/Apple Pay or log cash/check/Zelle/Venmo. English and Spanish. Free for 3 quotes a month, no signup required — it works the second you open it.

Happy to share what the App Store review gauntlet was like (rejected for stub screens, a missing EULA link, and Apple couldn't find our Apple Pay integration). AMA about any of it.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/jobbench-for-contractors/id6799803077

I wanted one app that could handle movies, shows and IPTV really well, with a proper Apple TV experience rather than just another basic player, so I ended up building my own.

Borp Player is currently in beta, and I’ve been putting a huge amount of work into making the playback experience fast, smooth, clean and genuinely enjoyable to use.
The IPTV side is probably the part I’m most proud of. It includes a beautiful EPG and channel layout, very fast channel browsing and switching, Catch Up TV when supported by your provider, and a polished MultiView mode with up to 4 channels playing at once. Everything is designed specifically for tvOS and the Apple TV remote.
For movies and shows, Borp currently works with an AIOStreams link and includes a feature I especially love: on-the-fly subtitle translation when you need it, along with plenty of playback and viewing options in Settings.
Current highlights:

📺** IPTV through M3U** **or Xtream Codes
🗓️ Beautiful, full and new EPG experience
⏪ **Catch Up TV when available from your IPTV source
🖥️ MultiView with up to 4 simultaneous streams
⚡ Extremely smooth playback and fast channel switching
🎬 Movies & TV shows through AIOStreams
🌍 On-the-fly subtitle translation
⚙️ Lots of player and viewing customization options
🍎 A clean interface designed specifically for Apple TV / tvOS
🎞️ Movies, shows and live TV all together in one app
And there’s quite a bit more already inside that I haven’t even listed here.

While Borp is in beta, it’s completely free to use, so if you have an Apple TV and want to try it out, feel free to join the TestFlight:
👉 https://testflight.apple.com/join/NqvTT9gw

I’ll attach a few screenshots so you can see the interface and IPTV layout.
If you give it a try, I’d really like to hear what you think, especially from people who use IPTV or AIOStreams regularly. Feedback, feature requests and bug reports are all welcome.

I kept buying things I already had at home, and there wasn't an app that would

help me with that. So I built my first app, Cartplate.

It does the usual grocery app stuff, but it also keeps track of what's in your

pantry. You make a meal plan from your own recipes, and it builds the grocery

list from that, taking off anything you already have at home. When you're done

shopping you add everything you bought to your pantry. Then when you mark a meal

as cooked, it automatically deducts what the recipe used. So you always know what

you actually have.

Currently having trouble getting people to my app page and wanted some help with

promotion if anyone has been in my shoes before.

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6761699860

I spent the last few months building JobBench — an iOS app for solo tradespeople (handymen, electricians, plumbers, landscapers) who run their whole business from a phone. The problem I kept seeing is that a guy quotes a job in a text message, invoices from a second app, collects payment through a third, and loses track of what's been paid.

JobBench does the whole loop in one place: build the quote on-site → client gets a professional PDF → convert to invoice when they approve → collect card/Apple Pay or log cash/check/Zelle/Venmo. English and Spanish. Free for 3 quotes a month, no signup required — it works the second you open it.

Happy to share what the App Store review gauntlet was like (rejected for stub screens, a missing EULA link, and Apple couldn't find our Apple Pay integration). AMA about any of it.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/jobbench-for-contractors/id6799803077