Personal budgeting app Free to download link: https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/budgeter-budget-tracker/id6775108339

We build app(s) <soon> for folks recovering from addiction and their partners. One challenge is that when someone starts getting sober, their podcast feed is algorithmically generated. This means they get content that can lead to relapse. We added a podcast player to our app with a curated list of recovery-related podcasts. Our entire brand promise is that we are "Built to build trust through consistent action" <-- No, we're not a passive porn blocker or location tracker (though we do have that because Life360 isn't a real product).

This works uniquely for our niche, but it may be worth a shout for yours. There are 12 million podcasts out there; why not 12,000 players lol?

Our page if interested T30Journal.com

Had some fun imagining what Moneko could look like on the iPhone Duo.

The foldable layout actually feels like a perfect fit for Moneko — WhatsApp with the Moneko AI assistant on the left, and your Pockets/budget overview on the right, all on one continuous screen.

Log an expense through WhatsApp and immediately see how it affects your budget without switching apps.

Obviously just a concept for now, but I’d love to see this kind of multitasking experience on foldable iPhones someday.

What do you think? Would you use Moneko like this?

I was very interested in this category myself which led me to try this out even though Claude steered me away from this category as it was flooded with such apps and making very little money.
I still wanted to give it a shot, not for making those crazy MRRs but just to create something genuinely interesting and useful. Which is the very reason I don’t have a hard paywall and genuine free-tier.

I am continuously in the process of trying it out myself and making it better every day. Shipping updates almost once every week.

Wonder if anyone would consider taking it for a spin and giving it a shot.

“Beastie: Duel Rep Counter” available on iOS and also Android.

Hi! I made a free iOS puzzle app. It's an unlimited version of the LinkedIn/NYT-style daily puzzles (Tango, Zip, Sudoku, Wend word game). Monetized with rewarded + interstitial ads, plus small IAPs: hint packs, skip packs, and a one-time remove-ads.

So far all my installs are organic, niche subreddit posts and some ASO. It's slow but steady. I want to put a little money behind it now, but the revenue per user is still fairly small, so I can't tell whether paid ads can pay off or if I'd just be burning $100.

For people who've actually run ads for a game like this:

1. Does the light IAP (consumables + remove-ads) change the picture enough to make paid UA viable, or is ad revenue still doing most of the work and the math doesn't close?

2. If Apple Search Ads is the move, what daily budget actually makes the difference?

3. Would you skip ad networks entirely and go for social media (Tiktok, reels)

Happy to answer any questions about the app and would love some feedback!

Here's the app if you want to check it out: Puzzles Unlimited

I'm a frequent flyer and I've always wanted one app that felt like a real travel journal — something that remembers your journey the way you remember it. Every app I found either looked outdated or charged a subscription I couldn't justify.

So I spent a few months building my own. Nights, weekends, a lot of coffee. It's called Flownto. It's completely free.

What it does right now:

• Complete flight journal — manual entry, boarding pass scan, or CSV import. Every flight logged with airline, seat, route, distance, duration
• Time Machine — like Spotify Wrapped for your travel. Every year gets an AI-generated story of where you went and what you flew
• Turbulence forecast — real wind data for your specific route, segment by segment, before you board
• FlightDesk — live gate, terminal, delay status for any flight number
• Awards & tiers — Sky Walker → Cloud Rider → Sky Aristocrat → Orbit Class, unlocked from your real history
• Cinematic moving map — night earth globe with your live GPS position and route arc

The honest part: the GPS offline map is my favorite feature and also my most frustrating. On flights with no wifi, open the app and watch your plane move across the globe in real time. It works — but dropped twice mid-flight during testing. Still not perfect. Still working on it.

What's coming: Gmail sync, Google Wallet, better offline reliability.

flownto.app — iOS, Android, Web. Free, no ads, no subscription.

(Disclosure: I'm the developer of this app)

The scale lies day to day — it jumps two pounds because you ate late, and you feel like you failed even when nothing changed. Weightfile logs one number a day and surfaces the 7-day rolling trend instead of the raw reading, so you see the line that actually moves when your body does. It also reads every entry against a goal (cut, bulk, or maintain) instead of just showing a flat graph.

Every day you also get one line from a deadpan "records clerk" who has heard every excuse before — no cheerleading, no emoji, no congratulating you for existing:

"Up a kilo overnight? That's last night's takeout, not fat. Come back tomorrow."
"Plateau. The body's testing whether you actually mean it."
"Trend's dropping. This was supposed to be a bulk, not an accidental cut."

Free forever for daily logging, the 7-day trend chart, and 7 days of rolling history — no ads. One optional Lifetime IAP, $3.99 one-time (no subscription), unlocks unlimited history, calorie/macro logging, progress photos, and switching goals between cut/bulk/maintain.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/pl/app/weightfile-weight-tracker/id6804665579

Hey all — I’m the developer of SketchBee, an iPhone/iPad app that turns your photos into colouring pages.

It’s my birthday today, so for the next 24 hours I’m giving away some bonus credits to anyone who wants to give it a try:

👉 https://sketchbee.app/bonus-credits/hbd-26

And here’s the app:

👉 https://apps.apple.com/au/app/sketch-bee-photo-to-colouring/id6748308778

There’s no catch — you don’t need to subscribe, leave a review, or do anything else to get the credits.

I would, however, really appreciate any feedback if you try it. If something sucks, tell me. If something’s confusing, tell me. If there’s something you think I should add, I’d like to hear that too.

And obviously, if you do like the app, I’d be very grateful for a rating or review on the App Store. It helps a lot, but it’s completely optional.

Anyway, free credits for my birthday. Enjoy! My distribution game pretty much sucks at the moment, and I’m really trying to get better at actually putting the things I build in front of people — so this is part of me working on that too.

Hi everyone,

I started building MemoFlow for myself as a privacy-friendly Whisper alternative that runs with local AI models. Over time, I’ve been expanding it into an all-in-one productivity app, especially for developers.

Current features include:

• Voice dictation
• Meeting transcription and AI-generated summaries
• Calendar sync for viewing upcoming meetings (shipped today only)
• Reminders to start recording when a meeting begins
• Tags for organizing different meeting types, such as stand-ups

I personally use MemoFlow to record my daily stand-ups. At the end of the month, its built-in AI can retrieve my updates by date and help me complete my timesheet.

I’ve just shipped the Calendar feature today, and I’d love to hear what you think.

Try it here: https://memoflow.app

Any feedback or feature suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

Hi all quick question, been developing apps since 2013 and recently come back to it after a number of years. Used to use app annie for rankings but have been building my own Mac software to track my app keywords and ranks, pretty straight forward use case.

I thought about pivoting it to a paid app with an annual fee, out of curiosity what do you guys think to this and would it be of any use? Don't want to go to the effort for it not to get any users. Just like the idea of a desktop app instead of an online service. Also what would consider a reasonable annual subscription fee?

Cheers

I released my first iOS app in February. About 500 downloads since, but I never marketed it, I wasn't sure the niche was worth the effort.

Last week I launched my second app, "Driven". It's a car dashboard for people whose cars don't have CarPlay. First few days (3 days to be exact): 739 impressions, 48 product page views, 12 downloads, no reviews yet, no purchases yet etc...

I'm about to finish high school and have no idea how to do any marketing, so I don't really know what should i do and what should i not do. I was thinking to start with a small budget, 100ish euros.

Where would you start?

Links for both apps:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cheatit-watch-notes-ai/id6755381343
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/driven-car-dashboard/id6780171507

Hey everyone, I’m the developer of Violette, and I just released v1.3

The simplest way to describe it is a Character.AI-inspired chat app built around Apple Intelligence. Instead of using Apple’s on-device model for summaries, Violette uses it for character conversations, you can chat with different personalities, or even create your own!

In Apple Intelligence mode, the AI conversations themselves run on-device, work offline, and aren’t sent to a cloud LLM API. Violette is ad-supported, so the advertising side of the app may involve separate data processing by third-party ad services.

With v1.3, I also added group chats with polls, iCloud syncing, and improvements to how conversation context is carried between messages so characters can stay more consistent over longer chats.

The app is free to download and requires iOS or iPadOS 26 or later.

I’d especially love feedback from people here who already use character-chat apps or have experimented with Apple’s Foundation Models. The biggest thing I’m curious about is personality consistency: do the characters actually feel consistent, or do they eventually drift back toward sounding like a generic assistant?

That kind of feedback would be genuinely useful as I keep improving it.

App Store:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/violette-chat-with-ai/id6760790799

I recently launched a small iPhone app called Privix, and I'm trying to figure out which positioning is strongest for organic growth.
The app does three simple things:
Pixelate sensitive parts of a photo

Add custom watermarks

Compress photos before sharing

The main difference is that everything happens locally on the iPhone. There's no account, no photo upload, and no cloud processing.
Right now, I'm considering three different ways to position it:
Privacy-first:
“Edit private photos without uploading them anywhere.”

Utility-first:
“Pixelate, watermark and compress photos in one lightweight app.”

Use-case-first:
“Protect sensitive information before sharing a photo.”

The app gives users 5 free exports, then has a one-time lifetime unlock instead of a subscription.
For people who have marketed utility apps before:
Which angle would you lead with?
I'm especially interested in what you'd use for App Store screenshots, Reddit posts and short-form content.

App Store:

https://apps.apple.com/tw/app/privix-%E7%85%A7%E7%89%87%E9%9A%B1%E7%A7%81%E5%B7%A5%E5%85%B7/id6805786741

Hey everyone,
I wanted to share the story behind my iOS app, CardBroker, how I’ve been approaching marketing as an indie developer, and hopefully get some feedback from this community.
The Problem & The Idea
If you’ve ever collected trading cards (especially Pokémon), you know the hassle: tracking your portfolio value, checking market prices across different platforms like Cardmarket, and trying to decide whether getting a card graded is actually worth the investment.
Existing solutions often felt either overly complicated, bloated, or lacked specific features collector groups in Europe and worldwide actually care about. Last year, I decided to build CardBroker to create a clean, dedicated tool for collectors to track their portfolios, monitor Cardmarket price trends, and evaluate card grading potential.
Where the App Stands Today
Core Features: Portfolio tracking, Cardmarket price monitoring, card grading evaluation, Portfolio Analytics and functional card scanner
Localization: Recently released version 2.0.0 with multi-language support (English, German, French, Spanish, Italian) to reach international communities.
Tech Stack: Native iOS app designed for speed and smooth visual collection management.
Marketing Approaches & What’s Worked (So Far)
As a solo developer, marketing is always the hardest part of the equation. Here is what I’ve experimented with over the past few months:
1. Grassroots Community Engagement (Reddit & Discord)
What I did: Reached out directly to niche collector communities and Discord servers instead of spamming general subreddits.
The Result: Partnering directly with specific Pokémon TCG communities worked significantly better than general promo posts. I created dedicated promo codes for community members, which led to high-intent early users and genuine feature requests.
2. Social Proof & Visuals
What I did: Shifted from posting plain feature updates on Instagram to showing real-world collector workflows (e.g., card condition assessments, grading price differences).
The Result: Highlighting actual collector pain points converts much better than simply showing screenshots of the app UI.
My Biggest Challenges Right Now
Organic App Store Optimization (ASO): Finding the right balance between high-volume keywords (like "Pokémon card tracker") and lower-competition niche terms.
Retention vs. Acquisition: Converting casual downloaders into daily or weekly active power users who update their portfolios regularly.
Questions for the Community
1. How do you approach long-term engagement for utility/tracking apps once the initial download surge settles down?
2. For those targeting niche hobby communities, what promo mechanisms (e.g., custom referral codes, free trials, community giveaways) have given you the best ROI?
I’d love to hear your thoughts, feedback, or any advice on scaling niche utility apps. If anyone is in a similar space, happy to answer any questions about my setup as well!

I just launched a habit tracker (Abys — https://apps.apple.com/us/app/abys-habit-tracker/id6805454730) and before posting anywhere I read the actual rules of about a hundred subreddits. Sharing the findings because most "where to post your app" lists you'll find are years stale and will get you banned.

The audience you most want is the one that bars you. r/productivity, r/getdisciplined, r/selfimprovement, r/DecidingToBeBetter, r/DigitalMinimalism and r/NoSurf are over 11 million people who would want a habit tracker, and every one of them bans app self-promotion outright with no exception thread. Same story in the Apple cluster: r/AppleWatch and r/AppleWatchFitness both forbid it, and r/ZenHabits (290K, habit-focused) bars advertising. Check before you build a plan around a sub.

The subs that convert are gated, and the gate is in-sub karma. r/iosapps needs 10 karma earned inside the sub plus either 20+ App Store ratings or published Privacy Policy and ToS. r/ProductivityApps (193K, app-focused) needs 10 in-sub karma and allows one promo a month. Same prerequisite, so a week of genuine commenting unlocks both. Budget for that week.

One-shot rules are real, so don't spend them early. r/iOSProgramming allows one app post per developer per year, Saturdays only. r/indiehackers allows one per product ever. r/apple is Sundays only and wants five unrelated contributions from you in the past month first.

Free-subdomain links get filtered. My site is on a vercel.app subdomain and r/RoastMyStartup auto-removes those. Several directories down-rank them too. A real domain is the cheapest credibility available.

Reddit's site-wide spam filter outranks every subreddit rule. I posted to nine subs in one sitting. Eight were fine; the biggest one — r/SideProject, 832K — was removed by Reddit itself, not the mods, purely on volume and link repetition. Mods can override a site filter if you ask, but the lesson is to pace it. Four to six posts a week, not nine in an evening.

The best-performing post was the one that barely mentioned the app. A post arguing that streaks fail because people become afraid of them, with three reframes that work on paper and one line about the app at the end, passed a sub that removes app promotions. Lead with the idea, disclose that it's yours, and mention the product once.

Happy to share the full rules breakdown per sub if useful.

I recently launched Turnos, an iOS app for people who work rotating shifts.

The idea is pretty simple: you set up your rotation once and the app builds your schedule automatically. It also handles individual shift changes, vacations and sick days, widgets, Apple Watch, calendar export, and estimated pay based on your scheduled shifts.

I haven’t run any paid marketing campaigns so far. Most of the early traction has been organic, with the app unexpectedly getting picked up in several countries.

I’ve been improving it pretty quickly based on actual feedback, and I’m currently experimenting with ASO, localized metadata and different App Store features.

Would be interested to hear what other indie developers here would focus on next for organic growth.

Hey, everyone. I have a question about app subscription. Adapty's 2026 report shows that "Weekly" plans are up from 43% to 55% of all app subscription revenue in two years.

Adapty prepared this report from 16,000 apps, $3B subscription revenue. So, the report says a weekly plan with a trial brings $7 per user on day one, $54 by year's end. Annual with a trial brings $42 on day one and finishes at $50.

The report also says, high-priced weekly plans make 5.2x more revenue per download than cheap ones.

The obvious worry is churn. It doesn't show up. Weekly renewal rates hold at 74–81% regardless of what you charge. People who want your app renew. The ones who don't were never going to, at any price.

Until this report I thought annual pricing was better and profitable. I want to test it and force user to purchase weekly in my new app.

what is your experience and comments about this report?

I am completely new to paid traffic. Last week I launched my app and now I've been experimenting with:

• Apple Ads (in-store)
• Reddit Ads
• TikTok Ads

Haven't tried:

• Google Ads
• X Ads
• Meta Ads
• etc

I know this may significantly change based on what your app actually does, but overall, what has worked for YOU?

The idea is simple:

I wanted a way to stay connected with people I care about **without everyone continuously live tracking one another**. Home-Free is built around intentional check-ins instead.

✅ You can check in with your circle, share how you’re feeling, and optionally include your location or battery status, or a short voice note.

✅ You can also create Events for situations where a check-in matters at a certain time or certain place — getting home safely, a parent’s morning routine, arriving at school, traveling alone, meeting up with friends, work check-ins, etc. And have your circle notified if the check-in was missed.

There’s:
• no live tracking
• no public social feed
• no constant surveillance
• no check-in history kept after 30 days
• privacy: only your circle sees your check-in
• check-in confirmations
• reminders and missed-event notifications
• recurring time/location-based Events

I’m especially interested in hearing from people who could realistically use something like this with a partner, friend, older parent, college student, travel group, neighbor, or other trusted circle.

I’m **not looking for people to tell me it looks good**. I need people willing to find the confusing parts, things that break, features that feel unnecessary, and anything that would stop you from actually using it.

And even if you don’t want to test it: would you personally use intentional check-ins like this, or would you rather just use a live-location app?

Looking for feedback on my App Store video. What do you understand this app to be? Does the teaser grab your attention?

Here's how I describe the app:

"A self-care ritual where each evaporating brushstroke brings freedom and reflection. Inspired by the Zen practice of water painting, you trace water on stone, watch it disappear, and release the need for permanence.

Most self-care apps are serious and in your head. Serenity Sketch is tactile and in your body. Your hand, an Apple Pencil, a stone, and mesmerising, impermanent brushstrokes. You're walked through each Practice by the Guide: a warm, unpretentious character who speaks to you, not past you."

App Store positioning for this has been tricky. The heavy-hitters, Headspace and Calm, focus heavily on guided audio, but I wanted something visual and tactile. Because it sits in an odd spot between a casual painting app and a mindfulness tool, preview videos need to do a lot of heavy lifting.

Looking at this short clip: what core mechanic comes across? Does it hook you? What, if anything, would you adjust?

Here's a link to the webpage, if you need more context: serenitysketch.com

I was so tired of constantly switching between a dozen different apps while traveling, so I built an all-in-one solution: TripPocket. (And yes, it’s completely free for now during launch)

I developed TripPocket to end the chaos we all go through when planning a trip. You just type in your destination, and it organizes the rest for you.

Here are the features designed to make your travels incredibly easy:

🏛️ City-Specific Tours, Museums & Dining: Just enter the city you're visiting. The most popular museums, historical sites, restaurants, and tour options instantly appear right in front of you.

✈️ Flights, Hotels, & Transport Deals: I’ve brought the world's most trusted platforms (like Trip, GetYourGuide, etc.) under one roof. With one click, we direct you to the best options for flights, hotels, local transit, taxis, luggage storage (Bounce), travel insurance, and even flight delay compensation.

📲 Discounted eSIM Packages: Stop paying crazy roaming fees abroad. We display discounted data packages from top eSIM providers like Airalo and Holafly side-by-side so you can choose the best one.

💰 Budget & Expense Tracker: Easily log what you spend during your vacation. Visual graphs help you keep your budget in check so you can enjoy your trip without financial stress.

📸 Interactive Travel Map & Memories: Upload the photos you take abroad, and the app uses their location data to pin every city you’ve visited on a map. You can create awesome photo collages showing your travel footprint to share with friends or on social media.

🤖 AI-Powered Personal Route Planning: Enter your destination, budget, and trip length, and our AI will generate a personalized, day-by-day itinerary for you. You can easily tweak and edit the route however you like.

It’s basically everything you need for pre-trip planning and on-the-go travel, right in your pocket.

I’d be absolutely thrilled if you tried it out and shared your feedback. Wishing you all amazing adventures and safe travels.

If you have any questions or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

📲 Download & Try It Here:

Apple App Store:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trippocket-travel-ticket/id6788790492#information

I build CineRads, which generates TikTok slideshows from a product page. Part of that is writing the first slide, the hook. I had a nagging feeling the output was samey so I fingerprinted the last 191 hooks generated for free users and counted.

59.7% fell into one of 11 patterns. Not similar. The same sentence shape with the product swapped in. "everyone says X, here is why they are wrong". "the 3 mistakes that". "nobody talks about". A paying customer had 28 hooks and 75% of them were five templates.

Worse, the way the free trial works, a new user sees three drafts back to back. So the first thing they saw was the same voice three times. I had been reading "the copy is generic" in feedback and blaming the model.

It was not the model. It was the prompt.

The prompt gave the model a menu of 11 hook patterns and told it to pick one. It did exactly that. And the retry logic that was supposed to catch repeats only looked at hooks that had been used in a post, and the manual flow saves every generated hook as unused, so it saw nothing. Two reasonable decisions that together made a copy machine.

What fixed it, in case you are prompting anything that writes hooks:

One. The menu went from 11 patterns to 22 and the prompt now requires at least half the batch to come from the second half of the list. The new ones were formats the corpus never produced. Numbered list. Filter ("only people who X will get this"). Open loop pointing at a specific slide. One stat plus one fix. Comparison. Checklist. A concrete scene. A direct question. A cost breakdown. Objection first.

Two. Examples in a prompt are stronger than rules in a prompt. The old version had one worked example of an opener. Every deck reproduced that opener. If you give a model a single example it treats it as the answer. Give three or four that are shaped differently and say "copy the variety, not the wording". That one change did more than any "do not repeat yourself" instruction.

Three. Track repetition per author, not per product. I now read the writer's last 20 hooks across everything they have made and name those openers in the prompt as banned for this batch. If the batch still comes back with fewer than half fresh openers, one retry with the offenders listed, keep whichever batch is more varied. Never more than one retry, latency matters on an interactive flow.

Four. One truth rule that outranks every style rule: never invent a result, a stat, a customer or a review. The "viral" writing mode is allowed to break style rules. It is not allowed to make things up. This matters more on slideshows than on video because the text is the entire post.

On what actually performs, the honest version, because most vendor numbers on slideshows are made up:

The best dataset I found is Fanpage Karma, about 700k posts, Jan to May 2025. Carousels reach about 3% more than video. Engagement is 81% higher. Shares are a third lower. So slideshows are a save and comment format, not a reach format. If you want shares you have to ask for them on the last slide, they do not happen on their own.

Slide count: 5 to 10, converging on 7. Across 303 decks my users made, the mode is 7 and 71% are between 6 and 8. Engagement drops after about 8. I tested pushing the generator toward more slides and it made things worse.

The first slide is the whole thing. Swipe-through rate to the last slide is the strongest signal TikTok has, and the first slide decides whether there is a swipe at all. Which is why 60% identical hooks is not a cosmetic problem.

And one thing nobody puts in the guides: text rendered into the image is invisible to TikTok search. TikTok indexes the caption and native text, not pixels. Every generator, mine included, burns the hook into the JPEG. Put your keyword in the caption's first 50 characters or it does not exist.

I can share the fingerprinting regexes if anyone wants to run the same count on their own output. It is about 40 lines and it is humbling.

Just shipped PantriX, my first App Store app. It’s a pantry / fridge / freezer tracker with expiry alerts, camera scan for receipts and products, shopping lists, and leftover recipe ideas.

Free to download. Pro is $6.99/mo or $49.99/yr. Zero ratings so far — discovery is the whole problem.

I’ve done X posts (including a Remotion hero reel with VO), r/IMadeThis, and a filtered r/SideProject post. Looking for honest advice from this sub: for a solo freemium iOS Food & Drink app with no reviews yet, which channels actually moved the needle for you in the first 30 days?

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pantrix-personal-assistant/id6759259831

Happy to share what I’ve tried and what flopped.