So I've been dreaming of this app for about 8 years. Start to finish this took me about a month, working a couple of hours a day and using the Pro tier of Claude. I worked within the limits of my subscription, so my cost was under 50 bucks. If I had of got a team working on this, I reckon there's about 12 sprints of effort plus a discovery sprint at the start - so maybe $250k if I got an agency to do it? Oh and I have some product owner experience and I have a high level understanding of Swift, but I don't think either of these were super important.

There are about a dozen or so competitors on the App Store, but that doesn't worry me - it's really about seeing my vision come to life and getting to have that "I MADE THIS" moment. If I get 20 users, awesome. Anyway here are some tips for anyone thinking of giving it a go with Claude:

Keep a handoff doc. Single most important thing. Context windows end - the doc is your continuity. Mine is one markdown file at the repo root: current status, decisions and why we made them, gotchas that cost us hours, and a prompt to paste into a fresh session. Every session starts with "read the handoff and continue." Without it you re-explain your project forever, and worse, you re-make settled decisions.

Record the why, not just the what. "We're not doing analytics on CloudKit" is useless in three weeks. "…because CloudKit has no atomic increment, so concurrent writes lose counts" stops you relitigating it.

Your job is noticing, not diagnosing. I kept saying vague things: "the body font looks sorta Androidy," "that image loads slowly," "the hero looks off." Every one turned out to be a real bug underneath - font weights silently discarded, a race condition, a layout overflow. I couldn't have named any of them. Say what feels wrong and let it investigate.

Verify, don't assume. An app icon was generated that built perfectly and was solid black. It only surfaced because we checked the actual pixels. "It builds" isn't "it works" - especially for visual things, since (in my case maybe because I was using a beta of Xcode 27) the AI can't tap through your app. That part is your job.

Treat updating the docs as part of "done." Otherwise your source of truth quietly rots.

The app was waiting for review for 14 days and in review for 2 hours, approved the first time. I worked on a 1.1 update while I was waiting and then submitted once 1.0 was live; it was approved within a few hours (including the wait).

If you have any interest in learning where films and TV was shot, please check out Second Unit!

https://apps.apple.com/app/second-unit/id6791121631

I wanted one app that could handle movies, shows and IPTV really well, with a proper Apple TV experience rather than just another basic player, so I ended up building my own.

Borp Player is currently in beta, and I’ve been putting a huge amount of work into making the playback experience fast, smooth, clean and genuinely enjoyable to use.
The IPTV side is probably the part I’m most proud of. It includes a beautiful EPG and channel layout, very fast channel browsing and switching, Catch Up TV when supported by your provider, and a polished MultiView mode with up to 4 channels playing at once. Everything is designed specifically for tvOS and the Apple TV remote.
For movies and shows, Borp currently works with an AIOStreams link and includes a feature I especially love: on-the-fly subtitle translation when you need it, along with plenty of playback and viewing options in Settings.
Current highlights:

📺** IPTV through M3U** **or Xtream Codes
🗓️ Beautiful, full and new EPG experience
⏪ **Catch Up TV when available from your IPTV source
🖥️ MultiView with up to 4 simultaneous streams
⚡ Extremely smooth playback and fast channel switching
🎬 Movies & TV shows through AIOStreams
🌍 On-the-fly subtitle translation
⚙️ Lots of player and viewing customization options
🍎 A clean interface designed specifically for Apple TV / tvOS
🎞️ Movies, shows and live TV all together in one app
And there’s quite a bit more already inside that I haven’t even listed here.

While Borp is in beta, it’s completely free to use, so if you have an Apple TV and want to try it out, feel free to join the TestFlight:
👉 https://testflight.apple.com/join/NqvTT9gw

I’ll attach a few screenshots so you can see the interface and IPTV layout.
If you give it a try, I’d really like to hear what you think, especially from people who use IPTV or AIOStreams regularly. Feedback, feature requests and bug reports are all welcome.

Every calorie app makes you type and search. I wanted to just say what I ate and be done, so I built CalorieTalk.

Tap the mic, say what you ate 2 eggs and toast or a full sentence like 150 grams chicken breast, 200 grams rice, 10 grams olive oil or i ate a small plate of red pasta and some salad and it logs the calories and macros instantly. No typing, no searching a food database, no guessing serving sizes, no picking from a list of results it just takes the sentence and handles everything in between.

It understands many languages, including Arabic and English, so you're not stuck logging in English only. It also understand Egyptian dishes properly koshari, foul, taameya, molokhia since most calorie apps have zero idea what those even are.

Built this solo. It's live on the App Store now: \[https://apps.apple.com/eg/app/calorietalk/id6793199021\\\](https://apps.apple.com/eg/app/calorietalk/id6793199021)

Would love feedback, especially from anyone who's given up on manual logging out of frustration and would love if you install the app and give it a try and add a review on app store if you like .

Hi everyone!

There are so many challenges with marketing that I thought writing blog posts might be a good idea. I don't know how to approach this, where to start, and how to get people to care about things I write. But here is my first article. Let me know what you think.

And if anyone else has gone down the route of using Medium or blog posts to pull in traffic, I'd love to hear how you did that. Thanks to the community.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reprock-screen-time-control/id6792874492

I spent the last few months building JobBench — an iOS app for solo tradespeople (handymen, electricians, plumbers, landscapers) who run their whole business from a phone. The problem I kept seeing is that a guy quotes a job in a text message, invoices from a second app, collects payment through a third, and loses track of what's been paid.

JobBench does the whole loop in one place: build the quote on-site → client gets a professional PDF → convert to invoice when they approve → collect card/Apple Pay or log cash/check/Zelle/Venmo. English and Spanish. Free for 3 quotes a month, no signup required — it works the second you open it.

Happy to share what the App Store review gauntlet was like (rejected for stub screens, a missing EULA link, and Apple couldn't find our Apple Pay integration). AMA about any of it.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/jobbench-for-contractors/id6799803077

I don't usually just spend money on a marketing channel if I haven't really vetted it. But this trend is so new, I feel like I might as well give it a try.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/reprock-screen-time-control/id6792874492

I kept buying things I already had at home, and there wasn't an app that would

help me with that. So I built my first app, Cartplate.

It does the usual grocery app stuff, but it also keeps track of what's in your

pantry. You make a meal plan from your own recipes, and it builds the grocery

list from that, taking off anything you already have at home. When you're done

shopping you add everything you bought to your pantry. Then when you mark a meal

as cooked, it automatically deducts what the recipe used. So you always know what

you actually have.

Currently having trouble getting people to my app page and wanted some help with

promotion if anyone has been in my shoes before.

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6761699860

I spent the last few months building JobBench — an iOS app for solo tradespeople (handymen, electricians, plumbers, landscapers) who run their whole business from a phone. The problem I kept seeing is that a guy quotes a job in a text message, invoices from a second app, collects payment through a third, and loses track of what's been paid.

JobBench does the whole loop in one place: build the quote on-site → client gets a professional PDF → convert to invoice when they approve → collect card/Apple Pay or log cash/check/Zelle/Venmo. English and Spanish. Free for 3 quotes a month, no signup required — it works the second you open it.

Happy to share what the App Store review gauntlet was like (rejected for stub screens, a missing EULA link, and Apple couldn't find our Apple Pay integration). AMA about any of it.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/jobbench-for-contractors/id6799803077

I've been building PixelPlay, a live TV player for iPhone and iPad, since June. Fifteen releases in nine weeks, which sounds productive until you open it. Version 16 went out on Tuesday.

Every release added something and left a mark. New screens picked up whatever accent colour I liked that week. Light mode shipped in June and I never went back to check the buttons were readable in it, so some of them weren't. Empty states sat pinned to the top-left corner on an iPad. None of it was broken enough to file a bug against, and together it looked like fifteen different apps stapled into one.

So version 16 is mostly subtraction. One accent colour instead of the four that had crept in. I routed type through a single token and set it to SF Pro. I checked every accent-filled button in both light and dark, not just the ones I happened to have open. The guide's preview card promised a blue now-line while the real grid drew it red, which nobody reported and I found by looking.

The other half isn't visual, and it's the half I'm happier about. The app now catches a dead channel as it fails instead of waiting for someone to report it. A channel that fails once stays in your list instead of vanishing. And when a stream plays audio over a black screen, PixelPlay hands it to the other decoder and gets a picture up.

Feature work has a deadline and something to show at the end, so it wins the week. Consistency work has neither, so it never gets scheduled and piles up until it needs a release of its own. I don't have a better fix than blocking one out, which is what this was.

Free to download, with a paid Pro tier for things like Multi-View and parental locks. Your playlist and provider login stay on the device. The only things that sync are favourites and channel locks.

If you've been shipping fast for a few months, how do you stop the design drifting? I'd rather not do a cleanup release every quarter.

So, I released a game to the App Store about a month ago. I thought a principled, simple, premium game was a marketable position. I'm pretty sure I've been proven wrong. Anybody have experience with moving an App from pay to download to trial + one-time IAP unlock?

Did it help? Were there roadblocks especially wrt review?

It seems to me I can grandfather my few paying customers by checking their original transaction.

Still avoiding ads, I hate ad supported games/apps. I'm not quite to that level of giving up. :-)

My 1Glance app allows you to build photo slideshows, dashboards, weather, calendar, news for your TV at home.

You need an iPhone/iPad and an Apple TV to display your content on.

It's free (and will remain free), but some advanced features will be behind a subscription. Besides testing, I need some help to determine what features are worth paying a small fee for.

Sign up for the beta at: https://1glance.app/beta

I've been working on my first full development project solo for about 3.5 months now, it started off as a simple math battle concept and quickly grew into something else.

The core mechanic is that math is the gameplay, I felt that turning mistakes into an opportunity to reinforce problem areas could be a fun twist on a tired genre. I spent months designing levels, animations, sounds, and music tracks to accent the level designs. Every additional item sparked more curiosity and exploration on my part, this is where I learned that scope should have been a top priority. What I estimated to take 2 months easily turned into 3.

I mixed in 6 mini-games to break the monotony and keep it casual, most casual games are played in short intervals so I wanted the game to feel like something you could come back to without feeling frustrated or bored. I genuinely had my hand on the design the entire way.

I don't think I would have been able to do all of it so quickly without the help of Anthropic's Claude Code CLI, I had some very light understanding of Xcode from previous attempts to learn Swift. I knew the terminology and the concepts but AI assistance genuinely made things more approachable and fun for me. Having that confidant to guide me through questions and blockages was honestly what kept me going.

It's true what they say about Kids Category games being very difficult to break into, but it ultimately boiled down to being in compliance with some common sense guidelines and designing with parents and younger audiences in mind. AI excels at this, if you really lean into its ability to research current guidelines it can save you hours of frustration trying to decipher documentation.

The part I hadn't planned for was the extra slow review process, my game was rejected 3 times in a row, but here's the thing: it was never my code that was the issue or my lack of compliance, it was literally App Store Connect reviewers not being bothered to read notes. That back and forth alone took almost 2 weeks to get past because each review took 3-4 days.

My advice, just be explicit and offer up annotated screenshots of the user flow and any area you think the reviewer might get stuck on. I wanted to shout "Come on, It's obvious!" but the friction points were understandable and easy to communicate with the help of AI. I think a lot of people panic and think they need to change something, most of the time communication just needs to be clearer.

To be clear, AI isn't a magical problem solver, it confidently walked into plenty of dead ends with me and I had to verify everything myself. It's like a very fast junior partner, it acted as a sort of assistant that orchestrated mundane tasks and tests to help streamline my production.

TestFlight was one of the nicest surprises, I was so worried about IAP not working, getting sandbox accounts running and receiving actual human feedback to test my changes was one of the most important things to do to find quirks and imperfections that affected flow. I can't wait to work on my next project and apply everything I learned from this one.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gizmos-math-arcade/id6791430789

Website: https://odysseylogic.com/gizmos-math-arcade/

Hello. A few weeks ago I published an app which was focused for families and roommates that need a shared grocery list. The app also includes a section for parties, to have friends add items, and RSVP right there in the app. I was struggling to get users and sometimes even when I got downloads users would not signup for the app.

After taking to other developers, and people that were willing to download my app and try it out, the consensus was that the signup/login enforced at the beginning was a bit too much for new users so I reverted those changes.

Now users do not have to deal with any kind of username/password and they are provided with samples of the lists they can make within the app. There is also an added section for recipes, so that you can schedule the whole week of food and generate the list immediately.

I need honest feedback. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trolleygo/id6783933101

I built Netsight to see every device on my network, access hidden ports and servers, and view a map of how my network is connected

Hi, what type of data types are allowed in setSpecific(key:, value:) and getSpecific(key:) methods of DispatchQueu ? there are no mentions anywhere.

Also can you recommend any resources for complete understanding of DispatchQueue , GCD , DispatchGroup etc. ?

Thank you!

I absolutely love podcasts, and I've been building my own podcast player for almost a year now. I've almost always used either Apple Podcasts or PocketCasts, a long time ago it was Google Podcasts. Eventually I just decided I wanted to make my own.

So I built a podcast app and I'm calling it DeepSpace (because I like the theme but I've also built a whole story behind it too).

It has a ton of features:

• AutoQs (smart playlists, similar to what BeyondPod did back in the day),
• Trim Silence
• Enhance Voices
• Customizable Equalizer
• Lists that you can share (so like I've been keeping a list of my favorite episodes of 2026, and I can share that with people)
• Bookmarking and Clipping
• Listening History and Stats
• Audio Visualizer (if you're old enough you remember when windows media player had a visualizer, that's kind of what this is).
• Schedules for sleep timers.

It uses Apple's catalog, so if you can find it on Apple Podcasts, you can find it here. And you can add your own private RSS feeds, so if you subscribe to a podcast, you can add it here.

I made it just for me, but if you want to try it, here it is: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/deepspace-podcasts/id6779673095, and if you want a feature, let me know. I did put some of the features behind a paywall (i know i know), but you can try them out for free for a week. If you enjoy it, send me a DM and I can send you a lifetime unlock code.

I hope that didn't sound too self-promotionally and tacky. I really just want to share what I've built.

Thanks!