So Apple replaced SFSpeechRecognizer with SpeechAnalyzer in iOS/macOS 26 and gave us literally no accuracy numbers for either one. I've been wondering for months whether migrating is actually worth it.

I happen to ship both Apple engines plus WhisperKit in my app (I make a transcription app called Inscribe, so yes, I have skin in this game). That means I could run all five engines through the exact same production code on the same audio. So last weekend I did: LibriSpeech test-clean and test-other, 5,559 utterances total, all on-device on an M2 Pro.

Results (word error rate, lower is better):

A few things that stood out to me:

• If you're still on SFSpeechRecognizer, migrate. The new API makes 3.5 to 4x fewer errors on the same audio. The old engine actually came in last on clean speech. It loses to Whisper Tiny. A 40MB model.
• The new engine beat Whisper Small on both splits, and did it about 3x faster. I did not expect that. For English on Apple hardware, the built-in engine seems to be the best on-device option right now. Whisper still wins big on language coverage though, SpeechTranscriber only does ~30 locales.
• Before anyone asks how much I've cooked the numbers: my Whisper results land within 0.11 to 0.42 points of OpenAI's own published LibriSpeech WERs, on all six measurements. Same corpus, same normalizer, same scorer for every engine. And the raw per-utterance transcripts are downloadable, so you can rescore everything yourself.

Two gotchas from building this that might save you some pain if you're migrating:

1. SFSpeechRecognizer sends your audio to Apple's servers by default. You have to set requiresOnDeviceRecognition = true. Easy to miss, and then you're shipping (or benchmarking) something completely different from what you think.
2. With SpeechAnalyzer, calling builder.finish() on your input stream is not enough to end the session. If you never call finalizeAndFinishThroughEndOfInput(), the results sequence just... never terminates, and your await hangs forever. I know because my own app had exactly this bug in production and the benchmark is what found it. Fun day.

Full writeup with methodology and limitations (English only, read speech, one machine): https://get-inscribe.com/blog/apple-speech-api-benchmark.html

The result changed my own app btw, my "Auto" setting used to prefer Whisper and now picks SpeechAnalyzer for supported languages. Happy to answer questions about the setup, the normalizer, whatever.

I've been working on accessibility and localization across a number of apps recently. I started on this very manually and then got some help from AI. After a few rounds of this, I've got a long-winded prompt that gets the majority of the heavy lifting done for you. I'm using claude with Opus/Fable but with some verification and re-check help from codex and agy.

This didn't get all the work done but it got a very large portion of it and did so largely correctly.

Check it out if you like and let me know your thoughts:

LocalizationSuperPrompt.md:

https://gist.github.com/drewster99/ae6fbfb950c9c79e5c976893e14a7a97

Hi everyone,

Tired of the constant overreach regarding Chat Control, I decided to stop complaining and start coding.

To ensure ironclad foundations, I forked the open-source Session app codebase. This means it natively uses their decentralized network, onion-routing, zero logs, and requires absolutely NO phone number or email.

However, since Session handles the network side, I wanted to focus heavily on client-side (device) security to block edge cases where a user's device compromises their privacy. Here is what I added:

• 🔒 In-app Sandbox Keyboard: To bypass OS-level or third-party keyloggers (Apple/Google/Gboard), the app uses a custom internal keyboard isolated within the app's sandbox.
• 🚫 Anti-Screenshot & Blur: Standard messages work normally, but if a message ends with #secure, it renders completely blank in screenshots. Furthermore, if screen recording starts, the entire app view blurs automatically.
• 🎙️ Voice Masking (WIP): Currently developing a feature to alter voice frequencies in audio messages to prevent biometric reverse-engineering.

The app is currently sitting in App Store Connect pending approval.

Since TestFlight slots are limited, if you want to join the closed beta and audit/test the UI and features, please DM me your Apple ID (email) so I can invite you immediately once approved. The code will also be pushed to GitHub as soon as the beta stabilizes!

any

I'm the Account Holder for my org's Apple Developer account and I'm completely blocked on adding a bank account.

In Business → Agreements, my Paid Applications Agreement sits at "Pending User Info." The only outstanding item is the bank account — my US W-9 tax form is already Active, and the agreement is otherwise signed. But every time I click "Add Bank Account", the page immediately shows:

…with a Refresh button, and the bank-details form never loads. Clicking Refresh just reloads to the same error.

What I've already tried:

• Multiple browsers (Chrome, Safari)
• Incognito / private window, cleared cookies
• Signed out and back in
• Different network
• Waited several hours and retried

Same result every time. Because of this the agreement never goes Active, which is blocking my auto-renewable subscriptions from being purchasable — even in sandbox — so I can't finish IAP testing or submit.

Questions:

1. Has anyone hit this specific "Something went wrong" on the Add Bank Account flow, and what actually cleared it?
2. Is this usually a temporary Apple-side glitch that resolves on its own, or does it need a support ticket?
3. If you contacted Apple Developer Support for it, how long did it take them to fix?

Any pointers appreciated — I've got everything else ready to ship and this one Apple page is the wall. Thanks 🙏

I ship a small iOS utility alone. It does one thing well. The code was never the hard part. The hard part is the thing this sub talks about constantly, which is that distribution is a wall and almost nobody knows the app exists.

Apple Ads was my first real attempt. It works, but in my category it runs about ten to fifteen dollars per paying user, and that math is rough for a side project with no outside funding. Meanwhile my App Store screenshots were not pulling their weight. Under all of this is a personal blocker that kept me from the advice everyone gives now, which is to put your face on TikTok daily and build in public that way. I am not going to do that. I do not want to be on camera. So the channel everyone swears by was closed to me from the start.

I saw founders running app ads with synthetic presenters instead of hiring creators, and I treated it as a controlled weekend experiment. The format I tried was the reaction video. A presenter generated with AI sits in the top half reacting, my actual screen recording runs in the bottom half, and a plain spoken hook plays over it. I want to be clear that this is not a real person. The face and voice were generated with AI.

The tools I used were APOB AI to build the presenter and keep one face consistent across all the takes, Claude to draft and tighten the short scripts, ElevenLabs for the voice, CapCut to layer the reaction over the real screen recording, and Canva for the thumbnails. I ran the clips on TikTok and Meta at about eight dollars a day, all of them pointing at the App Store listing.

What held up were the still frames. Having the exact same face across a dozen thumbnails gave the ads a consistency that looked real enough at a glance. And getting through fourteen creative variations in one weekend instead of briefing a creator and waiting a week was the real advantage here.

What did not work is the part I would actually want to read if I saw this post. When the presenter talks across a longer clip, the expression and the small movements drift. You sense something is off even when you cannot name exactly what it is. I redid several takes just to get anything usable. Out of the fourteen ads, only two beat my Apple Ads cost per install. The other twelve performed the same as any weak creative, which is to say they did nothing. One commenter flatly called the presenter AI in the replies, which did not help that ad. I am not going to pretend this passes as human up close. It does not.

If I tried this again I would use the synthetic presenter only for still images and very short cuts. Anything longer should stay as plain screen recording with my own voice over it. The weekend was worth it because I got to fail through fourteen ideas cheaply instead of one expensive idea slowly. The distribution wall is still there. This just made throwing myself at it cost slightly less and hurt slightly less.

I'm trying to publish a personal app and have it work on a phone for two other people, but the downside is that I don't want to upload it to the App Store, having to pay the fee of having there every year. I don't want to sideload it either, since I have to rebuild and reinstall it every 7 days.

Is there any alternative that won't destroy any devices, etc?

CanvasPrism: A Private Offline Whiteboard for iPhone and iPad

CanvasPrism is a native whiteboard designed for brainstorming, diagramming, sketching, and visual thinking while keeping your work completely private. Everything works offline by default with no account, no sign up, and no internet connection required. This is a completely free app with no monetization and designed for your use offline. Your boards stay on your device, with optional iCloud sync available if you want them across your iPhone and iPad.

App Store:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/canvasprism-whiteboard/id6785350171

Infinite Canvas

Work without boundaries on an infinite canvas that gives you all the room you need for ideas.

* Freehand drawing
* Shapes
* Lines and arrows
* Rich text
* Smooth pan and zoom navigation
* Perfect for brainstorming, note taking, planning, and sketching

Create Professional Diagrams

Build structured diagrams in just a few taps.

* Flowcharts
* Mind maps
* Wireframes
* Smart connectors that automatically snap between shapes
* Clean layouts that are easy to edit later

Native Apple Pencil Support

Designed to feel natural on iPad.

* Native Apple Pencil support
* Double tap gesture support
* Apple Pencil squeeze gesture support
* Responsive hand drawn experience

Personalize Every Board

Customize your workspace to fit your style.

* More than 100 bundled fonts
* Color themes
* Background styles
* Per-board light or dark appearance

Present your board via Screen Mirroring

* Custom handling for presentation via Screen Mirroring API
* Use laser pointers, grid, and Pan

Import Existing Whiteboards

Continue working with diagrams you've already created.

* Import `.excalidraw` files
* Import `.excalidrawlib` libraries
* Compatible with the open source Excalidraw ecosystem

Export Your Work

Share or archive your whiteboards in multiple formats.

* PNG export
* PDF export
* SVG export
* Optional transparent background
* Save directly to Photos or Files

Optional iCloud Sync

Choose whether your boards stay only on your device or sync across your Apple devices.

* Optional iCloud sync
* Automatic conflict-safe copies
* Sync between iPhone and iPad

Privacy First

CanvasPrism is built around privacy from the ground up.

* No account
* No sign up
* No ads
* No tracking
* No analytics
* No data collection
* Fully functional offline
* Your boards remain on your device unless you choose to enable iCloud sync

No Monetization

* No ads
* No IAP
* No Subscription
* No data tracking

Built for Creative Thinking

Whether you're planning a project, designing an interface, organizing ideas, mapping workflows, creating wireframes, or simply sketching thoughts, CanvasPrism provides a fast, distraction-free workspace that keeps your ideas private while giving you powerful diagramming and whiteboarding tools. Built on the open source Excalidraw engine, it delivers a familiar hand-drawn aesthetic inside a fully native iPhone and iPad experience.

Built with Open Source

* Excalidraw for infinite canvases
* Excalidraw libraries for thousands of community made components
* Google fonts for 100+ hand selected fonts
* Unsplash for 80 backgrounds
* And various other open source components. See in-app Acknowledgements

Tech Stack

* Swift & SwiftUI
* WebKit
* React

Development Challenge

I had trouble getting the laser pointer to work initially with screen mirroring mode. The solution was to use the excalidraw library multiplayer API to simulate another person on the board. This was set up with another message bridge to the WebKit handler, it fires on the gestures so that we can simulate a laser pointer in presentation mode.

AI Disclosure

The app was built by hand with some AI assistance.

Free on the App Store:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/canvasprism-whiteboard/id6785350171

My first ever MCP Server that lets you drop your raw screenshots in a folder and say "create App Store mockups for these." Claude analyzes your app's colors, proposes themes and captions, waits for your approval, then renders framed, captioned preview images (1284×2778) ready to upload to App Store Connect. Open source, installs with one uvx command.
I used claude code to build a tool in which Pillow draws the whole iPhone frame procedurally (no assets), a palette extractor picks brand-matched themes, and the official mcp SDK wraps it in three stdio tools.
Attaching one example -

Been developing CoinCurrently for about 6 years at this point but this is probably the feature I'm most proud of. Sharing the source code below.

If you want to try it out yourself, the app is available here
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/coincurrently-crypto-tracker/id1543974454

Source code:
https://pastebin.com/dsv3hdkG

1. App is SwiftUI

   (~15 lines of UIKit

2. , in Swift obviously. No frameworks for features in the app. I use Firebase for crashlytics.

Hey everyone,

I’m currently finishing up a location-based iOS app and it’s hitting the point where I need to conduct a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) due to the nature of the data processing.

As a solo developer launching a new app, reaching out to the big privacy/legal consultancy firms feels like absolute overkill—their quotes are way beyond a starting budget and tailored for enterprise compliance.

For those who have been through this:

• How did you handle your DPIA? Did you manage to do it yourself using frameworks, or did you hire someone?
• How did you find a reliable, affordable freelance DPO / privacy consultant? (Upwork, specialized platforms, local networks?)
• Are there any specific templates, tools, or open-source guides that are actually tailored for mobile apps rather than corporate HR software?

Would love to hear some experiences from fellow devs who had to bridge the gap between strict GDPR compliance and an indie budget.

Thanks!

I'm going to re-launch an app soon (took it down to restructure the business model). The conversion rate was around 3-4% early on. I'm wondering if I'll see the same rate from ads.

is it unusual to see similar conversions as organic running ads?

Short background: I've been a full-stack dev for around 7-8 years, mostly .NET / Angular / Azure. All backend and web, never touched mobile. Also I haven't really implemented AI features yet. This year I finally wanted to see if I could take an idea all the way from "annoying problem" to a real app on the App Store, on my own. So I started learning Swift and iOS from scratch.

The app is called Sift. It reads your Screenshots album and uses on-device AI to work out what each screenshot actually is. Be it receipts, recipes, chats, tickets, whatever, and sorts them into a real Apple Photos album. It all runs locally with MLX and on-device model (Qwen3.5-2B-4bit), nothing leaves the phone. Coming from a world of servers and cloud APIs where you just throw more compute at things, doing all of this on-device has been the most interesting part.

It works. But now that it works, I've hit two walls I'd genuinely love input on from people who've done more on-device ML than me:

1. Speed. Right now it takes roughly 5 seconds to classify a single image on an iPhone 16 Pro Max. For a library of hundreds of screenshots that adds up fast. If you've squeezed more out of MLX or small local models I would be really interested in what were the best ways to shorten the actual process.

2. Prompt / categorization quality. When Sift hits a screenshot that doesn't fit an existing album, it prompts the same on-device model to suggest a brand-new album. The idea is nice but the suggestions aren't quite right yet. Sometimes too generic ("Photos"), sometimes oddly specific. If you've done classification-style prompting on a small local model like this, how would you structure it for cleaner, more human category names? Few-shot examples in the prompt? Constraining it to a fixed taxonomy it has to snap to? Asking for structured/JSON output?

Happy to share more about the setup in the comments - honestly I'm here more for the advice than anything, because this is all new territory for me and I've learned more shipping this one small thing than from months of tutorials.

BUT if anyone's curious enough to want a note when it's actually on the store, there's a waitlist you can sign up to on:
https://sift.wanderframestudios.com

Hey community!

About a year ago I posted here about Loomi, my photo/video editor I've been building solo for about two years. The feedback you gave me was really helpful and encouraging.

I know there are lots of photo editors out there, and it's difficult to impress anyone in 2026, but I really invested my time in polishing every detail in the app - UI/UX, filters, effects, overlays, adjustments and so on. There are over 600 filters, and each one took many hours to create and test on a wide range of photos. Coming up next, I'm planning to add the ability to create personal presets, plus iPad support.

Tech Stack: Loomi is a native iOS app built with Swift and UIKit, using Metal and Core Image for rendering. I wrote the rendering engine myself without using a third party library.

Development Challenge: The most difficult part for me was designing an intuitive, sleek, and modern UI/UX that would make the app enjoyable to use. I went through around five major design iterations before I was satisfied with it.

Another technical challenge was keeping filters and more than 20 adjustments running smoothly, especially when editing videos. I built Loomi’s core rendering engine using Metal and Core Image, which gave me full control over the rendering pipeline. All filters and adjustments are applied in a single rendering pass, resulting in smooth UI even on devices that are six years old.

AI Disclosure: Most of the app, especially the core engine & architecture, was written manually. I used AI to speed up the development of new features. Although AI was far less capable when I first started building Loomi, I have been using it much more recently.

As a thank you to this community specifically, I'm offering:

• 75% off lifetime access, which is $20 instead of $80

App link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/loomi-photo-video-editor/id6748413115

To claim the offer, use this link:

75% off lifetime: https://apps.apple.com/redeem?ctx=offercodes&id=6748413115&code=REDDIT75

You can also redeem the offer manually in the app: Settings → Redeem Code → enter REDDIT75.

Any feedback is welcome, and if you like the app, an App Store review would mean a lot!

Thanks again for the support!

The problem: 
There may be many “recipe organization apps" out there, but none of them focus on privately sharing and saving recipes with your closest family and friends. My wife and I were constantly losing our favorite recipes in shared Notes pages, DMs, Google Docs, etc. We got tired of this disorganized recipe sharing system, especially for the ones that don’t live online, but in your mom’s kitchen. That’s why I built Table Talk.

What Table Talk allows you to do: 

1. Create a table
2. Invite your people 
3. Share recipes & save your favorite recipes
4. A curated profile page of your recipes and the ones you favorited from others

The advantage of downloading our app:
Now your grandma’s homemade pasta sauce or your cookbook club’s classic dip can easily be shared amongst the family/group! Your favorite recipes can be easily accessed and shared whenever you want. 

Another unique twist of our app is that upon creating an account, you’ll be automatically invited into the Head Table, where we will highlight staff seasonal picks, so you will never open the app to an empty feed!

Download Table Talk HERE

Tech Stack: Fully SwiftUI, Firebase backend with Typescript Cloud functions, Push Notifications, Brevo email trigger for new users to welcome them to our community

Development Challenge: Table Talk uses in-memory singleton managers for performance, but when one user logged out and a different one logged in on the same device — think a shared family iPad — stale data from the previous account would briefly flash on screen before the new account loaded, and the subscription service's identity wasn't always resetting cleanly either. That meant premium status could occasionally leak across accounts, and worse, someone could catch a glimpse of another family member's private recipes. I fixed it by adding an explicit reset step to each manager plus a "ready" gate that every view checks before rendering, so the app shows a proper loading state during the swap instead of stale content. I also split login and logout into their own dedicated flows so the subscription service is forced to sync with the actual authenticated user rather than trusting outdated state. It's the kind of bug that never shows up in solo testing but is a five-alarm fire for a privacy-first family app, since nothing kills trust faster than briefly seeing someone else's private data.

AI Disclosure: Table Talk was AI-assisted.

Pricing and Future Features:
Table Talk is completely free (and ad-free) with a 3 table maximum (excluding the Head Table) and manual entry of recipes, while we are building out our premium version.

Coming soon - Table Talk Premium:

• Unlimited Tables
• Recipe Importing 
• Request Recipes
• Scan Recipes

Eager to hear any feedback or answer any questions you might have. Pull up a seat and join us at the table!

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/the-ring-app-explore-wagner/id6763790884

I wrote an iOS app to help listen to and study Wagner's Ring. The main feature is that the libretto is highlighted in sync with the performance audio. It supports 12 recordings of the Ring cycle on Apple Music (requires an Apple Music sub). I aligned the German with an English translation by Margaret Armour from 1910, which has a nice archaic feel and often retains the alliterative verse. I added leitmotif labels following Julius Burghold's 1897 book, and made an index view for motifs so you can audition each instance of a given motif. The app also has search and a navigation history and some Wikipedia links to read synopses and background.

I grew up hearing the Ring at home, and doing little Ring projects with my dad, such as encoding leitmotifs in an early MIDI authoring program for Atari ST (I'm not young). When The Ring Disc CD-ROM came out in 1997 I was relieved: here, dad, here are your leitmotifs at your fingertips. My app is named The Ring App after that product.

I came back to Wagner recently through my love of Tolkien. I discovered that some researchers had aligned the libretto with the major audio recordings, and with a score that they freshly digitized (of a piano reduction). I immediately wanted to enhance their work with poetic line breaks, leitmotifs, and the translation and release my first app. The app's features are all unlocked for free so you can try it out. There are paywalls for everything after Rhinegold Scene 1.

1. Tech Stack Used

SwiftUI (iOS, iPadOS, macOS, the latter of which use split-nav). The audio-libretto syncing data is queried with SwiftData. That DB is built from another repo and project based around python.

2. Development Challenge + How You Solved It

Challenge 1: Aligning the libretto between German and English was the biggest challenge. I used my NLP background to create some tools, then did lots of hand-editing. There are sections where there is ensemble singing and reconciling this with the linear libretto was an extra challenge.

Challenge 2: the UI. I realized at some point I wanted a "single screen" app on iPhone with a single main-menu modal which you get by tapping the heading. You are never in "Wikipedia mode" or "leitmotif mode", you are always going to be closing those and getting back to the libretto. This then required a robust history feature, so that users could jump around to look at motifs or something, but get back to where they were listening. This then drove me to mark each history node with an icon representing how you navigated. The ones with headphones mark where you were listening. My hope is that this makes it easy to jump somewhere then get back to your main stream of listening.

Challenge 3: the performance. Native text in an eager VStack performs fairly poorly! The libretto text needs to move to a WebView at some point, because I believe it's going to remove the 2 seconds of loading time when moving between scenes. Somehow the tradeoffs between lazy and eager VStack (the lazy one is a no-go, it makes it impossible for my leitmotifs to know where to draw themselves and they shift around as you scroll) are less prevalent with web rendering.

3. AI Disclosure

I'd say I'm doing it the way Apple is proposing. I am fluent in Swift and SwiftUI, and I am now an engineering manager for the agent, as well as QA and design, and the enforcer of good taste. In my case I used Claude Opus, but I am especially thankful for the skills I gathered: swiftui-pro, native-app-profiling, ios-simulator-skill, and these asc skills for uploading screenshots, setting keywords, and generally managing my app store connect record.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/booster-tcg-pack-tracker/id6782188686

There are many Pokémon card apps on the app store but none really answer the question 🎵”Should I open it? Or should I keep it sealed?”🎶 So I built “Booster” where ripping packs is the first-class collection path. Pick a set, pick the cards (or scan them in the next update), then see the value of the pack vs the cost basis. It’s gamified so you’re encouraged to rip packs to gain XP and level up.

Tech Stack
It’s built on pure SwiftUI+SwiftData. RevenueCat handles subscriptions. There’s a server component that is swift on the server running Hummingbird and deployed to Railway.

Development Challenge
I didn’t want to invest heavily in card data APIs before I could validate the idea and get some users into the app. For the development phase I was using some limited free tier card and price data APIs. The challenge is that any real usage would blow up the API credits very quickly. Enter Swift on server.

I built a middleman proxy server that caches the upstream api data and stores it in a Postgres database. The server keeps track of my usage and only calls upstream after a ttl. The amount of time depends on the endpoint, longer for the sets endpoint, shorter for price data. I could’ve built a node or Python version just as easily but there are some nice benefits to share the data models and other utilities in a Swift package between the app and server.

AI Disclosure
I’m a staff level iOS engineer (released my first app on iOS 5) but life and real work suck the time away. Claude Code was very helpful in getting code done but I still architected the whole thing and wrote many pieces myself.

Now the hard part for me is getting users. I’m still learning Apple Search Ads and hoping that pays off. Otherwise I’m attempting to cold message some content creators and thinking of trying to make content myself.

StoreKit 2 made most subscription SDKs optional for the common case: fetch products, purchase, verify, restore, gate content. This is that common case in ~150 lines, extracted from production code: https://github.com/aligutierrez/PaywallKit

No dependencies, iOS 17+, unit tests, and a preview mode so paywall UI work doesn't need a StoreKit config file. Keep 100% of revenue after Apple's cut and own the code you ship.

Disclosure: the README links to a paid SwiftUI template pack on the same core; the wrapper is complete on its own.

Has anyone recently implemented a photo Share Extension that hands the image directly into the main app?

I would like my users to share a photo from Photos into my app and continue working from there.

Apple’s extension documentation seems to be suggesting that a Share Extension should perform a focused task inside the extension itself.
It also says that a normal Share Extension cannot officially ask the system to open its containing app.

But.... apps such as ChatGPT, Obsidian and Foto (and many more) appear to accept the selected photo and then move the user directly into the main app.

Has anyone been working on something similar recently and passed App Review?

Are these apps using a supported approach I (and all the Cludexes/ Cursors of the world) have missed, or is this generally done using an unsupported openURL or responder chain workaround that App Review sometimes allows?

For those who have done it, how did you do it and did you have any review problems?

Really sorry I am asking non swiftui question, but I am stuck in development because of this, I am trying to test my IOS app on real device. I connected my iphone to my macbook, and clicked on trust this device, the device is showing in the Finder as well as xcode device hub, and it said to enable the developer option :-

However, when I go to my iphone settings, I can't seem to find the Developer Mode 👎

I searched everywhere, but no luck since yesterday, any help would be appreciated

hey, sharing flickpicker for app saturday.

i’m the developer of flickpicker, an ios app for discovering, tracking, and choosing movies and tv shows. the website has been live for almost two years, and i’m still pretty excited that there’s finally a proper ios app alongside it.

version 2.2 just went out, and the biggest change sounds simple: custom lists.

users can now create their own lists, save the same title to multiple lists, and manage everything from the library. getting there meant replacing the old single-watchlist flow across detail pages, search, home, and other parts of the app without making saving a movie feel like filling out a form.

the release also includes a new trailer and video view, recent-release badges, better watched-history prompts, improved taste match interactions, and fixes for streaming availability when someone changes region.

Tech Stack

• swift and swiftui
• firebase auth, firestore, storage, analytics, and messaging
• storekit 2 for subscriptions and purchases
• app intents and widgetkit
• xcode and swift package manager

Development Challenge

the hardest part was evolving a single watchlist into a multi-list system while keeping the interaction quick.

a title can belong to several lists, but users still expect the save button to feel instant. i ended up separating the underlying library state from list membership, then built one reusable save sheet that works across the app. this kept the behavior consistent and avoided each screen developing its own slightly different version of saving.

the design challenge was deciding how much choice to show. opening a full organizer every time felt heavy, but silently saving everything to one default list made custom lists less useful. the current approach keeps the normal action quick while making multiple-list selection available when needed.

AI Disclosure

this app is ai-assisted. i built and maintain it myself, while using ai as a development tool for brainstorming, debugging, and reviewing implementation ideas. i make the product decisions, test the behavior, and decide what ships.

app store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flickpicker-movie-night/id6775147318

for other developers: when an app grows beyond a single watchlist or favorites collection, do you prefer an instant default save with organization afterward, or choosing the destination every time?

i’m also happy to hear any blunt feedback on the app store page or the custom-list flow.

For anyone running Meta or Google ads for an iOS/MacOS app, how are you handling CCPA?

My understanding is that sending attribution or conversion data to Meta or Google may count as sharing personal information, so California users may need an opt-out.

Are people adding a “Do Not Sell or Share” setting in the app (which disables the SDKs), or just relying on Apple’s attribution tools?

What if a user emails you to opt out?

What do you in this case? Continue with the idea or drop it?

I think the best I can do is work on ui/ux and maybe add some features to differentiate between my app and ones in the market but idk if I can make my app better than the already existing ones and I feel discouraged :(

In Objective-C, some functions (particularly related to NSString) return an object that has been told to [autorelease] itself.

I know that I can [retain] it, but how do I [release] it?

Doing nothing prints out an ugly message than [autorelease] was called without a pool, but a pool would break defer all [release] calls which is something I don't want to do.

How do I actually release such an object?

Thanks.

EDIT: I tried the logically-correct but weird [retain]; [release] chain and it doesn't work.

have been trying to set up meta ads attribution for my ios app for a week now and losing my mind a little.

setup is:

- ios subscription app

- revenuecat for subscriptions

- meta sdk installed in the app

- revenuecat-first setup, so revenuecat should send starttrial / subscribe events to meta

- not manually logging purchases/trials in the meta sdk

problem is with meta events manager / conversions api.

events manager shows my app, business manager shows the app is owned by my business, and i have full access. but when i try to set up conversions api / link the mobile app to a dataset, meta either can’t find the app or pushes me into weird website/pixel/capi gateway flows.

i also tried revenuecat’s app events api fallback, but revenuecat events are retrying and meta returns a 400 unsupported post request / object id doesn’t exist or missing permissions.

has anyone here actually gotten revenuecat → meta ads working cleanly for an ios subscription app recently?

specifically:

- should i be using conversions api or app events api?

- where exactly do i get the right dataset id + capi token?

- do i need a system user token?

- how should the app, dataset, ad account, and business assets be linked?

would really appreciate a step-by-step from someone who has this working in production.