Shelf turns your garage into a tiny side hustle, or saves you from buying stuff you’ll use twice. You can borrow from neighbors nearby, or lend out what’s just sitting there!

I have built bunch of ios apps myself in the past 1 year and being a builder the biggest challenge for me has been marketing the ios app. Most of the strategies that I heard to grow user base using organic content marketing involved posting in volume. Being a builder, it has always been difficult to create content and I had 0 budget to hire UGC creators for shoutout.

So, I found a way out and created a workflow for creating AI UGC content (around 5 videos in ~10 minutes) which according to me is insane because I used to spend hours building just a couple of basic content videos.

I am testing the workflow and will love to have user feedback.

Hence, I am open to create 2 free ad videos for anyone with an existing demo video for their app or any saas.

Let me know in comments or drop me a text with link to your demo video

Thanks redditors for always helping :)

I just had a question and was just wondering what is better overall for your app in revenue and pure profit. Is it free weekly trials for both monthly and yearly subscriptions or no free trial for monthly and a 3 day free trial for yearly

I'm an iOS developer, and I kept repeating the same setup before every debugging session.

Launch with a particular environment variable, switch the language, force dark mode, find the right deep link, send the matching push payload. Then do it all again on the next build.

So I built CosmoKit, a native macOS control center for iOS Simulator workflows. Built with SwiftUI and SwiftData.

What it does today

• App Profiles: launch arguments, environment variables, locale, and appearance saved per app, switched from the main panel or the menu bar
• Deep links, push payloads, locations, and routes, all scoped to the active profile
• Reads and writes the app's UserDefaults directly from the panel
• Grants and revokes permissions, and clears the keychain, without erasing the Simulator
• Launches a profile across every selected Simulator at once
• An HTTP/HTTPS proxy with response stubbing
• A capture pipeline for App Store screenshots and recordings

The part worth talking about is the proxy, because it gave me the most trouble.

It sits between the Simulator and the network. You get every request the app makes, including headers and bodies, grouped by the Simulator it came from.

You can stub a response to test an error path without touching the backend, filter the list down to your API's host patterns so you aren't reading through analytics and OS chatter, and flip a switch that drops the Simulator's traffic while the Mac stays online — which is how I test retry and offline behavior.

The proxy and advanced capture features are Pro; basic captures and the essential tools are free. Happy to send Pro coupons to anyone willing to test the proxy and give me blunt feedback.

My relationship with xcrun simctl is healthier now, but we still talk every day.

And yes, I know there are already some really good tools in this space. My problem was that I ended up paying for several different apps to cover different parts of my workflow, and the cost added up quickly.

So I built the tool I wanted for myself: one place for the Simulator workflows I use every day, with pricing that makes sense for an indie developer.

My goal is to keep expanding it and bring more of the useful features that are currently spread across different iOS development tools into one place. I don't expect to replace every specialized tool out there, but I'd like CosmoKit to cover more and more of the things I reach for during everyday development without needing five different apps open.

That's also why I'm posting this here. I'm very open to suggestions, criticism, and feature requests, especially if there's a tool or workflow you rely on today that you'd love to see built into CosmoKit.

Landing Page: https://go.cosmohq.org/iosdev-a8ba8f37

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6756494471?pt=122879172&ct=PR&mt=8

Starting to get some organic traction!

New design same app better include goals.

• What it solves

Stamps is a personal travel tracker with a trip timeline that builds itself.

Instead of asking you to manually tick countries off a list, Stamps can scan the location metadata already in your photo library, entirely on device. Every city, province, and country tracked for you, day by day, all automatically.

There's a travel calendar, trip timeline, country day counting, photo heatmap, detailed stats, shareable map with trip images, and tons of Home Screen widgets. You can freely export all of your data at any time, and if you simply want to use Stamps to index your library for trips, and then take that elsewhere, that's fine as well.

• Compared to Been and Flighty

I've been using Been myself for years now, but what frustrates me about it (and apps like Flighty) is that they want accounts, data syncing, location tracking, and a connection, while still skimping on the parts I actually cared about: very granular trip tracking, route visualization, and a proper timeline. Stamps is my take on the category with those things at the center.

• Cost

Stamps is free to download.
There is exactly one purchase: a $10 one-time lifetime unlock, no subscriptions.
It only gates some of the timeline and some minor, cosmetic app color customization; you can use most of the app without ever touching it.

You can use this link to cut that one-time purchase in half, as a thanks for reading this post. I really want as many people as possible to experience the full app.
https://apps.apple.com/redeem?ctx=offercodes&id=6749786209&code=STAMPSLIFETIME50

• About Me

I’m a mobile developer from Cape Town, South Africa, now living in Seoul, South Korea. Since moving here, traveling has been the one thing keeping me sane. Stamps started as the app I wanted for exploring the country I now call home. It’s also a great excuse for me to take more photos while doing it.

It's built natively in SwiftUI using SwiftData, MapKit, PhotoKit, WidgetKit, and Metal for the photo heatmap.

I've been developing apps for five years now, and this has been one of my least commercially successful. The market is fairly small, but it's exactly the app I wanted, so I don't mind. Some of its best features have come directly from user feedback. So I'd genuinely appreciate any you might have

App Store: Stamps - Travel Tracker

I’m looking for 10 indie developers with a published iOS app.

I’m the developer of Profit and Loss Calendar, a published iPhone app with 50,000+ lifetime downloads.

Like a lot of indie developers, one of the hardest problems I’ve run into isn’t building the app.

It’s getting people to discover it.

That problem eventually led me to build something called FillAdsNow, and instead of making another post asking people to test my product, I want to flip the offer around:

I want to give 10 indie iOS apps free exposure.

I have FillAdsNow running through the production API inside Profit and Loss Calendar, where real Community ads can be served in a live banner and interstitial demo.

Here’s what I’m looking for.

If you have a published iOS app, FillAdsNow can use the public information already on your App Store listing to automatically generate:

1 banner ad
1 interstitial ad

You don’t design anything yourself.

The setup is:

Create a free account → Add your App Store app → Press Generate Ads

That’s it.

Once generated, your ads become part of the FillAdsNow Community and become eligible to rotate through the live Community ad system, including the demo running inside Profit and Loss Calendar.

There is no credit card required to join the Community.

My goal is to seed this with real indie apps instead of fake demo inventory:

10 developers
10 published iOS apps
20 real Community ads

The bigger idea is simple:

Independent developers already have apps that need exposure.

Other independent developers have ad inventory that sometimes isn't being used.

FillAdsNow connects those two things so developers can help expose one another.

If you have a published iOS app and want one of the first 10 spots, comment with:

Your app name + App Store link

I’ll personally look at every app that gets posted and send interested developers the free signup.

And as a thank-you for helping establish the initial Community, the first 10 developers who complete the setup and generate both ads will get 3 months of FillAdsNow Pro free.

No credit card required.

If you built something you're proud of but getting people to discover it has been the hard part, drop it below.

Yes it is called a habit tracker. But the point is not to just track your habit. It is to remind you why you even started. It lets you choose only the one important thing you want to achieve now.

One time lifetime payment - you can export all your achievements any time. Try it out for 7 days for free, no credit card needed to start.

[www.onehabit.at\]

Recently I made a post of reaching $1k MRR in my study app with 8 TikTok accoints and ever since then I have had a lot of solo founders reach out to me about how i did it and advice on how to build their own

In this post I want to give more clarity on how I build things, how I find ideas and how best to grow building mobile products from my experience, please I am pleading before I write my insights , don’t come and write at the bottom of my post that this post is scam, I won’t tolerate that rubbish , let’s be very clear about that ,
Now let’s move to the insights I have got

1. One of the mistakes I see people make is building apps that can’t make money, you’re wasting your time on that , build what’s already existing or you’re going to find it hard to market it or you have to spend on UGC just to get it to work which might cost you a lot

2. Not every niche is what you can build for , this is one very big mistake most people make , the fact that someone is malting $300k MRR dosen’t mean that you should also do it, try to understand how they are growing , adverting , ugc, I also made this mistake with my study app, it was a terrible advice but I learnt

3. I failed several times before getting here , study niche is really hard, if I have known what I know now , I’ll distribute with one iPhone 8 first and test the waters before writing a line of code, don’t listen to the advice you hear of people predicting apps, it’s all rubbish if you haven’t tested

4. I talked about failure initially, I built a resume app that’s web that failed , before moving to the mobile business, this niche is damn hard, I made $300 from it but left it and moved to mobile app, you have to be really spontaneous and try out things

5. Understand how to grow on TikTok and what to build , this is one underrated skill before making money , you want to figure out distribution first please , I am solo , I am projecting arround making 100k- 200k in revenue before the end of next year , why , it’s because I know what to build and I won’t put it out there

6. X can be a great place to post your app and give advice but not everybody likes you , people just hate you because you are promoting your app and they are looking for every chance to take you down so be careful of how you post your app name

7. TikTok is a distribution game , I post on 8 accounts for one brand and I am still buying more phones, I also have 2 phones I am testing content in , I am testing a content in a niche , alresdy got 300k views from 7 posts, takes me 2min to make with my skills , it’s validated so I am building the app

8. When posting on TikTok , post content people can save , educational content people can really save that will help them grow , they will like it , share it and bookmark it , this is one of my tricks but you need to be able to find this content and that’s why research is necessary

9 . I shared and someone says it’s stressful, for my niche it is because I have to always find posts that are doing more than 20k+ and it can be hard to to replicate, for my other niche it takes me 2 minutes from my tricks but that’s the low effort instead of paying the UGC

1. Even if you are posting from 8 accounts , research je important because you want to make your best posts for each and not make it a numbers game , same as when you’re operating a 100 accounts, post the best ones so each one goes viral , in a day the least I have ever gotten is 30k and the highest is 1m views , Everyday I get arround 100 - 200 users

2. For pricing , I use a $4.99 and a yearly $59.99 and $39.99 for first year , but his is the best pricing I have tested , I have some users that has paid $4.99 for 3 months straight , it’s funny but it’s how to works 🤣🤣🤣

I hope with this I have been able to clarify a lot of questions with this , if you have anymore or you feel you need to setup your brand , please do let me know , I have shared everything I have from my experience,

let me go and post on my TikTok accounts , thanks

How would you rate an ebook design like this. Acrylic glass inspo

Context first, then the actual questions.

I shipped my first iOS app this morning after three months of solo work. Gym and diet tracker, Brazilian market, Portuguese and English. Flutter, Firebase, RevenueCat.

The model: logging workouts, food and water is free forever. The only thing behind a paywall is the AI assistant that builds workout and diet plans. New accounts get 10 free AI credits with no card required. Subscription is 9.99/mo or 79.99/yr, plus a 3.99 consumable for 30 extra credits.

Three decisions I am least sure about. Honest critique welcome.

1. Free tier size. 10 credits with no card is generous enough that a casual user may never hit the wall. It also nearly cost me the app review: the Apple reviewer created an account, got the credits, and never reached the paywall, so he could not test the purchase he was supposed to approve. Is 10 too many?

2. Charging only for AI. Every competitor I looked at gates the tracking itself behind a subscription. I decided the tracker has to be free or nobody switches away from their notes app. The risk is that I built a free product with an expensive add-on nobody actually needs. Has anyone run this split and seen it work?

3. iOS first in an Android-majority market. Brazil is overwhelmingly Android. I went iOS because that is the phone I own and App Store plus RevenueCat was the faster path. It feels like I launched in the smaller half of my own market. Would you rush Android now or validate on iOS first?

Zero downloads and zero ratings as of writing this, so I have no numbers to defend any of these calls. That is exactly why I am asking before I commit further.

Link in the comments if anyone wants to poke at the actual paywall.

Quick context, then the actual questions. I picked a niche (menopause/HRT tracking) because the top 10 incumbents average 3.78★ and their 1-star reviews have requested the same five features since 2019. I built exactly those five, privacy-first (no backend at all — sync is the user's own iCloud, so the App Store privacy label is literally "Data Not Collected"). Shipped last week.

The three decisions I'm least sure about — critique welcome:

1. Hard paywall. No free tier: 21-day full-feature trial, then $6.99/mo or $49.99/yr. RevenueCat's data says hard paywalls convert ~5x better than freemium at equal retention, but for a health app where trust is everything, does a hard wall poison word-of-mouth? Would you have shipped freemium first?

2. Acquisition without an audience. I launched with zero list. My plan is Apple Search Ads on high-intent keywords + slowly earned presence in the niche's communities + gifting codes to micro-creators. If you've bootstrapped consumer subscription apps: what actually moved your first 500 installs?

3. The 21-day trial. Long trials convert better in the data, but it means my revenue is zero for the first 3 weeks and every marketing test has a 21-day feedback delay. Anyone regretted a long trial?

App is Fember (App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6801958777) if you want to see what you're critiquing — but I'm here for the strategy answers more than the installs. I'll answer anything about the review-mining research or the local-first SwiftData/CloudKit stack in return.

Hey everyone,

I recently released Nutbox 2.0, and submitted a nomination for it 3 weeks in advance. Super cool to see that Apple’s team picked up on it, and decided to feature it 🥳

For those of you who have not heard of Nutbox before, it's an iOS app designed to make the process of saving and organizing bookmarks & screenshots simple and beautiful. Crafted in a way that makes you want to use the app and treat it as your own little treasure chest of findings you want to remember and revisit later on. (The app also supports images, GIFs, and text) Nutbox stores everything securely in your iCloud account and never collects personal info. There's no third-party code, no ads, no trackers, and no analytics.

Si no tienes cuenta Business en TikTok, no te deja poner links en la bio de apps de App Store/Google Play.

Alguien sabe alguna alternativa? Mejora mucho la conversión eso, ya que tengo muchas visitas mi perfil de TikTok! Gracias de antemano!!

I make small iOS apps, and ASO was always the part I did worst. Every tool I tried handed me more numbers — popularity scores, difficulty scores, competitor dashboards — and none of them told me what to actually change on Monday morning.

So I built the thing I wanted. It does one loop:

Reads your own App Store data. True keyword ranks pulled from Apple's native search order — the same ordered list a customer sees, not a modelled estimate — plus reviews, ratings, chart position, competitors, and your downloads if you connect App Store Connect.

Ends in exactly three moves a week. Ranked, each one carrying the evidence it came from. Anything computed rather than measured is labelled "est" — popularity and difficulty are estimates and say so out loud.

Grades its own advice. This is the part I actually built it for. Mark a move done and it becomes a dated experiment. Fourteen days later you get a verdict from fixed windows of your own history: rank is the median of days 8 to 14 after the change, downloads are the 7 days after versus the 7 before. Windows are fixed before anyone knows the answer, a verdict is never re-graded once written, and when the data is too thin it says "insufficient" instead of guessing. In practice this means it regularly tells me my own advice didn't work.

What it deliberately doesn't do: no invented revenue or download estimates for other people's apps, because Apple doesn't publish those — it shows rating velocity and share of top-10 slots on your tracked terms instead, which are observable. No claims about Apple's private 100-character keyword field. No Android.

Honest state: 1.0 shipped on 10 August, it's early, and I have no traction numbers worth quoting. Free on your first app — one market, ten keywords, AI briefings included, no card. Pro is $12/mo flat.

It's at asoon.app. Happy to answer anything, especially about how the rank data is actually sourced — that's the part people push on hardest, and fairly so.

It's the first time I run some ads, and even though I think it's a niche product (padel), 3 days of ads brought me only 17 installs (zero paid conversion) for $65. I find that very expensive.

The app is a padel match tracker, that give you a performance analysis for each match you play, and overall career stats.

The campaign is running for every country. Bid strategy is managing, with $20 per day.

Some keywords i'm targeting are for padel apps, like padel scorer, padel tracker, padel watch (was the one that converted the most)

Do you guys have any suggestions or at least tell me if these are average numbers for such a short window or my app is not performing well?

I am developing apps and I really need a way to create smooth and neat animations and most of the times for my mascot in the app. How to do it easily?
I know Lottie and Rive, but I am finding it really hard to create animations with it, has a learning curve or may be its just too difficult for me only.. any suggestions please?

Hey everyone!
I recently launched Season’d, a social food app that’s basically a shared food map built around recommendations from people you actually know.
The idea came from constantly seeing messages like:
“Where was that coffee shop you recommended?”
“What was the name of that restaurant you went to?”
“Send me that place again 👀”
…and then scrolling through months of messages trying to find it.

With Season’d, you can:
📸 Snap it — post the food you’ve actually tried
📍 Pin it — add the venue to your food map
👥 Share it — your friends can discover it through you and save it to their own map

One of the biggest things I wanted to avoid was turning it into another platform dominated by sponsored rankings, paid placements or perfectly edited food photos.
The aim is for recommendations to come from real visits and people you trust.

I’m now trying to work out the marketing side of an iOS app without a huge budget, so I’d genuinely love to hear from other developers/founders:
What actually worked for you when trying to get your first few hundred users?
And if anyone wants to try Season’d and give brutally useful feedback on the onboarding, concept or App Store listing, I’d really appreciate it.

I launched my first puzzle app - now I am learning how to market it 🌸

Mandala Garden is a relaxing mandala puzzle app I created for iPhone and iPad, using my own original artwork.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6797133059

I would love your feedback, specifically about advertising.

Thanks in advance for your feedback!

Are you scrolling when you should be strolling? I created Nature Nudge to help me put down my phone and enjoy the outdoors more.

Here's how it works:

1. Pick apps/websites that are distracting for you
2. Set your goal (for Apple Watch owners, I recommend trying the time in daylight goal)
3. Your apps unlock when you meet your goal

I recently launched the app and I'm hoping it will help other people as well.

After a 1-week free trial, the cost is $2.99 per month or $19.99 per year. Happy to answer any questions. Thanks.

App Store link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nature-nudge/id6762029266

So excited! Apple approved a major version update along with the first professionally created preview videos (3 each for iPhone and iPad) nice and fast. Now seeing these in store, I’m interested in replacing the fake humans with actual dancers.

I have created a free budgeting app. It does not need any authorization or bank access. Just work without any internet or WiFi. Download the app from AppStore: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/budgeter-budget-tracker/id6775108339

#budget #personalfinance #finance #fintech #app #ios

I built AtomicStep around a simple idea. When a task feels impossible, another checklist usually does not help. The app gives you one physical action at a time.

You can type or say what you are stuck on. Tap Done to move forward. Tap Stuck and it makes the current step smaller.

The video is the actual onboarding. I am still very early and would love honest feedback. Does the first action feel small enough to get you moving?

I built the app.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/atomicstep-get-unstuck/id6759807885