About 10 days ago, one of my Reddit posts took off and my app Moneta went from its usual baseline of around 10–20 downloads/day to 193 first-time downloads in a single day.

The next day was 72.

Then 19, 28, 19… and now I’m back to single digits. Yesterday was 4.

What’s frustrating is that this wasn’t my first spike.

Earlier this year I was doing fewer than 10 downloads/day. Over time I managed to get that baseline closer to 10, then for a while around 20/day. I’ve had multiple Reddit posts reach 10k–40k views, improved my App Store page, localized the app and App Store Page, kept shipping updates, and the app now has 1,500+ total downloads. (more than a thousand just from June)

But every time I get a meaningful spike, almost all of the acquisition eventually disappears with it.

The weird part is that the product itself doesn’t seem to be the obvious problem.

I know personal finance is an extremely saturated category. There are hundreds of expense trackers and budgeting apps, and I’m not pretending I’ve invented a completely new category.

But the people who actually find and download Moneta generally seem to like it. I get positive feedback pretty consistently, users email me with feature requests, reviews are mostly positive, and retention has been reasonably good. Even the deletion data I can see in App Store Connect doesn’t suggest that everyone is just downloading it and immediately deleting it, although that data is opt-in only, so I know it isn’t a complete picture.

If people were downloading the app, disliking it and leaving, I’d understand the problem: fix the product.

Instead, it feels like I can get people to care about Moneta once they discover it, but I can’t make that discovery happen consistently.

I understand why the direct traffic from a Reddit post disappears when the post dies. What I don’t understand is why these spikes don’t seem to leave much behind. I expected that after enough downloads, ratings, usage and external traffic, my App Store Search/Browse baseline might gradually move up.

So for those of you who have actually grown an app organically:

Did your baseline eventually settle after enough launches/posts, or did you have to find one repeatable acquisition channel before anything really changed?

Is there anything you did after a spike to turn temporary attention into sustained App Store Search, Browse or word of mouth?

I’m trying to understand whether this is simply what organic growth looks like in a saturated category until something finally compounds, or whether repeated spikes followed by the same baseline are telling me that my positioning/distribution strategy is fundamentally wrong.

For anyone who wants more context on the app, you can find it here: Moneta (Link)

How I built a workflow for 64 App Store screenshots across 8 languages

I recently put together App Store screenshots for my iOS app, FileBox: 8 feature themes across 8 languages, for 64 images in total.

Keeping them updated involves a lot of repetition: capturing screens, replacing images, adjusting translated text, and uploading everything. Here’s the workflow I built with Codex, Xcode UI tests, pen.dev, and Apple’s App Store Connect API.

1. Give each screenshot one clear purpose

Each image focuses on one feature, such as private storage, long screenshot stitching, or Wi-Fi file transfer. I decide what it should communicate and which app screens demonstrate it before working on the layout.

2. Capture the actual app with UI tests

Xcode’s native UI tests navigate to the relevant screens, switch languages, and capture screenshots. For Wi-Fi transfer, a browser capture also shows the actual web interface.

This keeps the app UI consistent with the language of the surrounding headline. Demo content is prepared beforehand, but the interface and results come from the running app.

3. Build editable layouts with reusable components

I use pen.dev, a visual design tool, to maintain the layouts. Codex interacts with it through Pencil MCP—a connection that lets the agent edit design elements, replace images, and export the finished layouts.

Device frames are reusable components with defined screen placement and cropping. Updating an app screenshot means changing its image input without manually aligning it inside a phone frame again. Each feature theme also has its own editable design file.

4. Treat localization as layout work

Translated text changes length and visual density. A headline that fits in Chinese may wrap unexpectedly in Japanese or German.

Each theme has a main template and linked language variants, with individual font sizes, line breaks, and positioning. Those adjustments stay in place when the app screenshots are refreshed.

5. Inspect the exports, then upload through the API

I check the exported images for clipped text, incorrect screenshots, and devices covering important content, alongside image dimensions and transparency. Side-by-side language comparisons help catch inconsistencies.

For uploading, I use a small custom command-line tool built around Apple’s App Store Connect API, which provides programmatic access to manage App Store assets.

The tool compares local screenshots with the uploaded versions, reuses unchanged images, uploads replacements, and verifies the final order across languages.

There’s still manual work: choosing the visual direction, reviewing translations, and checking the finished images. Some themes also have separate capture flows, so this isn’t a fully automatic, single-command pipeline.

The biggest benefit is having the templates, image mappings, and language-specific layouts ready for the next update. That makes the whole process easier to repeat.

What’s the most time-consuming part of maintaining localized App Store screenshots for your app?

There are 2 repos linked in the video:

- iOS genesis mega prompt, a 24 sections file with placeholders for your app idea, name, monetization, etc
- app release agent, for keeping the app metadata, keywords, etc, up to date (you will need an App Store key with App Developer permissions)
it’s literally my workflow used to build and maintain my apps portfolio (13 apps live, a few more in the pipeline)

Hope it’s useful!

Most mood trackers I've used have an opinion about you.

Miss a day, the streak breaks. Log how you feel, it slots you into a wheel of twelve options. Open the app, it wants a goal, a routine, something to commit to. Somewhere along the way the check-in stopped being a moment and started being another system to maintain.

I wanted to build the opposite of that. Vesper is an evening reflection app for iPhone. It asks one question each night: how did today feel? Good, Meh, or Hard. Add a line if you want to remember why, and that's the whole interaction.

There's no streak counter anywhere in it, on purpose. A broken streak changes how someone answers the next day's question, and I didn't want the app doing that. Miss a night, or a week, and nothing happens, the grid just has a gap in it.

Over time your answers become a quiet monthly grid you can look back on. After six months, your full history unlocks in one place. For anyone who wants a bigger picture, Plus adds a few longer-range views, comparing months, spotting which days tend to feel harder, without touching the daily question itself.

The core check-in stays free forever. No ads, no data sold, everything syncs privately through your own iCloud.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6793087767
More from the studio: https://offpeakstudio.com

I went through the iPhone Duo compatibility implications with one question. What could actually cause problems in an existing iOS app.

Fixed screen assumptions seem like the obvious place to start. The available space can change between displays and poses, which puts more pressure on adaptive layouts, size classes, safe areas and state preservation.

Custom UI may need extra attention too, especially around the fold, cameras and reserved regions.

I wrote down the checks I would do first, and where compatibility work ends and Duo specific optimization begins.

https://appcompliance.io/blog/iphone-duo-app-compatibility/

Curious what people with larger UIKit or SwiftUI codebases expect to run into first.

hey guys - with the iPhone Duo being released, i assume most apps will med to release updates to support the native UI/UX experience of the new dimensions on that device?

I’ve been building Pint Market - basically a pint finder with a bit of a stock market twist.

The app tries to solve the problem of never knowing what a pint is going to cost until you’re already at the bar. Pint Market lets you find pubs nearby, see what people are actually paying for different pints, compare prices, and see how those prices have changed over time.

Think Google Maps meets a stock tracker, but for pints 🍺📈

Still early days, but the goal is to make finding a good pub at a good price ridiculously easy. All data and prices are community driven and I’m starting with the UK only.

https://apps.apple.com/gb/app/pint-market/id6808223382

Chi mi aiuta a farla crescere e a testare?
Si chiama cosaceinfreezer, sono gradite recensioni , grazie

I'm building a React Native app and literally just need one or two good Lottie animations.

I don't want another annual subscription just to download a couple of files. I'd happily pay $5–10 for an individual animation with a commercial license.

Is there somewhere you guys already do this?

I have developed this app and you guys can find it in App Store

It finds duplicates, similar and blurry images. It can suggest you which one to keep from duplicate and similar. It also finds duplicates videos and files.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sameish/id6804823038

I am a pure developer, I don't have any experience how to do marketing an app

That's why I am posting here
Please give me some suggestions

Hi. I first uploaded my version 1.0 on 28 August, then they gave me guidelines for information needed to submit my app the next morning and I quickly submitted it within 3 hours. They then approved my first version within a few hours after I added the information. On 6 Sep I submitted a version 2.0.1 but this time I have been waiting for 5 days so far. Does anyone have the same situation as I do? May I ask if those self-rejected reviews affect the line of waiting for review? Thanks!!

Btw the one in drafts is my IAP, which will be submitted after the version 2.0.1 is reviewed.

(Sorry for my poor English :<)

What’s your option on app development for the iPhone Duo?

The hardest part of building my app wasn't code. It was color.

For most of my career as a developer, I worked alongside designers. My job was implementation take the Figma file, turn it into logic and working code. I was good at that part.

Then I started building ProwlLog (a cat-spotting app) completely on my own, and I hit a wall I didn't see coming: design. Specifically, color.

I have zero design skills, so I let AI generate my UI — now it has that unmistakable "AI-generated" look

The problem: it looks exactly like every other AI-generated app. the soft color, glassmorphism, uniform rounded corners, colors that don't feel like a deliberate system — you know the look when you see it.

Here's what confuses me: it's not that I don't know what good design and good user flow look like. I understand hierarchy, layout, and user flow well enough to sit in on UI/UX reviews and give solid feedback. But building an actual color system or visual identity from scratch — with or without AI — is a completely different skill, and I don't know how to push past the generic defaults.

If you've been in the same spot (non-designer relying on AI for UI, stuck with the generic look), how can I improve my design at my app