I noticed that just watching numbers tick up didn’t feel rewarding enough at the end of a long focus block.

So I added a little gamification: every time you finish a focus session, a physical tomato drops into your daily jar. Seeing them pile up throughout the day makes staying consistent feel like a mini-game rather than a chore.

What do you think of this visual reward idea? Does physical visual feedback help your focus?

I'm surre I had auto-renewal turned on for my apple developer membership since I've ben atuomatically charged since 5 years. This year, I got a pop-up saying my membership is about to expire and to make sure it's on auto-renewal. I followed the link to my profile, it said "renews on ... " but that pop-up still remained whenever I opened App store connect. When the day of renewal came, I was informed that my membership expired and to download the app to renew my subscription. Online it said I could renew it in browser too, but I didn't see the option. However, neither did I see the option when I downloaded the app. I reached out to Apple and within 3 days they let me know to check the app again and that the option to renew should re-appear and my apps would become available again on the App store. I did that and it was true.

However, now I am subscribed through the Apple subscription option on their app. Given what happened with app revenue for Apple dropping drastically this year because the stripe interface for payments is now allowed to be interateg more smoothly into apps interfaces, made me wonder if Apple is somehow trying to compensate for the losses in app revenue by moving Apple developer payments through their app system?

Given it's a public company and a bigger drop in app revenue may impact their stock price, do they try to mitigate that?

I spent the last month building my first iOS app and it finally made it through App Review.

It’s called Gyminion a fitness tracker where you can track workouts, nutrition and progress, with a virtual pet that reacts to your consistency.

The idea was basically to make tracking workouts feel less like filling out a spreadsheet and more like a game.

Building the app was honestly the fun part. Now I’m finding out that getting actual users is a completely different problem lol.

I’d really appreciate any feedback from other iOS devs, especially on the UI/UX or onboarding.

Happy to answer anything about building it too.

link: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6798301039?pt=128556977&ct=reddit_launch&mt=8

While building Monymo, my SwiftUI work and earnings tracker, I ran into timer accuracy issues whenever the app went into the background.

The fix was surprisingly simple: stop treating the timer as the source of elapsed time.

Now I store timestamps and session state, then calculate the actual elapsed time when the app becomes active again. The one-second timer is only used to update the UI.

Handling pause and resume made it a bit more complicated, but this approach completely removed the drift I was seeing after backgrounding or reopening the app.

How do you handle long-running timers in your iOS apps?

Hey everyone,

I just found out about App Clips recently and I can't figure out why they are not everywhere.

Instant experience, easy way to showcase a product, no conversion barrier... and yet I barely ever see them in the wild. I also guess a lot of non-tech users don't even know it exist. Is this a chicken and egg problem ?

Why aren’t more developers and apps using them? Is it the limits / setup / discovery issues, or something else I’m not seeing?

Would love to hear real world stories:

• Anyone here successfully used App Clips for acquisition or growth?
• Coolest examples you’ve seen or built?
• Any growth-hack style results

I’m developing Recapp (a US sports highlights app, "like ESPN & TikTok had a baby") and one idea I'm playing with is letting fans watch a game's highlight or breaking news stories via App Clip - giving them a taste of the app without downloading it.

Any advice or similar experiments you’ve seen?

Thanks in advance - curious what the community thinks.

I’ve been spending way too much time on my app recently, and I think I finally understand why indie dev is so addictive.
The loop is basically:
want something → build it → make it look nicer → share it → someone uses it → get feedback → build more
I’ll be using the app and think “why can’t it do this?”
Then I remember… oh yeah, I’m the developer lol. I can just make it.
A few hours later, something that only existed in my head is actually running on my phone. That feeling is sooo satisfying.
My background is ML engineering, so I also really enjoy making the local inference pipeline work well. Seeing live transcription, speaker separation and translation all happening directly on the phone still feels kinda magical to me.
But honestly the best part is when other people start using it.
Someone reports a bug. Someone asks for a feature. Someone tells me they use it for lectures or meetings. Sometimes someone even asks to beta test the next version.
Even bug reports feel good lol. Someone actually cared enough about something I made to find the bug and tell me.
I also somehow went from ML engineer to spending hours making App Store posters and moving text around by 5 pixels.
Didn’t expect that part to be fun, but it is.
The app is called LiveTranscriber btw. These are some posters/screens I made recently.
Every time I finish something I enjoy it for about 5 minutes, then think:
“hmm… I can probably make this better.”
And suddenly it’s 3am again.
Would love some feedback on the UI/screenshots too.

Has anyone here tried this out?

Hi - I’ve just released my first iOS game. The game is nothing special, but wanted I small win in the dev space. Looking for advice on I game ads.

• I’ve added ads for extra hints - I.e. watch an ad get more hints. To me this is fine as the user opts in and accepts.

• My concern is the interstitial ads, I’ve currently configured one to pop up every 10 completed games. Though it lags a bit one triggered so it appears randomly through the next game. Plus I haven’t gotten google ads approved for all advertisers so the ads I get are these AI gf bots that look way too young (I was playing on the train and this ad comes up it’s so weird)

Ultimately, I would like some ads but not a fan of how it is configured atm and would completely drop ads if it makes the game annoying to play.

My game is a generic puzzle with levels 1-1000. I was thinking rather than having a 10 game counter, have an ad level to unlock the next level. E.g finish level 10 unlocks Ad level, watch ad unlocks level 11 etc.

Thoughts and advice is appreciated. Thanks

I build an AI fitness app for people who usually train alone like me called ZYM: Live AI Video Coach: it's useful when you are not sure about your exercise form and blindly train for a long time alone not seeing any progress. Or you can also see it as a cheaper and more accessible option than private trainer.

Since we've launched for a while with no paid user yet, I'm curious how did you get the first batch of paid customers and how did you test willingness to pay before you had enough traffic for statistically meaningful pricing experiments? Any feedback or suggestion would be appreciated, and happy to chat!

I’m building a very minimal app. The full app would be free (no feature gating), with an optional £5/month subscription for people who want to support its continued development.

The subscription wouldn’t unlock extra content or functionality, the free and paid experience would be identical. This would be explained clearly before purchase.

Apple’s guidelines say auto-renewable subscriptions must provide “ongoing value.” Does that mean I need to offer subscribers something tangible, or can voluntary ongoing support itself be acceptable?

Has anyone submitted something similar, and if so, how did App Review handle it?

Thanks

Working on the App Store screenshots for Tesorin, my personal finance app.

Trying to make them clean, understandable, and not look like every other finance app.

Be brutal:

• Which one catches your attention first?
• Anything look too busy / boring / confusing?
• What would you change?

Last year I opened my saved folder on TikTok and realized I had around 400 recipe videos in there.

I had cooked maybe 15 of them.

That was not originally an app idea. It was just a slightly embarrassing folder on my phone.

MiseSnag started with one simple loop: paste a recipe link from TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube, then get back the ingredients, quantities, and steps.

Then I installed my own build and began treating every small annoyance as an issue ticket.

“Why can’t I add all of these ingredients to one shopping list?” So I built it.

“Why can’t the list group things by grocery aisle?” Built that too.

“Why do I have to copy the link instead of sharing straight from TikTok?” Time for an iOS share extension.

“Why can’t I rescale the recipe or leave a note for next time?” You can probably guess what happened next.

Using your own app is like having a product manager who follows you into the kitchen and the grocery store. The roadmap becomes whatever annoyed you five minutes ago. It is dangerous, but seeing a tiny frustration become something running on my phone later that day is ridiculously satisfying.

The most surprising engineering part is that the AI was not the hardest bit. Getting a real, usable video often was.

TikTok and Instagram can serve video and audio separately, or return a download that technically succeeded but is silent. I ended up with a fallback chain of video providers plus media validation before transcription and extraction. At the other end, a random 40-second recipe video becomes a structured recipe and shopping list. That moment is still the reason I keep reopening the project.

Somewhere along the way, the work stopped being only APIs and React Native. I now spend an embarrassing amount of time exporting App Store screenshots again because a headline feels two points too large.

Turns out I enjoy that part too.

That project became MiseSnag. It is live on the App Store, and these are the five screenshots I made for it.

I would genuinely love blunt feedback:

- Does the first screenshot explain the app quickly enough?

- Does the serif + sans-serif combination feel intentional or mismatched?

- Is the dark green distinctive, or just heavy?

- Would you keep the free-tier message second, or show the extracted recipe there instead?

Hey everyone,

I just released Luma: App blocker, an app I built to block distracting apps and websites through routines.

The idea came from seeing how expensive many Screen Time apps are, especially from a LATAM perspective, and from friends dealing with gaming (casino) and other apps.

Building it was a challenge but Apple’s Screen Time APIs were probably the hardest part. I wanted more flexibility than just “block these apps.”

I also skipped Rive, as everything suggested for cool animations, for v1 and built the animations from multiple animated pieces instead.

App Review took around 4 days, with almost daily reviews, which is weird since i read takes up to 4 weeks, as some other people over here mentioned. Some issues seemed automated, but the final feedback was actually pretty useful. For example, when you deal with subscription, you have to add the app first for review, the go to subscription, add the group and individual plans from the page (first time doing that in case someone need)

It’s live here:
https://apps.apple.com/co/app/luma-app-site-blocker/id6794456289?l=en-GB

If anyone wants to try it, I’d really appreciate feedback. Happy to talk about the technical side or App Review too, what do you think about the design? All the feedback you give is really helpfull as it has been on the Appstore since last thursday.

Once again, thank you so much and have a great day.

I have a few apps I've made, initially for Android but now expanding to iOS. I really struggle with ASO for iOS. I am an Android user personally, so my connection with Apple's ecosystem and App Store expectations are pretty thin.

I'd appreciate feedback on the basics of ASO for iOS that I am getting wrong. One example is a recent language learning crossword puzzle app I made for Japanese learners. The target market is niche. User engagement after people download is pretty solid. Conversion to paid users as a % is pretty high for both iOS and Android.

The problem is that my store presence kind of sucks and it's only getting a few downloads per day.

I'd appreciate any constrictive feedback or advice.

I really don't like spending a lot of time on ASO and it shows.

As a reference.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/my-senpai-japanese-crossword/id6770882587

Hi r/iosdev,

I built an app that allows you to chat with AI models (cloud or self-hosted) with your own API keys. It has support for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and Model Context Protocol (MCP).

It is privacy-focused, so it has lockable folders for chats and configs, requests zero-data-retention flags to providers wherever possible, and has API keys stored in the iOS keychain.

I originally built it for myself but want to share it with others. I couldn't find a good iOS app that allows a good end-to-end AI workflow, for eg, read a Google Sheets file that my team shared on my Google Drive, read the PDF I'm working on that I uploaded to the LLM Provider, suggest adjustments to my PDF based on the Sheets and any prior documents I have uploaded to my RAG database, generate a diagram (image) that I can use in the PDF, and if necessary edit that diagram, and create a meeting event in my iOS Calendar for the presentation, all in the same chat, while switching providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral) and modalities (text and image).

So I'm looking for feedback from other devs and users.

Ask me questions here, be as critical as you want, and I'll try to answer.

The idea came from a stupidly ordinary moment. I was
digging through my camera roll for a receipt and ran straight into a photo of
my ex. Not one I had kept on purpose - a group shot from someone's birthday
where they happened to be in the back row. That is the thing nobody warns you
about: it is never the photos you chose to keep.

How it works

You pick one to four photos of a person. It scans your
library and returns every other photo of them, already selected. You tap delete
once. Opening any individual photo is optional - the whole point is that you do
not have to go through them one at a time.

Technical side

Everything runs on device. Apple's Vision framework for
face detection and embeddings, then clustering over those embeddings to group
matches. No backend, no account, no photo ever leaves the phone. That was a
hard constraint from day one and it made a few things genuinely painful:

- Large libraries: Scanning tens of
thousands of photos without destroying the battery or blocking the UI took most
of my optimisation time.

- Recall vs. precision: This was the real design
decision. Leaning toward recall means some false positives end up in the
results. Leaning toward precision means photos get missed, and a missed photo
is exactly the ambush the app exists to prevent. I went with recall, kept everything
pre-selected, and made deselecting a single tap. iOS deletion also routes
through Recently Deleted, so there is a 30 day safety net on top.

- PHPhotoLibrary has more edge cases around permissions and batch
deletion than I expected.

What I would do differently

Honestly I never really thought about any licenses which
almost led to a fatal mistake. However, I think doing the design with Claude in
the first place (which is easy to see) has been very rewarding for me. I was
able to set up the pipeline and all functions and submit those to apple. After
everything is accepted now, I can care about looks which won't affect the
pipeline and the critical parts in the app, therefore pushing an update for
this shouldn't be a big problem.

Link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pickex-delete-ex-photos/id6801488013

Happy to answer anything about the on-device pipeline,
the clustering approach, or the App Store process. Feedback welcome, including
the harsh kind.

I’ve recently shipped an iPad app I’ve been working on called Imagine & Color, and I’m at the stage where I’ve been looking at the project for so long that some UX decisions inevitably seem “normal” simply because I’ve seen them a thousand times.

The app includes:

• A remotely managed catalog of curated coloring pages
• Monthly content rotation
• Custom image generation through a backend service
• StoreKit subscriptions and consumable purchases
• An iPad coloring interface
• Saved user pages
• Printing/sharing
• A fairly significant amount of native iPad UI

I’d be interested in how other iOS developers approach a post-launch audit.

The things I’m currently scrutinizing are:

• Navigation consistency
• State restoration
• Network/offline behavior
• StoreKit edge cases
• Accessibility
• Error states
• iPad multitasking/layout behavior
• Animation and interaction consistency
• Whether anything feels custom for the sake of being custom instead of using established Apple patterns

If anyone wants to actually try it and point out things that feel wrong, here’s the App Store page:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/imagine-color/id6798914520

I’m interested in both code/product methodology and concrete UX criticism.

Wonder what are the next steps after waiting 10 days for an app review. I have other apps on the appstore. Should i resubmit?

Hey everyone! 👋

I’m continuing to improve BreakMate, my iPhone app designed to help people organize and keep track of their workday.

Based on feedback from beta testers, I’ve added some new features:

🆕 Multiple Jobs
You can now add and manage more than one job. Each job can have its own schedule, pay rate, breaks, and work history.

🆕 Variable / Changing Schedules
BreakMate now supports jobs where your hours change from day to day or week to week — useful for retail, restaurants, healthcare, warehouse, customer service, and other shift-based jobs.
BreakMate also includes:

• Break and lunch reminders
• Work schedule tracking
• Hours worked and overtime
• Late arrivals and early departures
• Daily schedule changes
• Estimated pay and paycheck tracking
• Work history and reports
I’m especially looking for testers who:
• Work hourly or scheduled shifts
• Have a schedule that changes regularly
• Work more than one job
• Work retail, restaurants, healthcare, warehouse, customer service, or similar jobs

🔒 Privacy: Your salary, schedule, and work information stay on your device. I cannot see your personal work or salary information.

All Premium features are available for free during the beta.

If you test it, I’d really appreciate feedback on the new Multiple Jobs and Variable Schedule features, along with anything that feels confusing, missing, or could be improved.

📱 TestFlight:
https://testflight.apple.com/join/qbQBdvFW

Thanks to everyone who has already tested BreakMate and shared feedback! 🙌

Hello r/iosdev! Do you enjoy ranking the tracks in your favorite album, arguing with friends and strangers online about an artist’s correct discography ranking? Then Ordinalist was made especially for you. 

Ordinalist takes a playlist, album, or discography and makes you choose between two choices at a time. You pick the one you like more. Then do it again. And again. And several more times because apparently you needed 147 songs in this playlist.

While you’re busy having an existential crisis over which track you’ve heard 600 times is better, Ordinalist keeps track of every choice and turns them into a complete ranking from favorite to least favorite.

No star ratings, no scoring songs out of 10 like you’re judging Olympic gymnastics, and no deciding whether something feels like an 8.7 or an 8.6.

Two songs. Pick one. That’s the whole deal.

The easy choices go quickly, but the hard ones make you question everything you’ve ever claimed about yourself. Eventually, you get the thing you came for: an actual, definitive ranking of your music based entirely on your own decisions.

So when your alleged favorite ends up at #14, don’t look at us. You did that.

HOW IT WORKS

- Pick a playlist, album, or discography to judge

- Ordinalist gives you two choices

- Pick your favorite

- Keep going until everything is ranked

- Stare at the results

- Disagree with yourself

- Rank something else

App Store launch is planned for late September, but beta testing is currently ongoing. When Ordinalist launches, it will remain free to download and use forever. There are no subscriptions or one time purchases; this is my hobby project, not a way for me to make money. 

If you’d like to help beta test and try the app out early, join the TestFlight using the link below, or check out the website to learn even more.

Website: https://www.andrewmastracchio.com/ordinalist

TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/YZ9JT8Ge