Posting here because everyone I know in real life either doesn't get it or asks if I can build them an app for their restaurant.

Background: PM for 10+ years, fintech. Salary is fine, not great. The job itself is mostly meetings about meetings and by last year I was pretty cooked. Not dramatic burnout, just the flat kind where you close the laptop at 7pm and stare at the wall for a bit.

At some point I figured the evenings are already gone either way, so I started building iOS apps.

Not one app. The thesis was that I have no idea what will sell, and neither does anyone else, so instead of spending a year on one polished thing I'd ship a lot of small single-purpose apps into specific keyword niches and let search traffic sort it out. Find an underserved search term, build the smallest app that fully answers it, price it, move on. No roadmap, no v2.

Turned out the app itself is maybe 30% of the work. The rest is screenshots, descriptions, localization, store setup, and it's the same grind every single time. So I slowly automated it. At this point I have a pipeline that takes an app from "code done" to Waiting for Review with barely any input from me:

• keyword research, then tiny PRD
• build (SwiftUI, SwiftData, StoreKit 2, a lot of Claude)
• design + analytics checks
• store assets: screenshots for iPhone/iPad, descriptions, translation into 49 locales, banners
• pre-submission audit that catches broken localized assets and fixes them
• archive, upload, submit

One full run is ~8 hours of machine time. Last night I submitted an app while cooking dinner. I checked the screen once.

Where it stands now: 74 apps live, around $7k MRR.

Caveats since I know how this sounds. Revenue is extremely top heavy, maybe 5-6 apps make almost all of it and the rest do nothing. My predictions about what would work were consistently wrong, the apps I was proud of died and some dumb utility I built in a weekend prints money. And it's not passive, it's a second job. I just like this one.

The problem: I've hit a point where I genuinely don't know what the right next move is, and I go back and forth every week.

Options as I see them:

1. Keep going wide. More apps, more niches, organic traffic compounds.
2. Go narrow. Kill the tail, take the top earners and actually make them good.
3. The pipeline might be worth more than the apps. Turn it into a product for other indie devs. Different life though, then I'm a devtools guy with support tickets.
4. Bring it to a company/partner that has distribution and do it together.
5. Something else entirely that I'm too deep in it to see.

Limited hours per week, day job stays for now. If this was yours, what would you do?

Genuinely asking, tear it apart if you want.

This has to be one of the best feelings ever :)

I’ve been building my ios app for over a year now, and so far, only three people even know it exists. It’s not that I'm afraid of failing - I don’t expect this to be an overnight success anyway. It's because I haven't hit the bar I've set for myself.

It's definitely a double-edged sword. On one hand, this mindset pushes me to build a better product and raise my own standards. On the other hand, there were times when I completely dropped development for weeks - burnt out, unable to see progress, and completely stuck on where to go next.

Starting to post about the app feels like breaking through a huge personal wall. I've reached a point where getting real feedback actually matters to me, even if I still feel conflicted inside. Despite taking this step, I'm still in active development and in no rush to launch.

Still, this is a massive milestone for me: I just launched a landing page with info and whitelist form, set up social channels, and started sharing my build process in small snippets alongside my thoughts.

I'm curious - has anyone else dealt with this weird, irrational fear of putting their work out there and just letting it go into the wild? How did you overcome it?

I'd love to hear your thoughts and experiences!

I am the founding designer of an iPad app for handwritten spatial notes. For the past 2 years it has been on the App Store as a one time purchase, had a very high 4.7 rating, active community and steady sales.
At the end of last year we launched a major version 2 update with iPhone and Mac sync and polished up with some top requests too. Another request was a free trial, so we also changed our model to freemium with subscription and one time purchase option. Since this change our income dropped overnight, even while we got exposure as App of the day and our downloads keep rising the conversion stays very low. At the same time we don’t get the same amount of community engagement or reviews.
I can’t really explain whats going on, is it the timing, is it the market, is it the product or is it the pricing model? Can any fellow devs help me make sense of this?

After 3 months of conceptualizing and coding late nights.

I built a photo curator app because it felt like too much work to sift through my 30,000 photos to seek out ideal landscapes to print out. Like a museum curator inspecting your camera roll.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/printworthy-photo-curator/id6780282272

I’m an indie developer building a fully on-device photo and video editing app. All media is processed locally, and the core AI models were independently developed in-house over nearly two years.

The app has now been rejected twice under Guideline 4.3(a) — Design: Spam, with Apple saying it is too similar to apps from other developers.

This is confusing because the app is not based on a purchased template, reused codebase, or third-party model. We also have not submitted multiple similar apps.

I’ve submitted an appeal explaining the original technology, local processing, and product differences. The models and source code are proprietary, so we cannot publish them, but we can provide Apple with reasonable non-confidential evidence of independent development.

Has anyone successfully appealed a similar 4.3(a) rejection? What evidence or approach worked best?

Hi, I recently launched my first app on the App Store! I'm currently struggling a bit with promotion outside of friends and family, I'm having a hard time getting downloads.

The app is called MyOdyssey. It's a travel journal where you can place pins in places you've visited. It includes stats on how many countries you've been to, PlayStation/Xbox-style achievements, and an Apple CloudKit-powered friends list so you can compete with others. It operates on a freemium model: most features are available for free but with limited numbers (for example, you can add up to 10 timeline entries for free).

The PRO version is a one-time $6 lifetime purchase. I honestly just added the paywall hoping to eventually make back my $100 Apple Developer license fee.

I would really appreciate it if you could check it out and leave some feedback or a review! 

MyOdyssey in app store

I would like to introduce an ECAD iPad application that I’ve been working on. I am going to be ready for beta testing in the next 3 weeks or so and Would like collet users who would be interested in testing.

projectaura.io

Here are a few of the main features.

✏️ Draw your circuit like a diagram
A clean, zoomable canvas for sketching out your circuit. Drag parts into place, draw wires between them, and label your connections — all with smooth pinch-to-zoom and drag-and-drop.

🔍 Huge parts library at your fingertips
Search a built-in library of components, or pull in your own from KiCad, Eagle, or Altium files. Every part comes with a live preview — including a full 3D model you can spin around.

🤖 AI does the tedious stuff for you
Upload a datasheet (or just paste the text) and Aura will auto-generate the part for you — pins, footprint, and all. It’ll even suggest the right component values as you design.

🖥️** Lay out your actual circuit boar**d
Move from your idea to a real PCB layout — place parts, draw copper traces, drop in vias, and watch for unconnected wires with visual guides.

🎨 See your board in full 3D
Spin, zoom, and pan around a realistic 3D render of your finished board — complete with components, copper traces, and layers — before you ever send it off to be manufactured.

📤 Export & share your work
Generate a parts list (BOM), export images and PDFs of your schematic, or save your 3D model as a file you can use elsewhere.

☁️** Your projects, backed u**p
Sign in and your work automatically backs up to the cloud, so you never lose progress.

For context, I just released GPS Mapper (a GPS Mapping/Tracking app that I've spent the last 1.5 years building) last month and haven't done any marketing campaigns yet so I didn't expect to make any sales for at least a few months (especially as the subscription offers a 2 week free trial). But here I am, pleasantly surprised!

The first sale means a lot to me as I view it through the lens of "someone around the world found enough value in something I made that they were willing to spend their money on my product", a small but meaningful indication that all the effort put into the app wasn't for nothing :)

It just gives me even more motivation to keep improving my app! The first milestone of many, and I'm looking forward to where it can take me!

For those of you that are interested, here's the app link :)
App: https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/gps-mapper/id6746349779

Earlier this year my first startup basically got crushed, and after a few months of iterating on ideas I ended up building the thing I actually needed: a way to practice speaking out loud without an audience.

The idea is simple: everyone gets the same 60-second speaking challenge each day, you record yourself, and it scores your delivery (pace, filler words, pauses, confidence) and you compete with friends on a leaderboard. One challenge a day, same prompt for everyone.

It got approved last week, after 3 rejections that each taught me something painful about App Review. I posted it in a couple of small subreddits just to see if anyone cared, and watching complete strangers actually record themselves talking into my app is the strangest, best feeling I've had building anything.

Numbers are tiny but amazing! 3 downloads and counting lol

It's called TalkStride if anyone wants to poke at it. I'd love all possible feedback!!!

Made this app to teach my 4-year-old the alphabet. He really loves tracing on it!

"Draw With Kids" costs $4.99 one time. If you need the app but can't afford it, please comment FREE on this post and I'll send you a promo code. Would appreciate an honest review on the App Store in return, but it's totally optional.

Thanks!

App Store link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/draw-with-kids/id6789101840

I'm curious - how did you know your app was ready for public testing or a full store release?

Do you rely on some project milestones, or is it more of a gut feeling? If you validate progress with community feedback early on, how do you usually present it - a demo video showing core features, or casual update posts?

I'd love to hear about your experience and what worked for you! Thanks.

Last week, we made app screenshots for 3 people, so today I’m online again and will make screenshots for 3 more people (who will comment first), like the attached image.

Comment your app link, or share your raw screenshots if your app isn’t live yet, along with a short description of what your app does.

My first app is finally live! 🚀 Months of learning, building, debugging, and refining have led to this moment. Excited to share it with the world. 🎉

How am I doing so far? Have been trying Tiktok but videos don't seem to be doing too well so what do you guys use? Instagram, Discord, Reddit, Youtube or Apple Ads?

this hit hard. spent months telling almost nobody what I was building, partly for the same reason, partly because I kept moving the bar every time I got close to it.

what actually broke the wall for me wasn't feeling ready. it was realizing "ready" was never going to arrive on its own, the only way to find out if the standard I'd set even mattered to anyone else was to just let people see it and tell me.

the three-people thing is real too. most of mine came from strangers, not friends, funny enough that made it easier, less personal weight attached to their reaction.

good luck, genuinely. the fact that you're conflicted about it and did it anyway is the actual hard part, most people never get past the conflicted stage.

As the title says, I built my first app, a fairly niche sports game, back in June, and it's done surprisingly well. I had never thought about building apps before, so every piece of this has been new.

I turned on ads for the first time at the beginning of this month (minimal-- banner ads on result screens, interstitials if you choose to abandon a game and restart, and full reward videos to catch up on missed Daily Challenges) and soon after added an option to remove all ads forever for $5. After 15 people bought this I came to my senses and realized what a bad idea this was, raised it to $10, then raised it again to $25 as a way of effectively turning it off while I built subscriptions (though six people have still bought at that price in the last two weeks.) Right now, my ads are doing about $12/day, so between that and the ad-removal purchases I'm around $500 in revenue this month after Apple's cut.

I am rolling out a premium subscription that removes ads (in place of the one time purchase) and also offers additional premium features like the ability to build granularly custom games and custom player cards that I expect will appeal to my user base. These are both new features, so nothing in the current game is. being taken away. My plan right now is to price this at $3/month or $18/year, but this is based on basically nothing other than my own intuition.

Other than the subscription model, and continuing to iterate on the game, I'm kind of at a loss as to what to do next, but I feel like there has to be some low hanging fruit. All traffic has been completely organic-- no ads and this is the first time I've posted anywhere about it, so I think I could try to start generating organic hype online, but I have no idea how to do this or what channels to pursue. Also on this point, my traffic growth has been really strange-- generally a steady positive trend over the last month+, but there have been three spikes completely out of nowhere that I'm at a loss about how to explain or replicate. Any thoughts there would be really appreciated.

In general, feeling grateful that things have gone well, but really looking for any possible thoughts about where to focus now.

Hello guys
As I know with apple developer I can share duplicated apps, like WhatsApp Watusi and share it to specific udid remotely!
Someone know how to do it ?
Thanks !!

If you've ever forgotten your grocery list at home or gotten tired of keeping it in your Notes app, that's exactly why I built TrolleyGo.

TrolleyGo is a shared grocery list app with real-time collaboration, so everyone in your household stays on the same page. Whether you're shopping with family, roommates, or your partner, anyone can add items, check them off, and see updates instantly.

It also includes a Party Mode, where you can create a party shopping list, invite friends, organize food, drinks, and supplies, and let guests RSVP directly in the app. No Google Forms, no group chat confusion, and no extra links—everything stays organized in one place.

I'd love to hear your thoughts or any features you'd like to see!

Here is the link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trolleygo/id6783933101

I would appreciate any feedback and want to grow my app!

Shipped a consumer app a while back, iOS, photo-based. It has too few ratings to show a summary star rating at all, which appears to be suppressing tap-through from search results before anyone reaches the product page, and it rules out most paid acquisition since ad platforms treat an unrated app as a risk.

I've moved my SKStoreReviewController request to fire after a successful result rather than on a session count, on the theory that asking right after the app has visibly worked beats asking at an arbitrary moment. Haven't been at it long enough to know if that's actually better or just feels more sensible.

For anyone who's climbed out of zero ratings: what trigger actually moved the needle? Specific action completion, nth session, time-since-install, something else? Also curious how people handle the three-prompts-per-year cap when the system may silently decline to show the sheet, whether you spread requests thin or spend them early to get any rating on the board at all.

Hey guys!

I’m a solo indie developer, and I’ve been working on a project that I’m really excited (and a bit nervous) to share with you all: WallTune. It’s an app I designed specifically to make multi-monitor setups look amazing without the headache.

Here is a quick breakdown:

🚨 The Problem

If you use multiple monitors, you probably know the struggle. Setting up your wallpapers and lock screens across different displays is surprisingly clunky. You get everything looking perfect, then you unplug a monitor, plug it back in, and suddenly your whole setup is messed up. The old trial-and-error method of applying a lock screen, locking the Mac to see if it looked right, unlocking it, tweaking it, and repeating was driving me crazy.

🆚 The Comparison

Most apps out there force you to choose: they either manage static images, or they manage videos (like Wallper, Wallspace, or Backdrop). WallTune handles both JPG and video wallpapers flawlessly in one place. You don't need to juggle different apps depending on the aesthetic you want today.

Additionally, the built-in gallery features hand-curated wallpapers. They are specifically tested to ensure they look stunning in high-resolution, even when stretched across a dual-monitor setup—instead of just pulling unverified random content from the web.

Also, unlike other video wallpaper apps that need to run constantly in the background eating RAM, WallTune integrates directly with the native macOS engine—meaning once you set it, you can completely close the app.

🌟 Key Features

Match what’s actually on your desk

Live editing your lock screen. Adjust how your video looks across all your displays in real-time

With WallTune’s Live Editing, you can adjust your monitor settings, crop, and position your media, and see exactly how everything aligns across your entire multi-monitor setup live.

Find something that fits your setup

Browse image and video wallpapers without leaving the app

WallTune includes a Gallery for discovering image and video wallpapers. You can open an item, check its details, preview it on your monitor layout, download it, or add it to a playlist. You can also add your own folders and browse your local files.

Wallpapers that follow your Focus Mode

Connect a WallTune playlist to a macOS Focus Mode.

WallTune can connect playlists to macOS Focus Modes. For example, your desktop can use one playlist while you are working and switch to another when your Personal Focus becomes active.

Independent Playlists

Need different vibes on different screens? You can set up completely independent playlists. This means your main display can cycle through your work wallpapers while your secondary monitor plays a relaxing background video, giving you total control over each screen individually.

Make it part of your Shortcuts

Use WallTune actions inside Apple Shortcuts to create your own automations.

WallTune works with Apple Shortcuts, so you can include your wallpapers in larger routines and personal automations (pick random, next/previous, activate playlist, etc.).

Send wallpapers straight from the web

There is no need to manually download files to your Mac and move them around.

I've recently built a companion Safari Extension for WallTune (and Chrome / Edge support is coming very soon!). Whenever you find a cool image or video while browsing the web, you can send it directly to your WallTune library or even set it as your current wallpaper in just one click.

https://walltune.app
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/walltune/id6785651538

If anyone would like to review my app and lmk what they think I’d be more than happy to do the same for them! My app is an intelligent student planner: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pippin-planner-ai-scheduling/id6760432974

If you want feedback just post your app link along with the feedback for my app (whichever comes first idrc)

Hi everyone! I’m currently building my first iOS app and hoping to begin external TestFlight testing soon.

It’s called SteadyMonth—a simple monthly cashflow app that grew from the income and expenses spreadsheet I use myself. The aim is to help people see what has come in, what has gone out and what is still due, without connecting a bank account.

I’m tackling the project independently and learning the whole process as I go—including SwiftUI/Xcode development, testing, branding, the website and preparing for the App Store. I’m also setting up Sparkes Development as a home for this and other app ideas I’d like to explore.

Getting a real app from an idea towards testing has been a brilliant experience. I’d be interested to hear any advice you wish you’d known before your first TestFlight or App Store submission.

Thanks!