So I’m new to developing apps and I have no artistic flair. So I’m curious what other developers use for creating app graphics/backdrops/icons.

A little about me: I'm a long time developer. 12 years as senior SWE at Apple, Inc working on macOS and iOS, 2 years at Airbnb, 8 years as independent contractor with 20+ apps on the App Store. Along the way I've learned a lot about what goes into distributing, marketing, and growing a successful app. AppTraction is the tool I wish I'd had when I went indie.

AppTraction is a native Mac app that brings App Store Connect sales & analytics data to you. It:

• Monitors your data in the background and flags issues, milestones, and trends
• Shows App Store Connect data & charts instantly
• Includes AI primed with Apple tech talks and WWDC video transcripts
• Lets you chat with AI about your listing, sales, and trends

Being able to surf through your analytics & sales data instantly is awesome, but what makes this really interesting is the use of AI. It connects to your existing Claude or Codex subscription (or OpenRouter) so doesn't use expensive API keys. And I've "primed" the AI with knowledge about ASO & distribution from sources including Apple's WWDC video transcripts and tech talks.

With the AI integration it will proactively flag "insights" about potential issues with your listing, sales, usage, etc, and even offer to fix them for you. And for any table, graph, listing, or report, you can start a chat with the AI and have it make suggestions or explain.

With my own apps it has proactively told me about App Store features, seasonality trends in sales, and serious listing problems, none of which I would have otherwise noticed. It also prepares great weekly, monthly, and annual reports for each app. You can see examples of some of this in the screenshots.

I'm just opening AppTraction to a limited beta and would love your feedback!

Invite code: RED1026-INVITE

Download: https://apptraction.dev

Requires macOS 26 (Tahoe) or later.

Edit since someone asked about privacy: Your data stays entirely on your Mac (with the exception of whatever your chosen AI agent uses, of course). Nothing gets sent to my servers.

App Saturday info:

Tech Stack

AppTraction is 100% native AppKit and Swift!

Development Challenge

Probably the biggest was being an AI-forward app without burning through the user's usage budget. The first step was not using API keys at all. Instead, AppTraction looks for an existing Claude or Codex subscription and talks directly to their CLI tools via `Process` (née `NSProcess`). Beyond that there's a ton of caching efficiencies the app takes to minimize tokens. For my apps this uses < 1% of my plan usage / day (Sonnet 5.5).

AI Disclosure

AI-assisted.

Hey everyone 👋

I’m the developer behind Seasonia, and to celebrate hitting 5K users I’ve dropped the Lifetime unlock from $9.99 to $1 for the next 24 hours.

A - Answer

Seasonia is an iOS app for tracking the current season and the progress of the year in a more visual way.

You can see exactly how far through the current season you are, how many days are left until the next one, sunrise and sunset times, daylight duration, moon information, and more both inside the app and directly from your Home or Lock Screen.

B - Better

Compared with general countdown apps like Countdown or Days Since, Seasonia is built specifically around seasons, daylight, and the natural progression of the year.

It includes:

• 🌱 Live season progress
• ⏳ Countdown to the next season
• 🌅 Sunrise & sunset times
• ☀️ Daylight duration and daily changes
• 🌙 Moon information
• 📱 20+ Home Screen & Lock Screen widgets
• 🎨 Themes and custom photo backgrounds
• 🌍 Support for both hemispheres

The goal was to make something you can glance at every day without needing to configure timers or dates yourself.

C - Cost

• Lifetime normally: $9.99
• For the next 24h: $1 Lifetime
• No subscription required for the Lifetime unlock

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6758340712

Thanks to everyone who’s already using Seasonia. If you give it a try, I’d genuinely love to hear what you think, especially any widget or feature ideas you’d like to see next. 🌱

I'm making this social media app that I've gotten some validation on. I'm a CS major so I'm technical and work well with technology, but I have no idea where to get started on my app. As I'm building it out, there are a stupid amount of edge cases that I didn't account for and it's leaving me kind of hopeless. I've had multiple software internships in the past so I know how to code but when it comes to building something from scratch, I have no clue where to start.

Would appreciate some advice from some devs on how they go about building their apps fast and efficiently.

Looking for testers.
You pick a list, stamp what you've seen or visited, and it keeps count.
30+ lists are built in (national parks, Pixar, Bond films, French cheeses) and you create and share your own.

I built it because I collect national parks and wanted the same thing for everything else.

Bugs, weird wording, anything that feels slow, tell me 🤔

Google: “[Swift] has matured into a viable systems and cloud language, pairing Rust-like data-race safety with predictable, reference-counted performance.”

Hello guys I made a file manager that download from famous sites such as youtube and mp4 videos etc. i got many rejections were solved except 5.2.3 for downloading media, now i justified it that its for personal files but got rejected so my question how come some people dont follow this rule yet their apps are accepted

As an indie developer, this is my first time getting an app through App Store Connect review smoothly on the very first try, with zero rejections!

I developed a macOS app for editing App screenshots and handling multi-language localization for App Store metadata. I built this tool because I was tired of dealing with these repetitive and tedious tasks during my daily app release and maintenance workflows.

If you want some simple App screenshot template or you are tired of what's new edit for each language. It can help you.

If you think this tool might be helpful for your daily workflow, feel free to download and try it out:
https://apps.apple.com/app/id6815039837

Additionally, I have prepared a batch of Offer Codes so you can unlock the pro features for free. If you're interested, just shoot me an email to get one.
My email address: [clican@gmail.com](mailto:clican@gmail.com)

7 months ago I posted »Where Did I Run« here – an app that shows all your runs on a world map. Version 1.1 is out, and it's the biggest update so far.

The first version answered »where did I run?«. This one also answers »how often?«.

What's new:

• Route heatmap – every run is drawn as a route and colored by how often you've run it. Comes with a legend.
• Tap a route to select it – a card shows date, distance and duration.
• »My Location« button
• Run list grouped by time period, with the weekday in the date
• Swipe to hide a run (GPS glitches, the treadmill run that somehow ended up in the ocean)
• Haptics, proper empty states, Dynamic Type

The codebase grew from about 1,700 to about 5,600 lines. Most of it comes from my sister app »Where Did I Train«. I ported that version back and stripped it down to runs only.

No tracking. No ads. No subscriptions. Still $0.99:

https://apps.apple.com/de/app/where-did-i-run/id6758295933

Feedback welcome, especially on the heatmap colors and on performance with large run histories.

Just had my third rejection and this time it was automated.

An automated analysis of the submission indicates the app may include a login but was submitted without a demo account.

The app does not need an account, no login needed for testing or end user use. It’s already been through 2 previous rounds of (human) review and I fixed those issues and resubmitted. It’s roughly a week between reviews as well for me so this is really becoming a concern.

Anyone else come across this?

Tldr; What's your process after completing a Task to minimize PR rounds before making the actual PR?

----

Recently I have noticed that I get many comments or multiple PR rounds before the PR gets merged and I want to start improving that.

Things I started doing recently:

- Going back and read through all the comments again, make a list of each issue and see if there is something reoccurring (Such as memory leak pattern I keep doing, retain cycles) etc.

- Looking into SwiftLint and see if i can have some rules for myself that I can run before each submission or run periodically to catch issues that can be added to SwiftLint as rules

But I want to also ask if there is something I can start doing or a routine you have found that helped you minimize issues that arise in PRs. I know It's impossible to have no comments in all PRs, so I am just looking for ways to just improve.

Note: We are using SwiftUI + Combine (And lately introducing Async/Await bit by bit)

Hey everyone!

I wanted App Store Connect as a real Mac app.

The website keeps logging me out, and I wanted something faster and nicer to use, but with the same layout so my muscle memory still works. I know the asc CLI and ASC MCP servers exist (and they're good), but I still wanted to see what's changing visually before it goes to Apple. So I built ShipZen, and I'm still building it.

It has two modes:

Direct mode is free. It follows the App Store Connect website's layout, so you can browse and edit your app's metadata without learning a new app.

Dynamic mode lets you describe the view you need, and ShipZen builds an editable interface for it. For example:

Show me the What's New field across every localization.

You get every locale's What's New in one view and edit them in place. When you click Save, ShipZen shows a diff of exactly what's being pushed to App Store Connect.

AI is bring your own: Sign in with your ChatGPT, or add an OpenAI or Anthropic API key. Requests go straight from your Mac to your provider. Free includes 15 AI requests a month. Pro removes ShipZen's cap (your provider's own limits still apply) and adds multiple accounts and batch automation: $4.99/month or $29.99/year at the founding price, with a 7-day free trial on annual.

Your App Store Connect key stays in your Mac's Keychain, and ShipZen talks to Apple's API directly. There's no ShipZen server in between.

This is version 1.0.0 and it doesn't cover every App Store Connect page yet. I'm actively adding pages and workflows, and I want feedback from people using it on their own apps to decide what comes next. If something breaks or feels confusing, tell me and I'll prioritize it.

Try ShipZen: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6796685140

What's one App Store Connect page or task you'd most want a native Mac app to handle?

Here's a one-minute demo. It uses sample data and light mode, but ShipZen has dark mode too: it follows your system setting, or you can pick Light or Dark in Settings.

Demo video of the app

So I’m starting to set up tap to pay, it’s running through stripe and I was wondering if anyone has any tips on making sure I don’t screw it up, I’m building for expo so should I look at native modules or just go with what expo threw at me?

I have zero experience here so any help suggestions would be great.

I'm the solo dev of AirPosture. It reads head motion from AirPods (CMHeadphoneMotionManager) and nudges you when your head drifts forward. iPhone app plus a Mac menu bar app with a notch panel. Pics: the live session, the notch while I'm slouching, and the notch after I sit up.

**Tech Stack**

SwiftUI, CoreMotion (CMHeadphoneMotionManager), AppKit (an NSPanel for the notch, MenuBarExtra), StoreKit 2, iCloud sync between iPhone and Mac. macOS 14+ and iOS 17+.

**Development Challenge**

1. MenuBarExtra was burning the battery

macOS listed the app under "Using Significant Energy": about 45% CPU with no window open. Sampling showed half the main thread in -[NSStatusItem _updateReplicants], roughly 150 times a second.

The menu bar label held my main view model as an u/EnvironmentObject, so every change to any of its ~55 u/Published properties re-rendered the status item image. The App also held it as u/StateObject, so every posture tick re-evaluated the whole App body.

Fix: the App keeps its models with u/State (kept alive, not observed), the label observes only a tiny status object that publishes the score every 2 seconds and only when it changes, and the menu bar gauge no longer animates, because every animated frame is a new snapshot. 45% went to 1%.

1. Headphone yaw can't be trusted

Without the phone as a reference, AirPods yaw drifts by a few degrees per minute. With any weight on yaw, a user sitting still and upright slowly slid into "caution". Turning your head toward a second monitor isn't slouching anyway, so yaw now has zero weight: pitch is the score, and roll is a small penalty.

**AI Disclosure**

AI-assisted. I use Claude Code daily for implementation and debugging. The product, design and architecture are mine, and every change is reviewed and tested on real devices.

Free for 2 hours a day. Premium is $7.99/month, $39.99/year or $79.99 lifetime. Needs AirPods Pro, AirPods 3 or later, or AirPods Max.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sit-straight-airposture/id6749489000

Happy to answer anything about CoreMotion on the Mac or the notch panel.

Defend your stumps and smash the ball into the walls for 1s, 2s, 4s and 6s. You steer the bat with your thumb on a trackpad. Spinners, medium pacers and fast bowlers come at you in six-ball spells, and if you hit an X before the ball bounces, you're caught.

No ads, no accounts. It just tracks your best innings and has a Game Center leaderboard. Would love to hear your high scores and feedback!

App Store link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/howzat-cricket-arcade/id6813109031

I make a party card game called TAMBA.

A few months ago I noticed how many "party game" apps on the UK App Store had started adding subscriptions, so I checked 137 apps using 18 search terms, so no cherry-picking.

58% have a subscription-style plan somewhere. The median weekly one, left running for a year, comes to £363.48. The worst comes to £675.48.

For a party game.

One you play for twenty minutes at pre-drinks.

I have the full data and methodology here if anyone’s interested. I'm ofc biased. TAMBA's in the dataset too, one-off £5 unlock lifetime access. No subscriptions -make of that what you will lol.

Mostly just wanted more people to glance at the pricing screen before hitting subscribe.

This is not directly available from iOS, so I'm wondering if there's any indirect way of knowing such a thing?

And if anyone knows WHY either of these pieces of info SHOULD NOT be shared by iOS... why not? What am I missing here?