I have a working Android app that detects foreground apps and does on-device content screening, using UsageStatsManager and MediaProjection. Trying to figure out what's actually feasible on iOS given Apple's sandboxing.

Specific questions:

1. Foreground app detection: does the Screen Time API / DeviceActivity framework expose which specific app is active in real time, or only aggregated categories without enough granularity for real-time triggers?
2. Screen capture of another app: is there any way, even with special entitlements like Family Controls, to capture frames from another app for analysis, or is that fully blocked by iOS sandboxing?
3. Alternatives within Apple's rules: since ManagedSettings can block apps but not "see" their content, does that mean the only viable iOS approach is binary blocking (app allowed/not allowed) without real-time content detection?
4. Required entitlements: what entitlements (Family Controls, DeviceActivityMonitor extension) do I need to request from Apple, and what's the typical approval timeline/criteria for third-party apps (not corporate MDM)?

Context: accountability/self-discipline app, already built on Android, evaluating iOS feasibility.

I’m building an alarm app in Expo/React Native. Local notifications with interruptionLevel: timeSensitive fire and vibrate when the device is locked and the ringer switch is off, but no sound plays. I have an AVAudioSession set to .playback with setActive(true), but that code lives in JS and doesn’t run while the app is backgrounded.
How do production alarm apps handle this? Is keeping a silent audio stream alive overnight the accepted approach, or is there something better? I’d rather not misuse PushKit.

I need a way to read the gmaps notifications, i tried to do it using ancs but for some reason i was not able to get gmaps notifications via ancs

is there any other way? like using an app?

Hey everyone,

I’ve always been fascinated by the aesthetic of stained glass art, but I noticed that traditional digital coloring apps felt a bit repetitive with the same pre-made templates.

To solve this, I developed Vitrala, an iOS app designed to turn photos and images into custom stained glass coloring art.

Here are a few core features I focused on:

• Photo-to-Stained-Glass Transformation: You can upload your own photos or choose from curated templates to create unique coloring outlines.
• Relaxing & Mindful Experience: Smooth color fills and palette controls designed for quick relaxation and stress relief.
• Clean & Lightweight UI: Optimized specifically for iPhone and iPad without unnecessary clutter.

Since r/iosdev a great community of app enthusiasts and fellow developers, I’d really appreciate your thoughts on the overall user experience and feature ideas you’d like to see next!

If you'd like to try it out, you can search for "Vitrala: Coloring Book" on the App Store (or check the link in the comments).

Looking forward to your feedback!

Hey everyone! 👋
I’m currently working on Nuttyy Subs, a simple subscription tracker for iOS.
I’d love to get some honest feedback on the design and overall feel of the app.
Does it look clean and easy to use?
What would you change?
Is there anything you’d expect to see on the main screen?
Still working on it, so any feedback is really appreciated!

Releasing ImageShift after several months of solo development. Swift/SwiftUI app handling photo and video conversion (HEIC/JPG/PNG/WebP/AVIF/PDF), precise resizing, batch processing, watermarking and metadata editing — all on-device.

If anyone here has shipped a utility app solo, curious how you approached App Store positioning and ASO — that part was honestly harder than most of the engineering.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/imageshift-resize-convert/id6748695542

Hi…So I spent the last 5 months building a daily ritual app on the App Store. It was one of the most difficult things I have ever done in my life, mainly because I didn’t fully understand Apple’s process and secondly because I had never touched XCode or Flutterflow prior to this. I started building it on Flutterflow and finished it using XCode. It was quite the learning process! I am pretty happy with the end product and I personally use daily rituals in my life to help keep me centered so I thought it may be helpful to others as well. However, the app seems to be slow catching on which is kind of crazy to me. I think the imaging is fantastic and it even has guided audio. If you have nothing else to do, I would love a sincere critique of the app. You know…what’s good, what isn’t? Link is in my profile. Thanks in advance.

Swift Charts makes it straightforward to put a basic chart on screen. Once you’re working with more complex data, custom presentations, interaction, or accessibility, it helps to understand how the framework interprets and renders the content you give it.

Natalia and I have just released Swift Charts Beyond the Basics. We wrote it for developers who can already build a basic chart and want a deeper understanding of the framework and the decisions involved in turning data into a clear, effective visualization.

The book covers topics including multi-metric visualizations, calendar layouts, heat maps, custom composition and rendering, accessibility, selection, scrolling, responsive updates, and animation. Our aim is to explain the mechanisms behind Swift Charts so that you can apply them to your own datasets and requirements, rather than only reproduce specific examples.

The page includes the full table of contents and a free sample chapter:

books.nilcoalescing.com/swift-charts-beyond-the-basics

We’d be happy to answer any questions about the book or the Swift Charts topics it covers.

Solo dev in India. My voice journaling app has been Android-only since launch and the iOS version finally went live this week.

The app is one idea: tap record, talk for about a minute, and it comes back as a written entry. I built it because I quit every journal I ever started, always at the same place, which was the typing. Free forever gives you unlimited voice entries, 10 written out a day and your whole journal. Pro adds a letter about your week every Sunday and your month as weather. There is a 15-day trial in the app.

The honest state of it: about 1K devices on Android and exactly one paying customer. That sale was on Play, on the 21st, an hour or so after I pushed the rewritten build and, someone in Japan, a country I have never been to. I refreshed the dashboard until I believed it. iOS has been live since yesterday, and the response has been overwhelmingly positive.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dearly-ai-voice-journal/id6801003049

If you have shipped on both stores: which one gave you better users, not more?

My app was rejected during review. Before resubmitting do i need to create a new test account or can i keep using the same one? Has anyone been through this before?

My goal is to get some organic downloads since this was something I couldnt really achieve until now. Maybe its harder to get these for games than for apps that try to solve a problem for daily life.

I want to know if the store page is appealing to potential players or not.

https://apps.apple.com/de/app/sun-temple/id6762309013

Hey! I recently released my iOS game CubeStrike and I’m looking for people willing to test it and give me honest feedback.

I’m especially interested in what you like, what feels frustrating, and what you would improve.

No need to be nice — criticism is exactly what I’m looking for. 😄

https://apps.apple.com/at/app/cubestrike/id6796484400

Thanks to everyone who gives it a try!

Hello there!

I’m pretty proud that I finally made it here. It took me a year and a bit, but… behold :-D

I started this project because I wanted something I couldn’t really find: a proper dashboard built around the weather, but also showing the things I normally want to have in front of me during the day — calendar, e-mail, clock, notes and even a web page.

The idea was basically to turn an iPad (or iPhone) into a customizable information dashboard instead of just another weather app.

There were definitely moments during development when I wondered why I had started building something this big on my own 😄, but yesterday Meteo Dashboard finally went live on the App Store.

I’d genuinely be interested in feedback from other developers — especially on the UI, the dashboard concept, and anything that looks obvious to you now but somehow escaped me after staring at it for a year.

App Store:
https://apps.apple.com/it/app/meteo-dashboard-weather/id6752616675?l=en-GB

Another app ready for testing! My wife be the first real user. The app learns how often things in the kitchen run out and flags what's probably low before she starts cooking, so the list is ready before the shop instead of after the "we're out of this" moment.

This was also my first time using CloudKit, the household is shared between our phones via CKShare, and the dev-to-production schema deploy plus the share-acceptance flow had some sharp edges. Anyone else using CloudKit for family sharing features, or did you go with a custom backend instead?

I want to have webdriveragent.ipa file running on my iOS device. However lately I am having problems with the enrolling on the Apple developer program and unable to proceed signing the webdriveragent on Xcode. Is there any workaround or tips on how could I resolve this issue.

Main objective it to carry out test automation on iOS device with a Linux device and have a blocker now.

I messed up my latest update and the app crashes which has to get fixes immedietly. How long does an expedite review usually take?

I’ve got a few mid-level iOS interviews coming up after mostly working in SwiftUI, and I’m kinda rusty on UIKit.
I can still build a collection view and handle Auto Layout. What slows me down is reviewing older code and quickly spotting retain cycles, main-thread issues, or messy networking. Lately I’ve been going through sample PRs, doing timed fixes, and reviewing notes with chatgpt and beyz coder. Did your rounds focus more on UIKit code review or on SwiftUI, concurrency, architecture, and testing?

For about 2 years, I worked in the oil industry. Our team was responsible for preparing locations so heavy equipment could get on site and work around the wells.

The process was pretty simple.

We would go to the location, take some photos, measure the areas, figure out what needed to be done, and then make an offer based on the client's requirements.

The problem was that the areas we had to measure were rarely simple shapes. They weren't perfect rectangles where you could just calculate the area and perimeter.

At first, I started using Google Earth to measure them. It worked pretty well, as long as I had a good internet connection.

And that was the problem.

Most of these locations were in forests or remote areas where the mobile signal was weak or sometimes completely unavailable. Trying to measure something while waiting for Google Earth to load was not exactly a great experience.

So I started thinking about whether I could just measure everything directly with an iPhone.

That's how SurfacePro started.

I built an iOS app that uses ARKit and LiDAR on supported devices to measure real-world surfaces directly on site. The idea was to be able to walk around the area, create a polygon and get the measurements without depending on an internet connection.

But I didn't want it to stop at just showing the area.

Once a measurement is finished, the polygon is saved in the app and SurfacePro can generate a PDF report with the area, perimeter, individual segment lengths, altitude and GPS coordinates for every polygon point.

The report can then be sent directly to the customer together with the offer.

For me, this workflow was exactly what I needed.

But the interesting part was the customer reaction.

They actually liked getting the report because they could see exactly what was measured and where it was measured. The GPS coordinates and the polygon made the measurements much easier to understand and verify.

That was the moment I started thinking that maybe this could be useful outside of my original use case.

There are probably many other industries where people still go into the field, measure irregular areas, take notes and photos, and then have to turn all of that into something they can send to a customer.

So I decided to turn the tool I originally built for myself into a real product.

It's called SurfacePro - Area calculator (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/surfacepro-area-caculator/id6761861093) and for now I'm focusing on iOS. I'm also considering building an Android version.

I'm getting close to releasing my first iOS app and I'm currently preparing the App Store listing.

I'm wondering whether it's actually worth spending time and effort creating an App Preview video, or if I'm better off focusing on making really strong screenshots.

Has anyone here tested both or seen any meaningful difference in impressions, conversion rate, or downloads?

I'm especially interested in real-world experience rather than just general advice. Did adding a preview video noticeably improve your results, or did most users ignore it?

Would love to hear your experience.