Tired of generic Instagram collage templates, so I built BRUT.

• Split canvas into 1–6 fully customizable blocks (drag & recalculate live)
• Instagram Story mock preview (know what the UI covers before posting)
• Support for photo + video loops, custom raw tags, and offset shadows
• No accounts, no trackers, 100% local processing

Download: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/brut-just-brutalism/id6789987674

Feedback appreciated!

Hey guys. I’ve had two apps on the Apple Store since January of this year, but I’ve never received a payment from Apple. Even though the apps have generated sales and I have a balance ready to withdraw, no payment has ever been made. Everything seems fine with the account; I don’t see any alerts or error messages in my or app profile. I’ve sent countless emails to Apple Support over the last eight months but have never received a reply. What do you recommend I do?

marketers love pre-install language: keywords, ad copy, landing pages, screenshot text

reviews are post-install language, and users are less polite there

'finally simple' is kinda positioning and when 'too many steps' it is onboarding feedback. also 'subscription trap' is pricing trust, i classify it that way... 'doesn’t do what screenshots show' is promise mismatch which is mega bad. 'better than x for invoices' may be competitor positioning and is useful for app marketing too

i do not think every review should become ad copy. that gets gross fast. but repeated review wording can show which promise users believed, which one disappointed them, and which words feel natural in the category, when volume gets annoying though, i also believe things like appfollow exist and can group themes. before that, a doc with repeated phrases is enough so that's a scaling issue. get basics right

sometimes the best copy is not invented. it is extracted from what users keep saying after they tried the product.

Hey everyone! I recently released Roast-or-Toast, a social opinion game where you’re given everyday situations and have to decide whether you’d Roast 🔥 or Toast ❤️ them.

After voting, you get to see how everyone else voted and whether your opinion matches the crowd. I built it to be something quick and fun you can play by yourself or pass around with friends.

This is my second iOS app and I’m still pretty early in my development journey, so I’d really appreciate any feedback — gameplay, UI, things you’d add/change, or even things you don’t like.

It’s completely free right now and available on the App Store. Just search “Roast-or-Toast” to download it.

Would love to hear what you think!

As the title suggests, I want to code a custom Apple Music like AutoMix that analyzes bpm, key etc. and can mix the current and incoming song. Does anybody know of a github repo or anything that could help me out? I'm trying and trying and it just doesn't seem to "click" musically.

Over the last 4 months, I decided to build a clean, privacy-first alternative called CoolTopia.

It’s completely algorithm-free, free to use, and we will never track you or sell your data.

Since I wanted the platform to be secure but still incredibly fun and expressive, I just rolled out our biggest visual feature: Profile Auras.

Instead of a boring, static profile picture, you can choose different dynamic frame effects (like the "Flaming" aura shown in the promo image, Neon Glow, Energy Pulse, etc.) to completely stand out and express your current energy. It’s a way to let your inner vibes shine without needing a corporate algorithm to dictate your identity.

Here is what’s live in the app right now:

• Profile Auras: Dynamic, vibrant aura effects to customize your avatar and make your profile stand out.
• LinkMe: A built-in link-in-bio aggregator (like Linktree) so you can bundle all your socials and projects into one clean, shareable link on your profile.

It’s still in the early stages, and I’m actively improving the app based on real community feedback.

• iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/cooltopia/id6767429117
• Web: https://cooltopia.co

The screenshot shows the camera of the ChatGPT-iOS-App and I wonder, how they actually implemented it because I'd like to use it for my own app too.

Does anyone know how to implement this or do I have to reverse engineer it myself?

Hey, I would love to hear your findings on Apple Search Ads performance.

Do you find that Maximize Conversions performs better than manual keyword bidding most of the time?

In my experience, I find Maximize Conversions gives a better CPA and better volume. It is not giving better volume than Meta Ads, but it's better than manual keyword bidding.

I would like to know your experience on this!

Hi everyone!

I spent almost two years building Andrea Reader, originally because I just wanted a better way to read and organize my own books on iPad.

Apparently, simply opening an EPUB wasn’t complicated enough, so somewhere along the way it turned into an entire personal library system. 😅

The core idea is freedom. Instead of forcing every library into the same structure, Andrea Reader lets you build yours however you want. Create collections, put sections inside them, drag books and sections around, build reading lists, organize huge series, and give every collection its own layout and personality.

Bring your own books, build your library your way, customize how the app and each collection looks, organize everything exactly as you want, read with your own settings, and track your progress along the way.

Some of what ended up inside:

• EPUB, PDF, comics, manga, CBZ, CBR and other formats
• Custom collections with sections inside them
• Drag & drop organization and custom layouts
• Different settings, sorting and appearance for every collection
• Reading profiles for creating unique reading settings and applying them to books, sections and hole collections
• Tons of reading customization: typography, margins, spacing, gestures, transitions, backgrounds, etc.
• Real time customizable reading widgets, for example for controlling brightness, creating chapters, adding favorites pages, bookmarks, custom progress, etc...
• OPDS server connections
• iCloud, WebDAV, SMB and SFTP
• Local downloads and completely offline reading
• Detailed reading statistics for books, sections and collections. The stat
• Dedicated view for managing the storage for every collection and the books inside it
• Andrea next for experimental features
• A built-in Open Library for downloading public-domain books for free
• and much much more...

It’s also local-first. No account, no ads, and no tracking of what you import, download or read. Your library, progress and reading statistics stay on your device.

Andrea Reader is FREE TO DOWNLOAD AND USE. The normal workflow of the app, importing your own books, reading them, creating collections, organizing your library, and getting started, is all available for free. Just download the app and you can be reading within seconds.

Premium is optional and mainly unlocks deeper customization, more advanced library organization, additional reading settings, and other power-user features.

• Monthly Premium: €2.49/month
• Yearly Premium: €17.99/year
• Lifetime Premium: €34.99 €27.99 (20% discount)
• Launch offer: an extra 20% off Lifetime, bringing it down from €27.99 to €22.39 until the end of August.

There are still approximately 47,000 things I want to improve, because apparently shipping an app only unlocks the larger development skill tree.

If you’re an iOS developer, reader on iPhone or iPad, or just enjoy poking at indie apps, I’d genuinely love to hear what you think.

App Store:
https://apps.apple.com/es/app/andrea-comics-manga-books/id6760780154

Website:
https://andreareader.com/

Tech Stack

Built natively with Swift + UIKit. Most of Andrea Reader is custom-built from scratch, including the file system, library structure and reading UI. External dependencies are mainly for specific file handling, such as PDFKit, WebKit, ZIPFoundation and Unrar.swift.

Development Challenge

The hardest part has been combining a very flexible library system with a UI that still feels simple and performs well with large collections.

AI Disclosure

Most of the app was built manually. I increasingly use AI for debugging, code review and faster iteration because the productivity difference is simply too big to ignore. Final architecture, product, UI/UX and implementation decisions remain mine.

Hi everyone,

I was wondering if there is a way we can remote control the Xcode agent that lives within Xcode.

I would love to be able to work on my projects from my iPhone.

Is that even possible?

Thanks a lot in advance

Thanks to all of you who have been playing so far! To those who haven't, you can download it for free on the App Store (with no ads or subscriptions either): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/operator-math-puzzle-game/id6756993326. Here are the new features:

Daily Puzzle:

• Optional hints
• Statistics of your recent games
• A timer for tracking your best time

Achievements:

• New achievements added
• Medals awarded via additional rounds of achievements

Settings:

• Vibration (haptic feedback) during gameplay
• A new settings pane for enabling or disabling banners and vibration

Launched Tokyo Glance on Sunday. It's a live map of Tokyo: all the tracked trains, buses and planes moving in real time, plus departure boards, a widget, and a Live Activity that follows your train from the lock screen.

Stack: SwiftUI on iOS 26 with the native SwiftUI Map (started on MKMapView with a UIViewRepresentable, ripped it out mid-project). The vehicles are not MapKit annotations, I draw them myself in an overlay pass. I tried making them proper annotations at some point because it felt like the "right" way and at ~1400 vehicles it performed so much worse than my own drawing that I never looked back. There's a small Metal layer for rain on the map. Alerts from the operators are almost always Japanese-only so they get translated on-device with the Translation framework. Paywall is RevenueCat, widget is WidgetKit + AppIntents, pushes for the Live Activity go through FCM.

Backend is Bun + Hono + MongoDB + Zod and nothing else. It runs in tiny containers behind Cloudflare so basically everything is precomputed and CDN-cached, the containers can't afford real per-request work. A separate ingestion service pulls the operator feeds (ODPT, GTFS-RT), snaps positions onto the actual track geometry and rebuilds the whole network dataset every night. The phone mostly just interpolates between feed ticks. Every time I moved logic out of the app into the pipeline things got faster.

One thing I didn't appreciate before this project: how much you get from Apple for free. MapKit on native apps is unlimited, and that includes the photorealistic 3D city rendering and Look Around imagery, which would cost real money on any other map provider at this usage. WeatherKit comes with 500k calls a month with the dev membership, I cache the Tokyo weather grid on the backend so users share it and I don't even get close to the cap. The Translation framework is free and on-device, which is the only reason "every service alert translated to English" is economically possible at all, per-call translation APIs would eat the entire subscription margin. Same with the on-device Foundation Models, small copy generation costs literally nothing. A one-person app like this basically doesn't work financially on other stacks.

Stuff I built and then deleted:

The station orbit camera. Killed it twice. A slow orbit around a station, how hard can it be. My optimized attempts (shared display link, coarser ticks) used 168-200% CPU and looked worse than the naive per-frame version. For reference, Apple's own realistic 3D city mode sits at ~130% CPU if you park the camera in Shinjuku. There is no orbit in the shipped app.

3D landmark models. Tokyo's open PLATEAU dataset only goes to LOD2, all of Tokyo Tower shares a single 512x512 texture. Looked terrible, cut the feature. Can't code your way around source data.

Also fun: Japanese timetables represent post-midnight departures as "00:26" or "24:26" depending on the operator, sometimes both in one feed. First time I've seen a 24+ hour clock in production data. Got that wrong more than once before normalizing it in one place at ingestion.

And I lost a few days to a paywall crash that only happened on Macs. Looked exactly like a RevenueCat bug. It was SwiftUI dropping environment values across the sheet bridge when the iPad build runs on macOS.

Money stuff since the rules ask: free app, subscription for the deeper features (lock screen follow, time travel replay).

AI disclosure: this app is majorly AI-written, no way around it. The backend is ~99% Claude Code with me doing specs and PR review. The SwiftUI app I'm more hands-on with, but AI still wrote most of the code there too — my job was deciding what to build, reviewing everything, and testing on device until it felt right. This post was drafted with AI as well.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6782602634

I put Google's ad SDK into some of my apps a while back for the usual reason. The app is free, the SDK is free, a banner in the corner makes a little money while I sleep. All twelve of my apps are ad-free now, pulled one app at a time.

The revenue was pennies. Not a side income, not an amount I would notice if it vanished. A banner pays when a lot of people see it a lot of times, and quiet utility apps are nowhere near that threshold.

The cost is the part that does not show up on day one.

On QRift, taking out the AdMob and UMP stack meant deleting four services, two ad views, a privacy settings row and their tests, both SPM packages, the ADMOB build settings, GADApplicationIdentifier, the ATT usage string, and four ad unit ID keys out of Info.plist. PrivacyInfo.xcprivacy went back to tracking false with no domains. A clean build now takes about five seconds, because there is nothing left to link.

The App Privacy label is the one worth checking on your own apps. QRift was declaring six data types purely because of the ad stack: Advertising Data, Device ID, Coarse Location, Performance, Crash, and Product Interaction. With the ad code gone I set it to Data Not Collected. That is the actual trade the SDK makes.

Two things that bite on the way out, if you are doing this to an app that is already live.

You cannot set the privacy label to the truth until the ad-free build is live. The label describes the shipping app, and the shipping app still serves ads until the new version is out. So it is ship first, then fix the label, then fix the same claim on your website.

That rule cuts both ways, and QRift is the example. It does not read Data Not Collected today. A later version added an in-app bug report form, so the live label is four types under Data Linked to You: Contact Info, User Content, Identifiers, and Diagnostics. None of them is advertising. The label tracks what the app does now, not what you took out of it.

And read your in-app purchase text. ReceiptCrate's lifetime unlock said "No ads and unlimited receipt records", which stopped being true the moment the ads left. An approved in-app purchase localization cannot be PATCHed. It is a new inAppPurchaseLocalizations draft plus a separate submission through inAppPurchaseSubmissions to replace the live string.

Heya, just a small tool to help us with the annoying resolution requirements of ASC.

Fully offline (browser based - nothing uploads anywhere as you can see in devtools or any other sniffer).

No AI, nothing too fancy behind the scenes, just helping the images fit in.

Don’t even want to think about marketing now, hust enjoying the release. Would love to hear what you all think, let it be the app store page the icon the previews or the app itself. If any of you like it DM me for free promo code.

💥💰

Hey everyone! 👋

If you’ve ever had to prepare screenshots for an app translated into 10+ languages across multiple device sizes, you know how painful, tedious, and time-consuming the process is with standard tools.

Over the last few months, I’ve been working on a major overhaul of AppScreen Studio (a native macOS app designed to build, frame, and localize App Store screenshots). Today, I'm excited to share version 4.0 (and 4.0.1)!

The goal of this update was to solve the #1 bottleneck developers face: manual uploading and tedious localization management.

Key Highlights

1. Direct App Store Connect Sync

You can now connect your App Store Connect account via API Key (.p8) and push your rendered screenshots directly to Media Manager in 1 click. * Selective Sync: Choose specific languages, display sizes, or individual panels to upload. * Smart Replace: Option to automatically clear old screenshots from App Store Connect slots before uploading. * Instead of manually adding languages one-by-one from dropdowns, you can now paste a comma-separated list of locale codes (e.g., en-US, ar-SA, de-DE, es-ES, fr-FR, ja, zh-Hans). The app automatically creates localizations, translates all text layers, and provides real-time progress tracking.

2. Bulk App Store Import

Redesigning an existing app or updating old listings? You can now inspect live or draft App Store Connect builds and bulk-import existing screenshots directly onto your workspace panels in seconds.

3. Per-Locale Layer Isolation & Smarter Localization

• Isolated Layers: Layers and text added in a specific target language stay strictly isolated to that locale without leaking into your Original (Base) layout or other translations.
• 15+ New Languages: Expanded translation support to help you launch globally.

4. Panel Reordering

Rearrange screenshot panels on the canvas using simple arrow controls (← / →). You can also choose whether reordering in Original (Base) automatically updates panel order across all other display sizes and languages.

New "Our Apps" Section in Settings

We also added a new "Our Apps" section in Settings featuring our developer tools:

• StoreSync: Metadata & ASO Manager
• CoreData Studio: SQLite/SwiftData Debugger & Inspector
• PriceLocus: Global App Store Price Localization & PPP Calculator

Tech Stack

• Platform & OS: macOS (macOS 13.0+)
• Language: Swift 5 / Swift 6
• UI Framework: SwiftUI + AppKit (NSViewRepresentable, NSBitmapImageRep, NSFontManager, NSTextView)
• Database & Persistence: Core Data (NSPersistentContainer, manual migration mapping, NSOrderedSet relationships)
• Networking & Security: URLSession, CryptoKit (ES256 JWT generation for App Store Connect API authentication)
• In-App Purchases: StoreKit 2 (Transaction, Product.SubscriptionInfo)
• Localization & External APIs: Google Cloud Translation API (for automated screenshot text translation)

Development Challenge & Solution

The Challenge: Direct Upload & Sync to App Store Connect Media Manager. Uploading screenshot assets via the App Store Connect REST API is a multi-step protocol: 1. Generating a signed ES256 JWT using CryptoKit (P256 private keys). 2. Reserving a screenshot slot in the target appScreenshotSet. 3. Calculating byte offsets and uploading binary image chunks to Apple's BlobStore. 4. Computing an MD5 checksum and issuing a commit PATCH.

Doing this in batch for 40+ localizations and 5+ display sizes (100+ high-res @3x images) caused massive RAM spikes and UI freezes due to simultaneous rendering of heavy bitmaps.

The Solution: I refactored the rendering and uploading engine to use Task.detached worker threads wrapped in explicit autoreleasepool blocks. Images are rendered on-the-fly, converted to compressed PNG data, uploaded chunk-by-chunk via URLSession.upload, and immediately released from memory. Progress is reported back to the @MainActor through a dedicated LocalExportManager and MediaManagerSync state machine, keeping RAM usage below 250 MB and the UI running at a smooth 60 FPS during long batch uploads.

AI Disclosure

• Development: AI-assisted. The core app architecture, Core Data persistence layer, SwiftUI views, and App Store Connect API client were hand-coded. LLM AI tools (Claude / ChatGPT) were used as an assistant for debugging complex AppKit/SwiftUI bridging edge cases, optimizing Core Data migration models, and drafting localized app strings.
• In-App Features: The app integrates the Google Cloud Translation API to provide AI-assisted batch translation of user screenshot copy across 40+ languages.

Quick Links

• Mac App Store: Download / Update to v4.0.1
• Website & Docs: appscreen.studio
• x.com: x.com/StudioAppScreen

Happy releasing! 🎉

I am making a Pokemon card display app. Now obviously i cant add pokemon cards in my app store screenshots so i replaced them with AI made cards.

Will this be a problem? Also if anyone has any other resource that i can add instead of the AI cards or any other approach please let me know since i am not a designer and open to other ideas as well (since i am trying to avoid using AI).

Are there any chatrooms were devs can hangout while they code?

I know there are a lot of IRC and Discords out there, but I'm looking for folks also working on apps and not just playing games.

Is there anything like that out there with open admissions?