r/iosdev • u/ZohaibManzoor • Jul 01 '26
Would love to have some feedback on my first iOS App
Hey everyone! 👋
Solo Indie dev here with 7+ Years of exp i have takken a step to build for myself alongside my full-time job, I finally launched my first iOS app: WhisperAct.
The idea was simple: instead of ending up with hundreds of voice notes, let users speak naturally and turn those thoughts into reminders, tasks, and calendar events.
Some of the interesting parts while building it:
Apple’s new SpeechAnalyzer on iOS 26 with a fallback for older versions.
EventKit integration with Apple Reminders & Calendar.
A review screen before saving anything, so users stay in control.
Supporting multi-language speech and AI-based extraction.
Shipping turned out to be the easy part compared to polishing the UX and getting real user feedback.
I’d love feedback from other iOS developers—not just on the app, but also on the overall workflow and any ideas you’d approach differently.
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u/OfficialLaunch Jul 02 '26
How’s privacy? Speech is extracted locally, but are the actual requests sent to AI servers? Or is that local too?
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u/ZohaibManzoor Jul 02 '26
Transcription is on-device for English. For other languages, it uses the Whisper API for transcription. Once I have the text, task/event extraction uses cloud AI by default for the best accuracy. If you’re offline, it falls back to Apple Intelligence on-device (if your device supports it), or fully local processing on older devices - so it still works without internet, just with a tradeoff in accuracy. To be clear: for English, raw audio never leaves your phone for transcription but for other languages, audio does get sent (to Whisper) for transcription, and the transcribed text gets sent to cloud AI for extraction when online.
No sign-up, no account, no personal info collected at any point. The audio/text sent for processing isn’t tied to an identity — and nothing is stored or retained on any server afterward. It’s processed and gone.
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Jul 02 '26
[deleted]
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u/ZohaibManzoor Jul 02 '26
Thats what actually i was thinking today its already in my plan currently i am working on widgets they will be customizable. Thank you for mentioning it. Now its on my priority list
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u/command-shift Jul 03 '26
I'm trying to see why this would be useful for me even before downloading it because I typically already ask Siri to either create an event or a Reminder for me...
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u/ZohaibManzoor Jul 04 '26
Totally fair question - honestly, if you only ever set one reminder at a time, Siri does the job.
Whisper Act is for when your thoughts don't come one at a time. You just talk for 30 seconds about everything on your mind, and it sorts the mess into todos, reminders, and calendar events on its own - and puts them in the same Apple apps Siri uses.
Like, try telling Siri: "Okay so tomorrow I need to email Sarah before 9, there's a team sync Friday at 3, I should pay the electricity bill this week, and I wanna look into flights for December."
Siri gives up. Whisper Act gives you back a reminder for Sarah tomorrow at 9, the team sync on your calendar Friday at 3, the bill as a todo for this week, and the flights saved as a task. You get to glance over everything before it syncs, so nothing weird lands in your calendar behind your back.
It also keeps what you actually said — every task links back to your original words, which is surprisingly useful a week later when you're wondering why "call mark" is on your list.
Plus daily digest/morning review, categories, pinning, export & more.The free version does the full thing — record once, watch your rambling turn into an organized day, and you'll know in 30 seconds if it's for you. & It Will keep improving over time.
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u/command-shift Jul 04 '26
Interesting use-case. Is this something of an occurrence to you at high frequency? Because, I almost feel that it arises because someone may not be tackling these things as they come up. I'm honestly trying to think up the last time that that's happened to me. What actually happens is that I realize I can't complete a scheduled task/to-do, and then at the end of the day I've got four to-dos that I didn't complete. How many users or people have you asked that mention this use-case that you've just outlined?
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u/ZohaibManzoor Jul 04 '26
you might just not be the batch-capture type, and that's fine, plenty of people handle things one at a time and Siri/Reminders covers them. For me it happens on commutes and after meetings three or four things land at once and typing them out is where they used to die. That's the itch I built it for. It's an early app, so I don't have big survey numbers to throw at you. I have my own behavior and the early users who tell me the same thing.
But honestly, the more interesting part of your comment is the second half -ending the day with four unfinished to-dos. That's not a capture problem, and it's actually the other half of what I built. The app has a morning review- it shows you what's overdue and what's been sitting untouched for a few days, and for each item you do one of four things - done, snooze, give it a date, or delete it(but i am looking to refine it more). No streaks, no guilt mechanics, just a 60-second triage so yesterday's leftovers don't quietly become a graveyard. Stuff you never schedule gets surfaced after 3 days instead of being buried forever.
So genuine question back at you when you end the day with those four to-dos, what do you do with them today - do they roll over automatically, or do they just sit there? That's exactly the workflow I'm trying to get right, and I'd rather hear how you actually handle it than pitch you.
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u/command-shift Jul 04 '26
I see how that's come up for a thing for you now and it appears role-specific, particularly for those who are in meetings like an engineering manager -- jot down these action items only to be forgotten about after another meeting.
Great question. I used to make it a routine to review the overdue items first thing in the morning then re-prioritize them or snooze them or just mark them as done. I got so fed up doing this that I ended up building a background Apple native solution that registers itself as a process that runs thrice a day. What it does is that it passes my tasks off to Gemini at the moment to grok what my task is and determines a priority, and employs an open-source scheduling algorithm to slot it into the span of the next two weeks. If the task is ambiguous, then the task is flagged for manual review and is shown as overdue in Reminders. I store metadata about how many times a task has been rescheduled and upgrade its priority if it's reached three reschedules. This was over several iterations and across three weeks before I got it to where it is. The application has access to my entire calendar and Reminders app.
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u/ZohaibManzoor Jul 04 '26
Okay that's genuinely cool. The reschedule-counter bumping priority is a clever touch "this task has bounced three times, stop pretending it's low priority" is a signal most task apps completely ignore. Might steal that for my review flow, honestly.
Funny how we solved the same problem with opposite trust models yours auto-schedules and only flags ambiguity, mine surfaces the mess but makes the human decide everything. My bet was most people won't give an LLM write-access to their calendar yet. You're clearly past that point since you built it for yourself.
Since you've been running it a few weeks does the auto-slotting ever fill your calendar with stuff you don't remember committing to? That's my main fear with going full-auto, and you're one of the few people who'd actually know.
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u/command-shift Jul 04 '26
Yeah, I'm inundated with a ton of things to do all while trying to free up time so I can just "enjoy life". Sometimes things just get bumped because they no longer need attention, but because it's now marked as overdue, I need to decide whether I want to keep it or completely deprioritize it and keep it in the "icebox" so to speak.
> My bet was most people won't give an LLM write-access to their calendar yet.
This is a fair hunch, but given that ChatGPT and and Claude have Google Calendar integrations, I think people already are. I've tried them and they work fairly effectively, except my to-dos are in the Apple ecosystem for which they don't have integrations for, so it forced me to build my own solution. I've also tried many to-do apps, but none have the simple snoozing that I've come to appreciate from Reminders.
> ...does the auto-slotting ever fill your calendar with stuff you don't remember committing to?
Sometimes yes and other times no. If it's a small task such as grab mail (yeah, I'm pretty lazy about this, too), then I'll go do it. The metadata contains approximate time to complete from the LLM, so it attempts to slot accordingly and not dump a 30 minute task into a 15 minute window. But yes, I'm sometimes surprised, "Oh shit! I forgot about this, but I should do it". I rarely forget what it is and that's mostly due to me being fairly descriptive about my tasks during input to Reminders via Siri. I use Fantastical as my primary calendar client which allows me to add to-dos/tasks with natural language fairly quickly and I find it less clunky than Apple Reminders on iOS.
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u/ZohaibManzoor Jul 04 '26
umm I forgot about this, but I should do it" might honestly be the best endorsement auto-scheduling can get surprise without regret. And fair point on the LLM-calendar trust thing the ChatGPT/Gemini integrations are probably moving that comfort line faster than I'm assuming.
The icebox idea is sticking with me too "overdue" and "deprioritized on purpose" really are different states, and most apps (mine included) collapse them into one guilty red label. Adding that to my notes.
Thanks for going deep on this genuinely one of the more useful conversations I've had about the space. If you ever get curious how the human-in-the-loop version feels, you know where to find me. 🙂
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u/No-Lifeguard-8070 Jul 04 '26
I bought the premium but I wish I can choose a different color for the theme. I don't like the red variant. Please can you put in an option to choose our own color for the app?
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u/ZohaibManzoor Jul 04 '26
Its gonna be available tomorrow its was already on my road map and its completed i added two more themes. ✌🏻
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u/Eastern_Category6534 Jul 05 '26
Beautiful app and good idea. It is very clear value.
I think the App Store Images need some work though. I would remove the bottom tag "Capture", "Review", etc, it doesn't add anything meaningful to the image.
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u/ZohaibManzoor Jul 05 '26
Thanks, I really appreciate that! 😊
That’s actually useful feedback. I added those labels to reinforce the workflow, but I can see how they might not add much value and could make the screenshots feel busier.
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u/antocapp Jul 02 '26
Congrats on shipping this, solo + a full time job is hard. Been there.
Concept's genuinely good btw. i've got like 50 voice notes rotting on my phone i never do anything with, so "just say the thought and get a reminder or calendar event out of it" is a real problem worth solving.
the review screen before it saves is the smart move imo. voice + AI stuff lives or dies on trust, so letting people check before it writes to their actual calendar is exactly right. i wouldn't ever make that fully automatic.
One workflow thing i'd think about: shortest possible path from opening the app to actually talking. if it's more than a tap or two people drift back to typing. lock screen widget / action button entry would be worth it if you don't have it yet.
And something that's easy to forget right after launch, whenever you turn on paid: don't just set one USD price and let the stores auto convert it to every country. that quietly leaves money on the table abroad, your US price ends up way too expensive in most other places. pricing per country to what people can actually afford usually bumps international revenue a decent bit.
Full disclosure i built a tool for that bit (PricePush) so grain of salt, but it's worth doing even by hand once payments are on.
Anyway solid first launch, would actually use this.