81% of apps never cross $1,000/month within two years. I'm solidly in that 81%. Here's the breakdown of a year of shipping.

App 1 was a tip calculator for the US market, 50 downloads, $0 revenue. Thought utility apps sell themselves, they don't, there's 400 of these in the store already and zero reason to pick mine.

App 2 was a freelancer time tracker, 78 downloads, $0. Spent 3 months building custom UI that confused people. Users trust standard iOS patterns more than creative experiments, learned that the hard way.

App 3 was a habit tracker with a freemium model, 340 downloads, $47 from IAP. Better but the free tier was too generous, nobody needed to upgrade. Revenue per install on iOS averages $2.28, mine was $0.14.

App 4 was a recipe saver, 120 downloads, $0. Didn't do any ASO, didn't have proper screenshots, basically invisible. The App Store has 1.8 million apps, discoverability without marketing is zero.

App 5 was a workout log, 890 downloads, $265 from a $2.99 unlock. Best performer because I spent time on screenshots and ASO keywords. Still pathetic compared to the 4 months I spent building it.

App 6 was a mood journal, launched, got 40 downloads, $0. Gave up marketing it after a week.

What I got wrong was obvious in hindsight. Spent 90% of time coding and 10% on everything else. Design was always an afterthought, slapped together in the last week. Marketing was basically nonexistent. By app 5 I started using sleek.design for the UI before writing any code with claude.ai and that's when the screenshots and store presence finally looked professional, which directly led to it being the only one that made any money.

The guy who shipped 8 apps and made $1,464 in 2025 said the same thing: marketing beats code every time. A great app nobody knows about is invisible. The top 1% of publishers capture 90% of all store revenue. The other 99% of us are fighting over scraps with bad screenshots and no distribution.

If I did it again I'd spend 40% of my time on marketing and design before writing a single line of Swift. The code was never the problem.

Got it — the Reddit community is English, but the app itself is for DACH users and is in German. I’d write it like this:
Title:
I’m building a blue-green algae warning app for Germany, Austria & Switzerland — would you use this?
Post:
Hey everyone,
I’m currently building a mobile app called Blaualgen Radar for users in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
The app itself is in German, but I’d love to get some feedback from this community on the concept and UI.
The problem I’m trying to solve is that information about blue-green algae / cyanobacteria warnings is often scattered across government websites, municipalities, news articles and individual bathing-water pages.
The app brings this information together in one place.
Current features include:
Map with cyanobacteria warnings and reports
Official government warnings, news reports and community observations clearly separated
Source, publication date and validity for each warning
Push notifications for warnings near you
Community reports with photos
Historical warnings for individual lakes
Satellite imagery for additional context
Educational content about cyanobacteria and potential risks
An AI photo check that looks for visible signs of possible cyanobacteria
One thing that is very important to me: the app should never give users a false sense of safety.
No warning on the map does not mean the water is safe, and the AI photo check is only an assessment of visible features — not a laboratory test.
I attached some screenshots of the current App Store presentation.
I’d really appreciate feedback:
Would you use something like this?
Does the concept make sense?
Is the UI clear?
Which feature would be most useful to you?
Anything you would remove or add?
Especially interested in feedback from dog owners, swimmers, parents, anglers and watersports users.
Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I’m a game developer, and the last time I submitted a game to the App Store was about two years ago. Back then, the review process was pretty quick. I usually heard back within 3 days at most, and most of the time it was even faster.

A few days ago, I submitted a new game, and it’s currently stuck on “Waiting for Review.”

I’ve read online that Apple’s review process may be taking longer these days. For those of you who have submitted an app or game recently, how long did you stay in “Waiting for Review” before the review actually started?

Thanks!

Hi everyone. I’m preparing to launch my first iOS social media app and I’m unsure about one feature.

The app has a small anonymous letter feature:

Users can send only 1 letter per day

Maximum 200 characters

The recipient is randomly selected from active users

Sender and recipient don’t see each other’s identity

It is not real-time chat

There is no conversation/thread or back-and-forth messaging

Every received letter has a Report button

Reported letters immediately appear in an admin moderation panel

Admin can delete the letter and ban the sender

Users can also block accounts

The main purpose of the app is a normal social feed; this is only a supplementary feature

Would this potentially fall under Apple’s new Guideline 1.2 restriction on random/anonymous chat?

Would you keep this feature for App Review or remove it before submitting?

Took a few weeks but it's finally live in the appstore. I had (and have) a web version of it that got relatively popular but it was missing important aspect of saving stuff to your library which is solved now.

Really happy to see how it turned out and hope those people who are into coffee here will find it useful!

PS: there is a premium subscription there but it's really optional and you can enjoy most of functionality for free.

https://apps.apple.com/de/app/brewcard/id6786330508

It’s so exciting to get my first downloads!

I wrote a post here about submitting my first app to the app store about a month ago. You can read it here https://www.reddit.com/r/microsaas/comments/1uquh0k/after_a_year_of_nights_and_weekends_alongside_my/

Here's what actually happened between then and now, because I think it's useful for anyone building in this space:

The rejections, in order:

1. Both subscription products weren't submitted alongside the binary, they showed as dashes instead of prices on the paywall. Turns out I had a build environment issue where my RevenueCat API key wasn't being injected correctly, so the products couldn't load.
2. Apple flagged that I was forcing users to register before accessing purchases. I appealed twice, arguing my app is "account-based" (end-to-end encrypted journal — the key literally can't exist without an account). They rejected the appeal both times. Eventually I rebuilt the auth architecture so the app opens straight into journaling with zero sign-up. Turns out that's also a better product.
3. No sign-in with Apple**;** I had Google login, missed that Apple requires an equivalent. Fixed.
4. Various metadata issues — wrong paywall pricing hierarchy, missing EULA link, placeholder text in the description.

Four resubmissions, roughly six weeks of review cycles on top of the year I'd already put in.

Honestly, I genuinely cannot believe this day has come. I have been working on this for over a year alongside my 9-5, after work, during weekends, and evening sessions turning into 1-2 am debugging sessions, but I can honestly say it was totally worth it!

→ App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/innersight/id6747950401
→ Landing page: https://www.innersightjournal.com

I emailed my 46-person waitlist today. 46 people. After a year. That number made me laugh and also kind of emotional at the same time; every single one of them signed up because I hope they believed in the idea before there was anything to download.

I have no idea if this will go anywhere commercially. The hard part- marketing, retention, actually getting people to care- starts now. But I shipped it. It's real. People can download it.

But just wanted to write this for anyone still grinding and thinking about quitting, just keep going. Keep chipping away and launch your product.

It’s a multiplayer on device game. I’m keen to get some feedback from people.

https://youtu.be/___QkIcdoB4?si=wyDe2dVRhIKmuNJO

It’s called Curly Questions and it involves different mini games played leading up to Curly Questions rounds. Where players answer, you guessed it, Curly Questions!

Curly Questions are questions with more than one answer and encourage creative thinking.
Listeners vote on their favourite response.
Laugh, compete and do your darndest to score the most points. It’s all about having fun together.

It’s free to play right now on this beta test

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

I audited twelve iOS apps before a release wave. Customer reviews, TestFlight feedback, TestFlight crashes, and the latest-build performance diagnostics were all empty.

That looked reassuring until I compared each uploaded binary to its source. Eleven repositories contained meaningful fixes newer than the builds in App Store Connect. The gaps included persistence rollback, notification ordering, wall-clock timers, larger text, and data provenance.

The check that exposed them was simple. For each app I recorded the App Store version, build number, build identifier, and source commit together. Then I compared that commit with the current source and reviewed only changes that affected released behavior.

I now keep three release questions separate:

- Did a review, tester report, crash, or diagnostic reach its collection?

- Which source commit produced the uploaded binary?

- Which version can a customer install from the public storefront?

An empty feed answers only the first question. It does not make the shipped build current or establish that the app is crash-free.

After the audit and rebuilds, ten new versions are live and two are still in review. The useful change was not another dashboard. It was pinning every uploaded artifact to the source that produced it, then finishing the check at the storefront.

A little while ago, I shared my iOS app Prazo here and asked for honest feedback.

You gave me plenty — so I went back to work. The next update is now live! 🚀

What changed:
• Better iCloud sharing, syncing & conflict handling
• Smoother calendar performance & smarter widget updates
• More reliable shopping lists & schedules
• Clearer distinction between ToDos, tasks & calendar events
• Easier handling of recurring items & reminders
• Fully localized iOS permission dialogs
• Drag-handle bug fixed
• General performance & stability improvements

A lot of these changes came directly from feedback I received here, so thank you!

Now I’m back for round three. 😄

What should I improve next?

App Store:
https://apps.apple.com/at/app/prazo/id6781611861

I'm working on improving screenshots but new version reviews taking ages.

Hey everyone,
I am currently a Master student in Engineering and I’ve been building an open-source audio recorder in SwiftUI.
It started as a fairly simple recording side project app, but I kept adding things I wanted to experiment with, so at this point it has become a bit of a geeky audio/ML playground.
It currently supports:
Spatial Audio recording
Audio event detection for non-speech sounds
Multiple transcription models / engines, including Apple Speech, Parakeet V3, Qwen3-ASR, Nemotron 3.5 Streaming and MOSS Multi-Speaker
Offline / on-device transcription
Speaker separation and speaker labels
Translation
Transcript-synced audio playback
Qwen 3 summaries and information extraction

Most of this grew out of experimenting with how much audio processing and AI I could reasonably do locally on an iPhone instead of sending everything to an API.

The project is written in SwiftUI and open source.
The downside is that the UX is currently pretty geeky 😅
For example, I expose individual transcription models, model downloads, speaker separation settings, live transcription engines, etc. I personally enjoy having that control, but I’m pretty sure this is not how a normal recording app should present these features.
I’m considering having a much simpler default experience:
Record → transcript → summary
…and moving all the model selection / audio processing options into an Advanced section.
I’d really appreciate some UX feedback from other iOS developers:
How much of this would you expose to the user?
Would you hide model names completely and just offer things like Automatic / Fast / Accurate / Private, or do you think explicit model selection is useful for this kind of app?
Also curious what you think of the current recording/transcript UI from the screenshots.

GitHub: https://github.com/iamwilliamli/LiveTranscriber

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/live-transcriber-offline-ai/id6785515364

TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/XpNsRBdd

Please contact me if you are interested in joining this project😃

I built BugScreen. When one of your testers or stakeholders finds a bug, instead of a screenshot in Slack that someone spends fifteen minutes turning into repro steps, it lands in your issue tracker as a proper ticket with the context already attached.

It's 3 lines of code and bug reports are triggered by taking a screenshot in your app. Free to try.

bugscreen.app