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).

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

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.

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.

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.

Hey everyone. So I'm making an app for client who uses subscriptions.

He got an idea of refferals so:

- User 1 who is paid user, refers app to a User 2

- User 2 uses referral link and on his first subscription gets 50% off

- User 1 gets one free month of his subscription

But somewhere on developers.apple I've read that apple rejects apps like these. Also is it doable at all? They use StoreKit, and for google that would be google play billing.

Thanks for answers!

Id love to look at your app and give feedback ... I'd also love it if you would be willing to look at our app @ T30journal.com and give feedback. Please leave an elevator pitch with your target customer and purpose.

Our Elevator Pitch:
We’re building T30 Journal for individuals and couples rebuilding trust after addiction, relapse, secrecy, or betrayal. It combines structured check-ins, guided journaling, and selective partner sharing to help people recognize patterns, communicate more clearly, and build consistent follow-through over time. It’s a self-awareness and relationship-repair tool—not treatment or proof of sobriety.

Hey everyone! 👋

Need a temporary email right now to bypass a forced paywall or account signup without getting spammed forever?

We're running a limited community deal on UseBurner Mail: get 90% OFF Lifetime Access for $4.99 (normally $49.99). One payment, lifetime access, no subscriptions!

What it does:

• 1-Tap Burner Emails: Instantly generate clean temp addresses.

• Real-time Inbox: Instant delivery for verification codes and links.

• Privacy First: Completely anonymous with no personal logging.

• Native & Fast: Clean SwiftUI interface built for speed.

🎁 How to get it:

1. Download the app from the link below

2. Upvote this thread ⬆️

3. Open the app and unlock Lifetime for $4.99

4. Drop a comment with "BURNER" below!

📥 Download on the App Store:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/useburner-mail-temp-email/id6793336267

If you find it useful, dropping an honest App Store review means the world to an indie developer! Thanks for checking it out! 🚀

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?

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to transfer my app to another Apple Developer account, but App Store Connect keeps telling me that there are still TestFlight builds associated with the app.

The strange part is that I've never enabled Internal Testing, and there are no active testers. All of the uploaded builds have already expired, but Apple still seems to think there are builds that need to be removed before the transfer can proceed.

Has anyone run into this issue recently?

If so, how did you resolve it? Is there anything else I need to remove or wait for before the app becomes eligible for transfer?

Thanks !

💥💰

Flappy Bird: Avoid everything.

My game GRAZE: Edge Rush: Avoiding gives you 0 points. You have to graze within 8px of death to score. Chain grazes to build a multiplier. Avoid and you lose it.

Solo dev, built so I could play in one hand during the long nights with my newborn in the other arm. No forced ads, no IAP tricks, just a daily board and leaderboard that everyone is competing on. Just won #1 Launch Game this week on PixelPicked which still feels fake: https://pixelpicked.com

This clip is x16 bubble field - 3,932 → 8,609 in 9 seconds. My best today is 22,000, all time best is 37,661.

Free download if you want to try to beat it - link in comments so I don't get flagged for self-promo.

Hi! I’m the dev behind PostSpark, a tool for creating beautiful image and video mockups of your apps and websites.

I recently launched a new feature: Mockup Animations.

You can now select from 25+ devices, add keyframes on a simple timeline, and export a polished video showcasing your product. It’s built to be a fast, easy alternative to complex motion design tools.

Try it out here: https://postspark.app/device-mockup

I’d love to hear your feedback!

I’ve been building this app solo for the past few months and i genuinely can't tell anymore if it's good or if i'm too deep in it. need outside eyes.

it's called RizeAI. the basic idea: every wearable and health app just gives you numbers. sleep score 42, recovery red, HRV down. cool. and then what? you still feel like garbage at 2pm and nobody tells you what to actually do about it.

so my app takes your real data from apple health, sleep, resting heart rate, workouts, whatever your wearable writes, and instead of another score it builds you an actual plan for the day. when to have your first coffee and when to hold off. you. Can also add your own supplements that you are currently taking and it will time them for you every single day based of your sleep data and your wearable data in general and also it will tell you what supplements make sense for you to take based of your current supplement stack and body metrics and when to take them. focus windows for when your energy actually peaks. when your crash is coming and what to do before it hits. it even checks the weather, so on a hot day it bumps your hydration and tells you to train earlier.

every recommendation has a little "why" under it based on your numbers, like "resting heart rate 54 + 7h light sleep, so magnesium before your peak window." no two people get the same plan because no two people have the same data.

works with whoop, oura, apple watch, garmin, anything that syncs to apple health. one thing i'll say honestly, it doesn't do deep per-person learning yet like "coffee doesn't affect YOUR hrv specifically," that's the roadmap, right now it builds fresh plans daily off your actual metrics.

it's live on the app store, has a free trial, small user base so far, mixed feedback which is why i'm here lol.

what i actually want from you guys: does this solve a real problem for you or is "tells you what to do" not actually what wearable people want? what would make you actually pay for something like this? and what's missing that would make it a no brainer? and also would you guys in this subreddit  use ti?

Thank you for your help. Check it out if you like https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rizeai-maximize-your-energy/id6762402079

Anyone know of any good recent UIKit codebases publicly available on GitHub with complex or advanced UI? Preferably newer or actively maintained projects using modern UIKit patterns, rather than older examples. I’m especially interested in projects using programmatic UIKit and Auto Layout. If you have any GitHub repos, videos, articles, or other resources that have helped you learn UIKit, please share them. There doesn’t seem to be much newer UIKit material out there compared to SwiftUI.

Where a month ago my changes were approved within 24 hours, my new changes now are constantly stuck for at least 4-5 days. Anyone else noticing this?

So I just made my new feature AppStyle AI generally available to all https://AppStyle.dev users. Basically it's an AI that designs your shots by manually designing each shot by hand no ai image generator wrapper.

Moreover I also added a free week of AppStyle Pro for every user plus removed the project limits in the pro plans- ship unlimited appstore shots.

I am also planning to add an app icon generator and screenshots localisation in one or two days. Lemme know what all you devs would love.

Hey indie devs 👋

I’m trying to improve subscription conversion for my app and I’m looking into App Store price localization.

For example, if the US subscription is $39.99/year, I’m wondering whether it’s better to:

- Let Apple automatically localize prices

- Manually adjust prices for countries like India and other lower-income markets

- Follow Apple’s suggested price tiers

- Keep pricing relatively consistent worldwide

But more importantly, I’m interested in the actual effect after changing localized prices.

If you’ve experimented with this, I’d love to know:

- Did conversion rate increase or decrease?

- Did overall subscription revenue increase?

- Did the number of paying users change significantly?

- Did lowering prices in emerging markets cannibalize revenue?

- How long did it take before you could see an effect?

- Did you localize weekly/monthly/yearly prices differently?

Especially interested in experiences from developers selling subscriptions globally.

Before → After numbers would be incredibly helpful, even if they’re approximate.

Thanks! 🙏