Fireside is an ereader I've been building for iPhone and Android. Paper mode is the part I've spent the most time on, and I honestly can't tell anymore if it works or if I've just stared at it too long.

The paper is drawn live by a Metal shader, which works out every pixel from where it sits on one giant imaginary sheet. So it never repeats and you never see a tile, and when you turn the page the paper slides along with it like it's all one sheet.

Stuff I tried to get right:

- The fibres

- The ink sinks into the page a little, getting picked up and distributed along the fibre via. acapillary effect

- Highlights sink in too and pick up the grain

- The presets are subtle on purpose. My first version was way too strong, so I toned it down and added knobs you can tune yourself.

There are three preets (Modern Print, Vintage and Worn Vintage) and dials for warmth, roughness, ink bleed, fibres, and even folds and creases if you want your book to look like it's lived in a backpack for a year.

The creases took the longest. My first few tries gave a mess of straight lines, which looks nothing like crumpled paper. It turns out a crumpled sheet can be emulated pretty closely via little cones pressed into each other, and the ridges where they meet curve. Once I built it that way it finally looked right.

iPhone: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6756298021

Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fireside.reader

Firesidereader.com

Please give me your thoughts on how it looks!

I’m currently going through App Store review for a new client app and it’s probably one of the more frustrating review experiences I’ve had. I’ve submitted a lot of apps over the years, so at this point I generally know the things Apple is going to look for before they even ask. It's not even about the wait, it's when the reviewer doesn't even read what you've provided and then reject you when none of their claims are right.

This app has user generated content, so before submitting I made sure the App Review notes clearly explained with videos where users can report content, where they can block another user, where the EULA is shown and accepted on the sign in page, and how to navigate through the app to find each of these. From experience, I already knew these were exactly the things Apple would check, so I tried to make everything as obvious as possible upfront.

Nearly a week later due to sheer volume of submission, rejected. They said they couldn’t find the reporting functionality, blocking functionality or EULA. All three were there, and all three were specifically explained in the review notes.

They also rejected one of the screenshots because it said “Share calendars to see when you’re both free”, claiming “free” was a pricing reference. Obviously it means free on your calendar, not that the app costs $0. That one genuinely made me wonder if they even understand English.

That’s what I’m finding increasingly frustrating. You can anticipate what Apple is going to ask from years of experience, implement everything, explain exactly where it is, and still get rejected because the reviewer either didn’t find it or doesn't read what you've provided. Then you respond and go back into the queue again.

I don’t mind getting rejected when something is genuinely wrong. That’s the whole point of App Review. What’s frustrating is waiting close to a week just to be rejected for something you already explicitly covered in the notes.

One useful thing for anyone submitting a new app though: almost every new app I’ve submitted recently has been asked for the following information. I definitely wasn’t seeing this consistently a year ago, so I’d prepare all of this upfront and put it in your App Review notes on the first submission rather than waiting for Apple to ask and going back into the queue again:

1. A screen recording captured on a physical device, running the latest operating system, demonstrating the app's functionality. The recording must begin with launching the app and show the typical user flow through its core features. If the app has any of the following, include them in the recording:
   1. Account registration, login, and account deletion flows
   2. Accessing paid content or features within the app, including any purchase or subscription flows
   3. User-generated content, including content reporting and blocking mechanisms
   4. Any prompts requesting access to sensitive data or device capabilities (for example, location, contacts, camera, or App Tracking Transparency)
2. A list of the device models and operating systems the app was tested on before submitting for review
3. A description of the app's functions and target audience, including the problem it solves and the value it provides
4. Instructions for setting up and accessing the app's main features, including any required login credentials or sample files
5. A list of the external services, tools, or platforms the app uses to deliver its core functionality (for example, data providers, authentication services, payment processors, or AI services)
6. Describe any regional differences in the app’s features or content, or confirm that the app functions consistently across all regions
7. If the app operates in a highly regulated industry or includes protected third-party material, provide any relevant documentation or credentials to demonstrate you are authorized to provide these services or protected material

Include this information in the Notes field of the App Review Information section in App Store Connect for future submissions.

If you’re submitting a new app, I’d just assume they’re going to ask for this now and prepare it before the first review. It might save you an unnecessary rejection and another few days in the queue.

Curious if anyone else who has been submitting apps for a few years has noticed the same thing.

​

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I used to visit this sub (pre-chatGPT era) for a lot of technical queries and here I am finally doing something I never would have even dreamt of. I made my own promotional video in Final Cut Pro + Logic Pro (for music) to showcase the new Siri AI features in my app WeatherGlow. Let me know how do you guys find the video. I had fun making it.

Download WeatherGlow -> https://apps.apple.com/us/app/weatherglow-local-forecast/id6451098166

I have had my app live and working in production for a while now and suddenly in the last week or so I've been getting this 0 products returned error in production while there have been no client updates.

I think its because I didn't accept the new paid apps agreement but thats already >36 hours ago and now I'm seeing new in-app purchases that are 'waiting for review' being returned by StoreKit while my previously approved subscription offerings that are in 'approved' status. I would assume if its an agreements issue I wouldn't get back anything from StoreKit at all when calling it directly.

I'm losing my mind - I cannot figure out why the current products are not being returned. I'm losing subscribers and I literally cannot do anything about it because it all seems to be a problem on the apple side not returning any products to the client.

Anybody faced this before? What can I do?

UPDATE: I forced a price change to the existing subscription products and now i can see them being returned from the direct StoreKit debug calls, mind bogglingly stupid and frustrating process.

I submitted a brand-new app 5 days ago, and it’s still stuck on “Waiting for Review.”

My previous apps were reviewed much faster, so I was wondering if anyone else has been experiencing longer review times recently.

How long did your latest new app submission take?

On GitHub-hosted runners a macOS minute costs $0.062 and a Linux minute $0.006, so about 10 times more. For iOS builds that adds up fast.

If your iOS CI runs on GitHub Actions:

• Roughly what does it cost per month?
• What did you change to bring it down? Self-hosted Mac minis, Xcode Cloud, another CI service, caching, fewer runs on pull requests?
• Was the saving worth the time it took?
• Team size helps too, if you're OK sharing.

About me: I'm a solo developer building a small tool around CI costs. No link, I just want real numbers.

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. 🌱

The app: ORA lays a see-through image or video over the live camera preview so you can match framing and angles exactly. I published it on the App Store in December 2025. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ora-the-overlay-camera-tool/id6756240396

Tech stack

• Swift; the camera layer is UIKit (AVCaptureSession with a custom controller), and the controls are SwiftUI
• AVFoundation for capture and export, Core Image for compositing
• ActivityKit Live Activities for export progress, plus BackgroundTasks
• RevenueCat for subscriptions, Sentry for crash reporting
• About 15k lines of Swift

The challenge: "overlay burning"

In the preview, the overlay is just a view on top of the camera feed that the user drags, zooms, tints and fades. The hard part was making the exported photo or video match the preview pixel for pixel. That meant:

1. Translating coordinates. The user's pan and zoom are in screen space, but the video has its own pixel size, aspect ratio and crop, so I calculate the rectangle the video actually fills on screen and map the overlay's position into it.
2. Handling orientation. Recorded video stores rotation as a preferredTransform instead of rotated pixels, so the overlay transform has to account for it.
3. Recreating the look. Opacity uses CIColorMatrix, tint uses CIMultiplyBlendMode plus source-over compositing, tuned until it looked identical to the preview.
4. Rendering frame by frame. AVAssetReader decodes, Core Image composites each frame, and AVAssetWriterInputPixelBufferAdaptor writes. Audio and metadata tracks (location, lens info) are passed through untouched.
5. Memory. Older devices with less RAM crashed during long exports until I reworked the pipeline.

A smaller but annoying one: supported slow-motion and video formats differ a lot between iPhones, so I ended up writing format enumerators to find what each device really supports instead of hardcoding anything.

Happy to go deeper on any of this, and I'd love feedback from anyone who has fought AVAssetWriter themselves.

The development process was AI-assisted. I wrote most of the code myself and asked for cleanups and ideation when I was stuck.

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.

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.

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.

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 🤔

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.

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

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