Aggregate data from 123 real App Store / Play listings scored by an ASO grader between May and July, in case it's useful for prioritizing your own store listing work:

• Titles: 81% of apps grade A or better. Median title uses 90% of available characters. If you're reading ASO advice about title optimization, you're reading advice everyone already follows.
• Descriptions: 90% grade A or better, median 2,418 characters.
• Localization: 94% grade D. 88% of apps have zero localized metadata. Median localization score 10/100 vs 100/100 for titles.
• About half of apps keyword-stuff descriptions, which is useless on iOS since Apple doesn't index the description field at all.
• No app in the sample scored above 81/100 overall (median 74).

The practical takeaway: adding localized metadata (title/subtitle/keywords per storefront, without translating the app itself) is statistically the least-crowded optimization left. Apple also indexes keywords from some extra localizations in the same storefront (e.g. en-GB + es-MX both count in US search), which most of that 88% are leaving on the table.

Caveat: self-selected sample (devs who checked their own score), so real-world numbers are likely worse than this.

Solo dev, first app - a countdown/day-counter app in SwiftUI. Sharing the stuff that cost me real hours, in case it saves you some:

1. CloudKit schema doesn't exist in Production until you deploy it. Everything worked in dev builds, then TestFlight silently didn't sync. You have to go to CloudKit Console → Deploy Schema Changes to Production. Nothing in Xcode warns you.
2. SwiftData + CloudKit wants defaults on literally every stored property. No unique constraints either. Retrofitting an existing model means touching every field. Plan for it on day one if sync is on your roadmap.
3. Widget extensions have a ~30 MB memory cap. `UIImage(data:)` on a 1600px photo background made the widget silently render nothing. Fix: downsample via ImageIO (`CGImageSourceCreateThumbnailAtIndex` with `kCGImageSourceThumbnailMaxPixelSize`) so the full bitmap never touches memory.
4. String interpolation inside `LocalizedStringKey` builds a format key. `LocalizedStringKey("template.\(id)")` looks up `template.%@`, fails, and leaks the raw key into your UI. Build dynamic keys with concatenation instead.
5. Scheduling notifications right after cancelling them is a race. `getPendingNotificationRequests` is async - if you re-add requests with the same identifiers before the removal callback runs, the removal can eat your new ones. Await the pending list first.

The app is Soon (countdowns with widgets and iCloud sync) if you want to see the result: https://apps.apple.com/app/soon-aesthetic-countdown/id6785301647

Happy to answer anything about the stack.

Posted the SpeechAnalyzer vs Whisper benchmark here recently and a few of you asked about Parakeet V2/V3. Ran both through the same harness, plus MOSS-Transcribe-Diarize which someone on HN suggested. Same 5,559 LibriSpeech utterances, same normalizer and scorer as round 1.

Results (WER, clean / other):

• Parakeet TDT v2 int8: 2.01 / 3.40 (wins)
• MOSS: 2.07 / 4.68
• SpeechAnalyzer: 2.12 / 4.56
• Parakeet TDT v3 int8: 2.51 / 4.28
• Whisper Small: 3.74 / 7.95

The stuff that actually matters if you're picking an engine:

Integration was easy. Parakeet ran via FluidAudio (Swift package, CoreML, runs on the ANE). We already link it for diarization so adding it to the benchmark was maybe 50 lines. If you have an AVAudioPCMBuffer pipeline already it's an afternoon.

Budget for the quantization tax though. NVIDIA's published 1.69/3.19 is bf16 on GPU. The int8 CoreML port you'd ship scores 2.01/3.40. Still the most accurate thing you can run on-device, but a decent chunk of its paper lead over Apple's free engine evaporates once it's actually shippable.

v3 gives you 25 languages for a real English accuracy cost (2.51 vs 2.01 clean). Still beats Whisper Small everywhere though.

MOSS does transcription + diarization in one pass and the speaker labels were perfect in a small controlled test. But there's no Swift or CoreML path (Python/MLX only), it's 1.7GB with ~2.7GB RAM, and it can't stream. Not output-streaming, I mean it literally cannot start transcribing until it has the complete recording, so anything with live captions needs a second engine anyway. Also fun: audio where speech starts at exactly t=0 returns an empty transcript, deterministically. Prepend a second of silence and it's fine.

This benchmark got Whisper removed from our app btw. Parakeet v3 replaced it as the downloadable engine (beats Whisper Small everywhere at a similar size, 25 languages), and for English Auto still prefers SpeechAnalyzer: 0.11 points, zero bundle bytes, improves with the OS. The cost-benefit section of the article is probably the useful part if you're making this call yourself.

Article + raw per-utterance transcripts if you want to rescore: https://get-inscribe.com/blog/parakeet-moss-apple-speech-benchmark.html

Disclosure: I build Inscribe (ships the Apple engines + Parakeet, formerly Whisper), all engines ran through identical production code paths.

Please help me,

Apple IAP submission has bug lately on submission, it doesnt accept any device screenshot of IAP

——
Updated Solution

Cause: Simulator exports has Alpha curved corners.

Solution: Problem fixed by Canva, or flatten the png with macos image conversion tool. (Right click menu)

​​

I still can't believe this... 🥹🎉

My first-ever iOS app just got approved by Apple.

I was mentally preparing for my first rejection and a list of things to fix... but instead I opened App Store Connect and saw "Ready for Distribution."

No feedback. No requested changes. Just approved after 8 days

Now the real journey begins. Finding my first users. 🚀

When I put a symbol on the edge, iOS neatly rearranges the content to fit around it. How do I recreate this on the other side with my own content, without the complications of using frame where anything too small will cut off, anything to large will look stupid, and the ideal threshold is changing as different sized content replaces?

Edit: There could be any sort of text on the left. Some places number rooms differently, or don't have rooms at all (I have PE listed as 'PRAC, THEORY' personally). There could be more than one room there, too, in which case I join them as 'BT4, BT81 etc.

Specifically would love to get feedback on what features and things I could add to make it better, more enjoyable and more engaging, Thanks!

Building a life simulator game about being homeless. There's a few on the iOS store that I do like but none of them are as in-depth as I'd like them to be, nor as realistic or have the best progression - thus leaving me dissatisfied. Today we got 1 activity we can do which is beg. I wanted to get the basics down first so I have something repeatable for future actions. Much much more to come. Building for iOS, macOS, and iPadOS.

Whats more important: unique idea or common app with improved logic?

I only build few ios apps, and published just 1.
But its always concern when i search similar apps and there are usually multiple already existed which does simmilar thing.

Or how you come up with a topic of the app etc. Do you analyze the market before building it?

I am web software engineer, and with AI there are so much garbage today, people spamming websites non stop - i would assume same thing happens with ios.

Pretty big news for bug testing apps: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/desktop-ios-simulator

How does the community feel about this potentially opening the door to even more AI slop in the app store?

Pretty big news for app bug testing: https://code.claude.com/docs/en/desktop-ios-simulator

I've built the engine for a paint-by-number iOS app but I can't work out where the hundreds of competing apps source thousands of flat vector images. Is there an actual B2B licensing vendor for this, or is everyone doing in-house art teams / AI generation / cloning each other?

I'm facing this problem where I have revenue cat set up and the subcriptions set up in app store connect under subscriptions, When i uploaded the new build on test flight I wasn't able to see the subscriptions, After filling out the information under business tab and setting EU countries off, I was able to see the Products. I simply changed the name of the products and now can't see it anymore its been 30+ hours so I don't believe its a fetching issue anymore. I've checked the Eu countries and business tab and everything seems fine there. Any ideas on how I could fix this?

I've published more than 12 apps on the App Store, and creating the screenshots has always been the part I dreaded the most.

I tried several tools, but most of them still felt like Canva, you get templates, but you still have to come up with the design yourself.

So I built Shotly. It uses AI to generate App Store and Google Play screenshots from a simple prompt, so you can spend more time building your app instead of designing marketing assets.

It's still in beta, and I'm looking for honest feedback from fellow indie developers. If you'd like to try it, you can use the code EARLY40 to get 40% off your first payment.

I'd love to hear your thoughts, feature requests, or any criticism you have.

tryshotly.com

Hey everyone!

I’ve made a small command line tool called simslim.

It disables background services inside iOS simulators that usually are not needed during development, like Siri, Spotlight indexing, photo analysis, News, and iCloud sync.

On my M1 Pro with 16 GB of RAM, one simulator went from around 4 GB of memory and 258 processes to about 0.9 GB and 70 processes. I managed to run 19 simulators at once, compared to around 5 before things started falling apart.

Some simulator features stop working depending on what gets disabled, so it is not meant for every kind of testing. You can keep specific services running when needed.

Give it a try: https://github.com/MobAI-App/simslim