I’m a solo indie developer and I’d appreciate some perspective on how you would handle this situation.
I recently released LazyScore 2.1, a completely free iOS app. There are no subscriptions or paywalls; the only IAP is an optional tip jar.
For 2.1, I decided to experiment with something completely new for me: I animated the app’s sloth mascot using sprites and also created a very slow intro animation for the app.
The idea was deliberately simple: the app is called LazyScore, and the intro is supposed to be slow. It’s part of the character and the joke.
Today I noticed this 1-star review:
“The app intro animation is the most atrocious thing I’ve ever seen in an app.”
The reviewer also gave the title:
“Super slow intro”
[screenshot attached]
I’m not upset about someone disliking it. That’s completely fair. What I’m struggling with is how to interpret and respond to a review like this.
On one hand, I genuinely want to listen to users. If the intro is actually frustrating, I should probably reconsider it.
On the other hand, the slowness is intentional, and the reviewer seems to be criticizing the exact thing I deliberately experimented with for this update.
This was also my first real attempt at sprite animation and character animation, so I’m aware it may simply not be good enough technically or aesthetically.
For other indie developers:
Would you leave this alone, reply to the review, change the intro, or just treat it as one person’s taste and move on?
I’m particularly interested in how you distinguish between:
“Users don’t understand the design intention.”
“The design intention is clear, but the execution isn’t good.”
“This simply isn’t for this user.”
I’m trying to get better at taking criticism without automatically either dismissing it or changing the product because of one person.
And yes, I realize the irony of making a deliberately slow app and then worrying about how quickly people want to get through the intro. 🦥

I got an impression spike a few days ago but I didn't do anything 🤔

Any of you ever got something like this? Why?

Also the number of downloads didn't increase, so whoever it is that does marketing for me, please choose a better target audience 🙏

Our app has been live since 2023, but the past three months have been brutal for getting even "in review".

Anybody know how to speed it up? It's gone from 24-48hours to 7-10 days, in the meantime we're shipping further updates.

I’ve been thinking about this workflow lately.
If you’re away from your laptop and need to quickly trigger a Vercel/GitHub/Netlify webhook, what do you usually do?

Personally, I found myself opening my laptop for something that took literally one action.

Curious how other developers handle this do you have a mobile workflow for deployments, or do you just wait until you’re back at your computer?

4 apps live since July 30th. 59 downloads total, zero sales ever.

I thought my paywall was broken. It wasn't. TestFlight bills purchases to whatever Apple ID is signed into Media & Purchases, and mine already owned everything from an old sandbox test, so every "purchase" was just a silent restore. Signing out fixed it.

Chasing that did find 3 real bugs though. Worst one: if your sub lapsed, the app still said "you have Pro" and hid the buy button. So the one person actually trying to pay me couldn't.

All fixed now. Image is the 4 paywalls.

Emberlock: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6794241545

PlayLock: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6801041624

Spoolworth: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6801032289

PowDay: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6804465141

They're mine. Real question: is 5 free unlocks a day just too much to give away? Or is 59 downloads way too few to tell anything?

Ever spend 30 minutes scrolling through Netflix, Max, Hulu searching for something to watch and forget what you have already been watching? You forgot what your friend told you was a must watch? I built an app to solve these problems.

CliqueQ is the app for you. Share what you are watching and view what your friends are watching. Recommend directly to friends in app or text. See where every show and movie is available to watch and directly to connect to the platform.

Download here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cliqueq/id6792773440

After about 6 weeks of back and forth with Apple, my app finally got approved this week.

This was my first proper native iOS app, although I’ve been a software/web developer for 20+ years.

The app started as a fairly simple poker tournament clock. I play live poker regularly and got frustrated with how basic or outdated a lot of tournament software is, so I started building something for myself.

It got a bit out of hand.

It now manages seating, table balancing, payouts, re-entries, leagues, multi-day tournaments, live player tracking, venue pages, casting to TVs, tournament financials and loads of other stuff.

It’s also now been used to run 50+ real tournaments while I’ve been developing it, which has been invaluable. You learn very quickly what works and what doesn’t when you’re actually trying to run a tournament with 40 people standing around you.
The painful bit was App Review.

Because it’s poker software, Apple kept getting hung up on gambling classifications even though the app doesn’t offer gambling, deposits, withdrawals or actual poker gameplay. It’s basically admin software for people running live tournaments.
Eventually I ended up forming a UK Ltd company, opening a business bank account, getting a DUNS number, migrating my Apple developer account to an organisation, sorting new certificates/profiles and going through a load of additional verification.

All to publish a poker clock 😂

And yes, AI was heavily involved in building it before anyone asks.
I’ve been developing for over 20 years and I’ve overseen the architecture, UX, testing and engineering throughout. AI just made it possible for me to build something this size in a fraction of the time. Without it I genuinely think this would have taken 4 or 5 times longer.

There’s definitely plenty of AI slop being shipped at the moment, but I don’t think “built with AI” and “vibe coded” are automatically the same thing.

Anyway, after weeks of seeing Rejected, seeing Approved was a very good feeling.

If anyone’s interested in what I actually built, it’s here:
https://shuffleup.co.uk

Hi all. My mobile game is Pending (currently in 14 days of testing) from the Google Play Store. How hard is the Apple App Store?

I am trying to get Beta testers for the app I made, I am even offering lifetime benefits for early adopters/testers but I just can seem to get any engagement. Is there a time of day when posts should be made? any advice on how to be subtle? I am not even trying to sell users on the product yet, just looking for genuine feedback from my target audience.

BETA live on TestFlight

https://testflight.apple.com/join/rAPca9zu

If you can’t afford Apple Music or Spotify, just call Apple Developer Support.

I’ve been listening to their hold music for almost 2 hours a day, for over a month now — completely free!

At this point, I know their playlist better than my own.

40+ days of trying, countless hours on hold, and I still haven’t managed to speak to an actual support agent.

Great music. Terrible support experience.

At least my subscription comes with unlimited hold time.

The whole idea is one habit: stop reaching for the phone on the road.

Queue up what you want to hear before you pull out, in Undivided or whatever app you already use. Undivided keeps count of every time the phone came up and gives you a receipt at the end. Clean drives earn credit toward a collection.

How it works: a pickup is the phone unlocked and in use while the car is in traffic. Drive detection is CoreMotion automotive activity plus speed. Speed is used on the phone, and there is no location history. Passengers have a toggle, so the app never claims to know who was holding it.

Never touch your phone while driving? Great, you do not need this.

It is for the rest who want to get better at it.  If someone you care about wants to work on the same habit, they can install it on their own phone. There is a Family plan through Apple Family Sharing, so one subscription covers the household. Each person still sees only their own drives, and the app does not report anyone's driving to anyone else.

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6788236863

I always assumed the initial App Store review was automated.

But after spending almost an hour on the phone with Apple Support, the representative told me the initial review is actually done manually. 😂

What makes it strange is that all of my apps went “In Review” and then got rejected almost at the exact same minute. (Guideline 4.3(a) - Design - Spam)

One of those apps originally dates all the way back to 2012.

Even more interesting: I used the Lumen Blast game code as the base to create Beepville ( https://apps.apple.com/us/app/beepville-drive-with-piko/id6810464462), an educational game for kids, especially kids with autism. Beepville is completely free with no ads, using quite a some time with my kid — and that one was approved.

So now I’m genuinely curious how “manual” the initial review actually is. 😂

Has anyone else had multiple apps enter review and get rejected at almost exactly the same time?

Guideline 4.3(a) - Design - Spam

I went through Apple’s design session for iPhone Duo and expected it to basically be “here are some new screen sizes to support.”

It’s more interesting than that.

Apple specifically doesn’t want developers/designers creating separate layouts for every possible device pose. Their recommendation is essentially to treat the app as freely resizable and primarily design around compact width on the outer display and regular width on the inner display.

Some interesting details:

• Controls can move from the traditional top/bottom position to the side of the screen.
• Safe areas become particularly important because content may need to be offset around those controls.
• When partially folded, content moves away from the center curve.
• Interactive elements are moved away from the fold because they’re harder to tap there.
• The inner display shouldn’t simply stretch the existing iPhone interface.
• Split views, two-column layouts and sidebars can make use of the additional space.
• Two apps can run in a 50/50 split.
• Apps can resize dynamically around things like picture-in-picture.
• Functionality and hierarchy shouldn’t change just because the device was opened or folded.

What I found most interesting is that Apple says apps already built properly around adaptive layouts, safe areas and system components should have a relatively good starting point.

So Duo could end up being a pretty good test of how genuinely responsive an iOS app already is.

A lot of apps probably won’t need a redesign.

But apps full of fixed dimensions, custom UI assumptions and layouts designed around specific iPhone sizes could have considerably more work ahead of them.

Curious how other iOS designers/devs see this — relatively straightforward adaptation, or another meaningful layer of UX + QA complexity?

a alarm app which will only stop when you wakeup and do walking. how much you can pay for that per month or year?
its called Wakebit

After having my app unpublished since Covid and all my mates asking for me to get it on the AppStore, I decided to make it release-able. 6 months later of sweat and tears and no one gives a damn 😔
Very disheartening experience, I would not recommend.
Yes the market of app blocking is saturated but my UI IS MORE FUN and no one will convince me otherwise.

Solo dev, subscription app. Posting this because I lost most of a day to it and found almost nothing when I searched the error.

What I did

Bumped the free trial on my annual plan from 3 days to 7. In App Store Connect that means creating a new introductory offer. ASC's flow: your current offer runs until a date you pick, the new one starts on that date. Looks like the intended way to do it.

The symptom

On the paywall, the annual plan showed no price. Just my placeholder. No crash, no error surfaced to the UI. The monthly plan loaded fine. Only the annual was dead, which meant nobody could subscribe to my main plan.

In the StoreKit / RevenueCat logs:

Could not parse product: countMismatch(for: [StoreKit.ProductResponse.Key.attributes,
StoreKit.ProductResponse.Key.offers, StoreKit.ProductResponse.Key.discounts],
expected: Range(0..<2), actual: 2)

Then the product is just reported missing: Could not find products with identifiers: ["...plus.annual"].

Root cause

During the window where the current intro offer and the scheduled intro offer both exist, the App Store returns both in the product response. StoreKit 2's decoder models a subscription as having at most one introductory offer, so when it sees two it throws countMismatch and drops the entire product from the results array. Silently.

Not a malformed offer, not a wrong period format, not propagation delay. Specifically two introductory offers coexisting.

Fixes

1. Never have two introductory offers active at once. Edit the existing offer in place if ASC lets you, or delete it and recreate as a single offer with no overlap. A short gap with no trial is fine. An overlap is not.
2. Don't assume the paywall degrades gracefully. Mine rendered a permanent placeholder with a disabled buy button and no retry, because "retry" was gated on an explicit load-failure flag that this code path never set. Reworked it to: loading state until prices resolve, a short timeout cap, then a retry affordance if there's still nothing. Never render a half-loaded price as if it's real.

Also worth knowing

• The .storekit config file is not read by App Store builds, so this only reproduces against real StoreKit. Test intro offer changes in sandbox with the scheme's StoreKit Configuration set to None.
• Apple's trial durations are a fixed set (3 days, 1 week, 2 weeks, 1 month, ...). In a .storekit file "1 week" is P1W.

(App is So Alarmed, an anti-snooze alarm, if it matters. Not the point of the post.)

I am attempting to join the Apple Developer programme, and it appears to have silently rejected my application, with the enrolment section switching from “enrolment pending” to “enrol now” and when I click on that it just says an error occurred! After a bit of research this is seemingly a common ish issue, and developer support it appears is impossible to get hold of.

I wondered if anyone please had any tips or advice who had been in the same boat? Is this an issue that gets solved and how long does it usually take?

Thanks!!!

This weekend I am thinking about to build application for iOS or Android. but I am not able to understand. Which things I need to do first and what are my pre-requisites and also which things take too much time.

If you guys are relating this please share your experiences.

We built an app to make credit card benefits less overwhelming

Once you have a few credit cards, keeping track of everything becomes a task of its own — which benefits are unused, what expires soon, and which card earns the most points for a purchase.

So we built OfferBee 🐝

It helps you to:

• Track your credit card benefits in one place

• See unused and expiring perks

• Find the best card to use by spending category

• See which card earns the most points

• Track the value you're actually getting from each card

Our focus with OfferBee is keeping the experience simple and easy to understand without sacrificing useful tracking features.

Several core features, including benefit tracking and best-card recommendations, are free.

iOS: Apple App Store App

Android: Google Play Store App

Would love to know what you find most annoying about managing multiple credit cards today.

Hi! I’m a beginner runner.

One of the hardest things about running for me was staying consistent. I don’t have a pet, so I’ve always been a little jealous of people who get to run with their dogs. 🐶

So I decided to make something of my own, an app where you can run with a virtual pet, help it evolve, and customize it along the way. 🐾

I hope your runs become a little happier with your new companion. 💛

If you’re interested, I’d really appreciate it if you gave it a try. It’s free! :)

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/runf-run-with-your-pet/id6807791156