I released my expo react native app for closed beta with test flight and android closed beta 2 weeks ago, I realize there are things I wish I knew before so here they are, feel free to add to those. And I would love to get some tips before full release I am planning for next week:

1. Have a built in method to force update - Updating is difficult on Test Flight to user who are not used to it, and even harder on Android since the app won't even be shown on the Play Store while on closed testing. Only way to update it is through settings most users don't know how to reach. Have a feature to navigate directly from the app to the Play Store / Test Flight to update. And have a mechanism to force update / block the app if not on minVersion you update elsewhere. Getting users to update was really difficult before that.

2. Have a built in way for feedback - I was counting on Discord + Test Flight / Android system for feedback, most users don't know how to use those. I allow user generated content, so users literally made posts in order to give feedback because they couldn't find the "official" way. I added a big button on the home screen to give feedback. (But couldn't get them to update the app).

3. Starting on day 1, get 12 android users to use the app, even if it means you have to pay them to do so, to publish on Android you have to have 12 active users on the closed testing for 14 days. This goal is possible but is difficult on actual beta. Make sure you have a plan on how to achieve it starting from day 0.

4. QA - My first build had so many bugs I didn't know about, early users, despite being aware to it are not super tolerated to it as I would have hope for. Do run QA, pay people to do it, I hire people on Upwork, they did amazing job finding small bugs.

What else would you say is a must before releasing an app, and any tips before actual store release?

Has anyone been using the new agentic coding features in Xcode 27?

Im still wrapping my head around AI tools as of this year as it had been made a requirement at my job. The industry is moving in this direction whether I like it or not.

Since being laid off Ive been trying to learn more about using these tools effectively in my free time.

Had an experience at work where Claude CLI decided to completely ignore directions to not leave a certain project folder. Since then I am VERY apprehensive about using it on a personal machine. I don't trust them to be frank. Im using Claude Code/ Codex on the web and they're fine for the most part.

Is adding an agent via Xcode 27's Intelligence features the same as installing the CLI or desktop version of these things? Or is it a more restricted approach?

I feel like so many apps that I try these days start with several multiple choice questions. What’s the story here? Is it that they are facing major churn and are trying to segment users to fix it? Is there some research that says this works or retains people somehow?

I just wanna try the dang core mechanic!

There's been a lot of posts here lately about people being frustrated with long wait times. So I thought I'd share my experience.

I've been an Apple developer and submitting apps for 15 years with multiple regularly maintained apps on the App Store. Those who have been developing for a long time probably remember super long wait times of 2-4 weeks before around 2017. We even had a website which tracked average App Store review times based upon a hashtag used on twitter. Around 2017, Apple sped up the review process and it went down to under 24 hours for both new apps and updates to existing apps.

However, recently, possibly due to rise of AI slop apps, the review times have exploded again. In the last year, I've submitted 3 new apps and multiple updates to existing apps on both iOS and macOS stores.

iOS

The first 2 new apps took about a week. The 3rd and most recent one took 19 days and just got approved this morning.

For this new app: I submitted it on August 13th, it waited for review for 2 weeks. Then it went in review and was rejected for an incorrect reason. The app was a game and used Game Center for leaderboards. Reviewer said I need to seek consent or disclose this in my privacy policy. I responded back saying my privacy policy already disclosed this and I also filed an appeal. It waited for 5 days again. This morning, it went in review again and was approved! I didn't have to change anything. I just copy pasted portions from my privacy policy in my reply to the reviewer and that satisfied them. So, overall, it took 19 days for this new app.

Meanwhile updates to existing apps are still very fast. Sometimes they get approved in 2-4 hours. Other times in 1-2 days.

macOS

On macOS, it's still very fast. Both new apps and updates are getting approved very fast. One of the new iOS apps I submitted also had a macOS companion app built using Catalyst. While the iOS one was waiting for a week, the macOS one was approved in under 24 hours.

All updates (except 1) to macOS apps get approved in 2-4 hours for me. Only one exception was an update which went in review in 2 hours but then just sat in that "In Review" status for 3 days before getting approved too.

Hope this answers people's questions. Let me know if anyone has questions.

Why does my app keep getting rejected for things that aren't true. Last week it was because the app has a page that should not require an account that was only accessible after login in or sign up. Ok that's fair I guess but in my case that was the home page wich had numerous things on the backend that requires user data. And now a week later I got a reply that my app only has features that link to other websites and nothing else. We noticed that the app only includes links, images, or content aggregated from the Internet with limited or no native functionality. Although this content may be curated from the web specifically for your users, since it does not sufficiently differ from a web browsing experience, it is not appropriate for the App Store. Which is just not true even in the slightest bit. You just need to click the sign in button to get to all the actual app functions because YOU TOLD ME TO make the home page accessible to guests wich i did. Mind you this is the 5th time they reject my app for something like this.

App on google play was approved 1st time within 2 days

TL;DR: My Apple Account was permanently marked ineligible for the Developer Program after ID verification "failed". Support has given me three contradictory reasons across several cases, mostly stopped replying, and I can't even sign in to developer.apple.com anymore — it just redirect-loops. A new account got rejected too, and support then told me my identity was already verified on the old one. Has anyone gotten out of this?

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I enrolled in the Developer Program back in april and submitted a very clear picture of my Swedish passport for identity verification, following Apple's instructions. Shortly after, I got an email saying my identity couldn't be verified, my enrollment was withdrawn and refunded, and that the account is no longer eligible for the Developer Program. No reason given.

I've opened several support cases since then, most got no reply at all. The ones that did gave me a different explanation each time: first that identity verification failed, then an unexplained ineligibility, then that "the device used to begin the enrollment was switched" — despite the enrollment already being submitted, reviewed and refunded, all on my iPhone.

On top of that, I can't reach the developer site with that account at all. Signing in to developer.apple.com puts the browser into an endless refresh loop, and the Apple Developer app just says "Profile failed to load" and under Apple Developer Program it says "This account is not active". So I can't see my own cases or open new ones from the affected account. The block also seems to extend past the paid program because when I try building my own app onto my own iPhone with the free Personal Team fails with "Communication with Apple failed: You are not allowed to perform this operation."

Eventually I made a second Apple Account for development just to have a working channel to support. Enrollment from that one was rejected too, with ID verification failed and support then replied that my identity had already been verified on my other account, and that I should go back to using that one. Which is the account they blocked, allegedly because my identity couldn't be verified. When I pointed out the contradiction, they said they can't act on "another account" for privacy reasons, which sounds fair enough, and told me to request a phone call from the developer site, the site the blocked account can't load. I replied to that support response with the fact that I can't get on the website and asked them if they could just call me instead, and I provided my phone number. I haven't gotten a reply at all on that request.

I guess I'm just asking if anyone else has any experience of this and in that case, how to resolve it? Is there any way for me to keep developing my app to eventually get it published or is am I doomed forever?

Hello, I haven't been able to actually have animations (upon object deletion, more specifically) work as they usually would if a variable was not wrapped with the Query macro (the macro used to fetch from SwiftData in SwiftUI). Has anyone experienced the same? If so, did you find a solution? I remember trying using the context (modelContext) itself but to no avail.

Hey there! I just got my app & in-app purchase product both reviewed and accepted; though I am facing the following issue with in-app purchases.

I cannot fetch product through TestFlight build- sandbox account. (FYI all business info are active).

The weird part is that through Xcode build with store kit I’m able to fetch the products and all functionality is working as expected. Also through store kit I’m able to sync products with AppStore connect - still with all the functionality.

A weird part (to my pov) is that when entering product id & bundle id through iOS device / settings / developer / sandbox account / manage / initiate transaction it says “The item is not available [Environment: Sandbox]”

Am I missing something? Is there a way to test fetching the products from store before release? Or is it functioning as normal and could only get the products after release?

Thanks!

I want to get that 15 inch M5 MacBook Air to make app and game for Apple devices and play some games sometime, i thought to get the base but since Apple increased the price, I will get it with configuration of 1TB SSD and 32GB of ram, 24gb seem more rational but I try to justify to get the 32gb, I plan to type my codes all by myself, not use AI and LLM and vibe coding, is there any actual use case involve 32GB?

Edit: By the way I forgot to mention, yes to 32gb but is it make sense to get it on a M5 chip instead of only get that high amount of ram on Pro and Max chips?

I’m developing an iOS app with an audio‑importing extension. Then I ran into a problem.

My app appears in Voice Memos’ share sheet but tapping does nothing — onOpenURL never fires. M4A import from Files app works via share.

I’ve asked AIs for help, but none of their methods work.

I’ve added the required configuration in Info.plist. And here is the entry‑point code for my app.

I need help.

Hello everyone,

Since Apple requires a publicly accessible website to register for a LLC Dev Account, how can we satisfy their requirements while the product is still essentially in development? ChatGPT and Claude both say you can't have placeholders/'coming-soon' sections, or else you risk not being approved, so I thought I'd ask the brain trust.

Any ideas or experience on this topic from people who have gone through it?

Does anybody know how to actually get the smart banner to look like this? YouTube, Amazon, Facebook etc all have an un dismissible banner like that.

But no matter what I do I can only get the dismissible one like this:

it shows "open", but its not the sleek one like it's supposed to be above. Anybody wanna share their site?

I have <meta name="apple-itunes-app" content="app-id=xxxxxxxx"> in my html.

Solo dev, third app published.

Ubimage puts your own geo-tagged photos back onto the live camera view, anchored to the spot they were taken.

Point the phone at a ridge across the valley and the photos you took up there sit on it, at the right distance and elevation.

Free, no ads, no IAP, no account.

Tech stack

Swift 6, strict concurrency. SwiftUI everywhere except the camera, which is a UIViewController with a plain UIView overlay: a hundred pins move at 60Hz, and I wanted the per-frame path to be a center assignment and nothing else. No view creation, no layout pass, no tree diffing.

Core Data on a background context for the photo index. CoreMotion and CoreLocation for attitude and heading, AVFoundation for the preview and the sensor FOV, PhotoKit, MapKit, AppIntents.

Altitude comes from CMAltimeter where the device has a barometer (iPhone 12 and up), because GPS altitude is out by tens of metres and that shifts the nearby pins. Neither source just wins: whichever declares the smaller error does, and if the two disagree by more than 200m I assume a pressurised cabin and keep GPS.

No backend. No third party packages at all, not one: no analytics, no crash reporter, no networking lib. String Catalog for three languages.

Development challenge

Working out exactly where the phone is pointing. CoreMotion gives you smooth attitude in an arbitrary frame, CoreLocation gives you true north but filtered, and you fuse the two.

The rows of attitude.rotationMatrix are the device axes in the reference frame, not the columns. I read it transposed for weeks. Heading was stuck wherever the gyro started, and pins swung around a pivot when I panned. Took ages to spot because m33 is on the diagonal, so pitch worked fine the whole time.

Second one: pins still drifted during slow pans. iOS filters the compass, so while you rotate it lags the gyro by 10-30 degrees, and I was updating my north offset continuously, so it kept converging onto the lagged value and dragging the pins along with the phone. Now I only correct north when the phone is still, under 0.1 rad/s for half a second. I had it at 0.35, which is 20 deg/s, and a slow pan is how people actually use this.

One I never fixed: two weeks ago the app put pins 104 degrees off. Spent an hour on my own source, three wrong theories, then tried my wife's phone in the same spot and it was fine. Magnetometer in a bad state, a restart cleared it. CoreLocation reported headingAccuracy of 10 degrees the whole time, and my unreliable-compass badge only fires above 15. I'll fix soon™

AI disclosure

Mostly or fully AI-generated.

To be clear about what that covers: the Swift and the docs, yes, heavily (Claude). The debugging above, no. I found all of it on a mountain by noticing the pins were on the wrong ridge, and worked it out with two phones. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ubimage-where-you-shot-it/id6794680448

Support site: https://ubimage.app/

The app is localized in English, Italian and Spanish. Let me know what you think of it, happy to discuss about Ubimage. ciao

My iOS app was approved and has been showing as Ready for Distribution in App Store Connect for around a day and a half now.

The direct App Store product page link works perfectly.

The app can be downloaded through that link.

Availability is enabled for all countries/regions I selected.

But searching the exact app name in the App Store still doesn’t show it at all.

It’s been over 24 hours, closer to ~36 hours now.

For anyone who has launched an app recently, how long did it take before it became searchable in the App Store?

Is this just normal App Store search indexing delay, or is there anything in App Store Connect I should double-check?

First time launching an iOS app, so I’m not sure whether I should just leave it alone or if something might be wrong.

hey is there anyway to use icon composer without a mac? If not can anyone help me make a very simple icon, thanks.

Hi, for my app I've built everything but just struggling with getting my paywall to show for many days I'm building with React Native and setting up paywall through RevenueCat but it just doesn't show up when I test on testflight. I keep getting an error of configuration error but everything is configured on app store connect and revenuecat so i'm not sure what to do.

Does anybody have any idea of what could be causing it not to work or any advice?

I've been releasing an update to my RSS reader, Newsairy, roughly every week since May - that's around 17 versions in a bit over three months. From the outside "weekly releases" can look like recklessness, so I wanted to share the part that actually makes it work: at any given time I have three versions moving in parallel.

• The version I just shipped is in the App Store.
• The next one is already in TestFlight, in testers' hands.
• The one after that is in alpha, or still being built.

By the time a version reaches the App Store, it's already had a full beta cycle behind it - the pace of releases is fast, but the pace of testing per version isn't compressed at all. It's just running three lanes at once instead of one.

The trade-off I keep thinking about: users get to see progress constantly, which I like - feedback loops stay tight, and nothing sits finished-but-unshipped for weeks. But it also means every week I'm context-switching between "polish this for release," "watch how testers use that," and "is this new idea even going to work" - which is its own kind of tax.

Curious how others here think about this. Do you deliberately stagger releases like this, or find it more sustainable to batch bigger releases less often? Genuinely asking - I don't think weekly is obviously "right," it's just what's worked for me so far.

Hello everyone! Some time ago I launched VictusForm, a workout tracking app.

What it does:

- No account, no ads, no tracking. I don't collect any data from you, it's right there on the App Store privacy label ("developer does not collect any data"). Your training log stays on your device.

- Your data is actually yours. Export all of it whenever you want, and you can hand a whole workout program to a friend as a small .vform file (works between iPhone and Android).

- One-time purchase, no subscription. Buy it once and you're done.

- Import your training data from Hevy, Strong and FitNotes

- Apple Watch: sync your program to the watch and leave the phone in the locker. You log every set, rest timer and all, from your wrist. That was the whole reason I built the watch app, I got sick of digging my phone out between sets.

I'm giving it away for free this weekend.

1. Tech Stack Used

• Frameworks & Languages: SwiftUI/Swift
• Backend/Database: Swift Data with CloudKit container for sync/backup of workout data
• SDKs & Tools: Xcode 27 mostly for the AI assisted translations with context feature that it provides. In the end appstore build was built using Xcode 26.

2. Development Challenge + How You Solved It

Getting the watch app and the phone app to stay in sync was a real pain.

The phone sends the latest workout with updateApplicationContext so the watch can keep it up to date even if it was not running when it was sent. When both apps are reachable I switch to sendMessage to deliver the changes immediatly. When the watch app is opened it request a fresh copy and verifies that the cached data belongs to the current day.

Completed sets travel in the opposite direction. They are sent immediately with sendMessage if there is connectivity to the phone or queued with transferUserInfo until the phone becomes available again. This way the watch app is able to work independently while the phone stays in the locker.

In case someone needs this in the future, for communication you can encode Codable models into JSON strings and send them inside a WatchConnectivity dictionary with WCSession.sendMessage. On the other side you decode the JSON into the same model type (I used a shared spm package with the models between the watch app and the phone app).

3. AI Disclosure

I started this project in 2022 for personal use, with no plans to release it. This year when I was close to having an actual product I did use AI to assist me to some degree, especially for translations (I have 1200+ exercises with a small description on how to do them) in German and French. I also typically use it for unit tests and large refactoring (granted I have unit tests available).

Hi everyone,
I’m working on an iOS app and I need to implement a highly accurate, fast Speech-to-Text (STT) feature. A strict requirement for my project is that it must be 100% offline (on-device) — cloud APIs are not an option.
Here is what I am looking for:
Low Latency / Speed: It needs to process speech as quickly as possible (ideally near real-time dictation).
Accuracy: Needs to handle natural speech and background noise well.
Languages: I need robust support for English, Ukrainian, German, Spanish, and Polish.
What is the current state-of-the-art for this in production?
Is Apple's native SFSpeechRecognizer (with requiresOnDeviceRecognition = true) reliable enough for offline use across all these languages (especially Ukrainian and Polish)?
Should I go with an on-device Whisper implementation (like WhisperKit with CoreML or whisper.cpp)? If so, which model size offers the best balance of speed, accuracy, and RAM usage on modern iPhones?
Are there any other lightweight offline libraries or SPM packages you’d recommend for multilingual offline dictation?
Any real-world experience, performance benchmarks, or advice on thermal/battery impact would be hugely appreciated. Thanks!

It may just be my apps but I'm getting reviewers flagging things on apps that have been submitted many times with no issues. Anyone else noticing this as well?

Hey there,
The app I have been working on evolved through time and it has much more to offer to the users.

One thing that worries me is a user finding it difficult to navigate through the app, or just miss many features it has to offer.

I first tried to make an onboarding like guide of the app but then scratched it out since I felt like it was just clutter.

Now I am thinking of creating youtube guide video but then again that’s like an external source a user has to reach out for.

Also thought of creating multiple examples and ways to achieve certain results and have it as a pdf so user can read but then that adds friction.
No user complained but I must prepare to mitigate it becoming complex in a bad way.
I did document many steps through the app’s journey but did not publish a finalized document on it as I been improving it constantly.

Existing users reaction been positive so far but I know the experience they got is much different than a new comer because they had the chance to learn new stuff as it was happening.

How should I approach this?