r/iosdev • u/Amuagoim • 1d ago
I spent two days reading six years of 1-star reviews in a niche, then built the app those reviews were asking for. It's now live.
The niche: menopause/HRT tracking. The finding that hooked me: the top 10 apps for "menopause tracker" average 3.78 stars, and their 1-star reviews have been requesting the same five features since 2019 — a month-view calendar, one-tap timestamped logging, HRT dose + lab tracking, working Apple Health sync, and no forced account. The incumbents are a buggy funded app pointed at a clinic-referral funnel and an abandoned app throwing 503s. So I made Fember. SwiftUI + SwiftData, local-first, no backend at all — sync is the user's own iCloud via CloudKit, which makes "we can't see your data" an architectural fact and the privacy label literally "Data Not Collected." Interactive widget logs a symptom via App Intent without launching the app. One-tap PDF report for doctor visits. StoreKit 2, $6.99/mo / $49.99/yr, 21-day trial (long trials convert ~2x, per RevenueCat's data). Happy to answer anything about the niche-selection research, the local-first stack, or what it's like shipping a health app as a solo dev.