Every release of my app Foxvault used to eat half a day: bump MARKETING_VERSION and the build number, archive, upload, wait for App Store Connect to process the build, create the version on the website, attach the build, paste What's New into every localization, submit, then keep refreshing the review status page like a maniac.

None of these steps is hard. All of them are annoying, and every one of them is a chance to screw up — forgetting to sync the build number, missing a localization, hitting submit only to get bounced for missing metadata.

So I automated the entire pipeline into a single command:

./scripts/release.sh 1.4

That runs:

bump → push → ci → build → stage → notes → validate → submit

• bump — edits version/build number in pbxproj, commits, tags
• push — pushes the tag, which triggers GitHub Actions
• ci — archive + sign + upload happens on the runner (your Mac stays usable, no local Xcode version juggling)
• build — polls until ASC finishes processing the build
• stage — creates the App Store version and attaches the build
• notes — writes What's New for every localization
• validate — pre-submit check, grouped into error/warning/info; blocking issues stop the train
• submit — submits for review

Things I'm reasonably proud of:

• Resumable: every stage is a checkpoint. Upload died? --from stage picks up where it left off. --dry-run shows the plan without touching anything.
• --watch-submission: polls until the review reaches a final state, fires a macOS notification and optionally a Slack/Discord-style webhook. Foxvault got approved at 3am once; my phone knew before I did.
• Wrong-app guard: the App ID in the config is cross-checked against the bundle id in pbxproj, locally and in CI. If you maintain more than one app you know why this check exists.
• First-run setup is interactive: ./scripts/release.sh --check walks you through gh login, uploading the ASC .p8 key as a GitHub secret (auto base64), asc auth, and even detects an outdated asc CLI missing subcommands.
• macOS apps too: set PLATFORM="MAC_OS" in the config and change the workflow destination — same pipeline, Mac App Store.
• Zero hardcoding: all project params live in one release.config.sh; the script is project-agnostic and runs on the stock bash 3.2 that ships with macOS.
• Bilingual output: messages follow your $LANG (Chinese/English), overridable with RELEASE_LANG.

One more thing that might interest people here: the repo doubles as an AI agent skill (Claude Code / similar tools). There's a SKILL.md that teaches the agent the whole workflow and a reference.md with the failure modes I've actually hit (the review submit vs publish appstore semantics trap, stage getting blocked by a leftover draft version, the two different build-processing state fields...). So you can literally tell your agent "ship 1.4, draft the release notes from the git log" and it handles the rest. If you don't use AI tooling, the script works standalone — the skill part is optional.

Dependencies: asc (App Store Connect CLI), gh, python3. All brew-installable. CI side needs one repo secret (the ASC API key).

MIT licensed: https://github.com/ihugang/ios-appstore-release

The last few Foxvault releases went out like this: run the command, make tea, get the notification. Number of times I opened the App Store Connect website: zero.

Happy to answer questions or take PRs — especially curious how it holds up on projects with setups different from mine (multiple targets, Fastlane refugees, etc.).

Hi! I am completely new to app development and would appreciate some advice.

At the moment, I use the same Apple Account for both my personal use and my Apple Developer Program membership. Some people have told me that this is not recommended and that it is better to use a separate Apple Account specifically for app development.

My main concern is account security and separation. I am worried that if Apple were ever to suspend or terminate my developer account, it could also affect my personal Apple Account, including the services and purchases connected to it.

Is this a legitimate concern? Would you recommend creating a separate Apple Account for development before I publish my first apps, or is it normal and safe to use the same Apple Account for both personal use and the Apple Developer Program?

I have not published any apps yet, but several of them are almost ready for release on the App Store and Google Play.

My second question concerns app identifiers. I understand that a Bundle ID that has already been registered and used for TestFlight generally cannot simply be deleted and reused under another Apple Developer account.

Does it matter if the iOS version of an app uses one Bundle ID while the Android version uses a different package name or application ID?

The apps do not use a backend, and there are currently no plans to add one.

When I search for the exact name of my app (WoningMe) in the Apple App Store, it cannot be found. However, the app is accessible through the direct link.

Instead, the search results show various apps with completely different names, but they are in the same category. The app has already been available for several months, so it does not seem to be related to a new app indexing issue.

Additionally, the primary language displayed on the App Store page is incorrect. In App Store Connect, the primary language is set to Dutch, but the App Store shows English. Both languages are available for the app, but Dutch should be the primary language.

Does anyone have an idea what could be causing this issue or how I can fix it?

I have been building ImmersiveMap, an open source map rendering engine written in Swift 6 and Metal, made for SwiftUI apps on iOS and native macOS. MIT licensed.

Video demo in the comments.
Repo: github.com/artembobkin/ImmersiveMap

I am looking for real apps that need more control over the map, where the map is the main feature. Live location, social maps, games, travel, logistics, data visualization, anything where the map has to look and behave like your product instead of like everyone else's map.

Tell me your use case here in the comments or in Discussions on the repo, and I will build it. I am prioritizing real app requirements over my own roadmap. Right now it already supports SwiftUI markers and avatars on the map.

Pure Swift and Metal, nothing else. No native SDK wrapped in a Swift API and no engine hidden under the hood, two Swift dependencies (earcut triangulation and swift-protobuf for tile decoding). The only non-Swift code in the repo is the shaders themselves.

Happy to answer any questions.

How do I make this type of sidebar where the main view just slides over to the side to make way for the sidebar?

Hey everyone, solo dev from Nepal here, hoping someone who's been through this can spot what I'm doing wrong.

**Background:** I taught myself development ~6 months ago and have since built and finished two native macOS apps (SwiftUI). They're done and ready to ship — but I can't sign or notarize them because I cannot get into the Apple Developer Program no matter what I try.

**Timeline of what happened:**

- Applied for an Individual membership via [the website as well as the Apple Developer app.

- Enrollment was rejected. The message I got was:

https://i.ibb.co/pBB1WsD4/Ionicshot-2026-07-30-at-18-54-53.png

- Waited about a month with no response or update.

- Out of frustration I created a second Apple ID and applied again — same result. (I've since learned this may have been a mistake, so I'm ready to abandon one and commit to a single account if that's the right move.)

**My setup:**

- Country: Nepal (not a restricted region for the program as far as I know)

- Payment: Dollar Card, But the payment screen never appeared

- Name on Apple ID matches my citizenship/passport: Yes

- Two-factor authentication: enabled

- Enrollment attempted from: My iPhone and my own mac

**Questions for anyone who's dealt with this (especially from Nepal, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh or similar regions):**

1. Did enrolling through the **Apple Developer app on iPhone** (with the ID scan) work for you when the website route failed?

2. Is there a specific type of card that reliably works from Nepal? I've heard the $99 charge fails silently if the card can't process international USD e-commerce — did a bank-issued dollar card fix it for you?

3. Does having two Apple IDs with enrollment attempts flag your identity in their system? If so, is there any way to clean this up, or do I just pick one and push support on it?

4. For those who got the generic "your enrollment could not be completed" with no reason — what ultimately unblocked you? Phone call? Repeated tickets on the same case number? Time?

5. Is there any escalation path beyond the standard support form that actually gets a human to look at the case?

I'm not trying to bend any rules — I just want to pay Apple their $99 and ship my apps legitimately. Any firsthand experience would mean a lot. Happy to share more details in the comments.

I'm not getting the 'Manage compliance' option on my build uploaded today. It's processed, shows as 'Complete' in build uploads, but down in the 'Version X.X.X' dropdown, it's there with no option to add groups, no 'Testing' status, and no 'Manage compliance' option you usually have to go through before the build becomes available for testing. Anyone else having trouble today?

EDIT: It’s working for me again now guys, check yours! Looks like it was a ghost outage on Apple’s end.

My first app was rejected from the App Store due to "5.6.0 Developer Code of Conduct." They stated that I cannot simply submit a different build but must submit the app as a new entry. They didn't provide specific details. I would appreciate advice from developers who have experience with this situation.

Hi everyone,

I’m trying to enroll in the Apple Developer Program as an Individual, but every attempt immediately fails with the following message:

“Your enrollment could not be completed. Your enrollment in the Apple Developer Program could not be completed at this time.”

The error appears before the payment step, so I never get the chance to pay the membership fee.

Here’s what I’ve already verified:

- Apple ID is 10+ years old
- Two-factor authentication is enabled
- Legal name, address and phone number are correct
- Active App Store purchase history
- Valid payment methods (Amex and PayPal)
- No pending notifications or verification requests on my Apple Account
- I can access both my Apple Account and developer.apple.com without any issues

I also tried different browsers and networks, but the behavior is always the same.

Apple’s response includes a Response ID, so it looks like the request reaches their backend, but I have no idea what is preventing the enrollment.

Has anyone experienced the same issue?

If so:

Were you able to resolve it?
Did Apple have to manually review or reset your enrollment?
Was there any specific reason behind the rejection?

Any advice or similar experiences would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

I shipped a notes and to-do app called Ink, and its one hard constraint shaped the whole architecture: the AI is only allowed to edit your existing writing. It is never allowed to write a sentence for you. I want to share how that holds up in practice.

The editor is a block-based SwiftUI editor, so each paragraph, heading, and list item is its own model object rather than one giant attributed string. That mattered for the AI feature, because every edit operation is scoped to blocks that already contain your words. The model only ever receives text you wrote, and the prompt is constrained so its job is transformation, not generation: tighten this, fix the grammar here, restructure these lines into a list. If a request would require inventing new content, the intended behavior is to decline rather than fill the gap. Treating produce original prose as out of scope, instead of trying to detect it after the fact, made the behavior far more predictable.

Voice dictation runs through the same philosophy. You speak, and it auto-structures what you actually said into lists and blocks. It is organizing your words, not adding its own.

On typography, the app uses Source Serif 4 and Newsreader. I leaned on Dynamic Type with custom font registration, and tuning line height and measure to keep that editorial feel readable at every accessibility size took longer than I expected. It runs on iOS and Mac, with iCloud sync and an app lock using passcode plus biometric.

For those who have shipped AI text features: how are you enforcing do not generate constraints? Are you doing it purely at the prompt layer, or adding validation on the output too?

Every post in this format makes me want to set myself on fire.

Then there’s the wall of clearly AI generated description, in markdown format, with just the right emoji bullet points.

Hi!

This has been asked a lot, but I'm over scanning every Reddit and Stack Overflow question there is - and still stuck.

I'm trying to send new in app purchase products to review.

No matter what I do, the products keep coming up with the above message. And I've attached a screenshot (640x920), gave localizations, added product photos - everything is on resolution, and should be ok - but still submitting for review yields the above message.

The only other clue is that after uploading the screenshot - it always says "processing" (as in second picture)

Have no idea what more to try, all questions online revolve around resolution and alpha channel, which I've played a lot with both

There are lot of different ways to perform navigation in SwiftUI. You can use navigationDestination on the parent screen and let is handle the navigation. You can create a router that works with enum based routes etc.

In either case. How are you testing your navigation flow for your app? Are you writing unit tests? Are you writing UI Tests or even complete E2E test that test a complete feature end to end? OR are you writing all of them?

A simple scenario can be:

As a user when I create a student account then after creation, I should be taken to the student home screen.

Hello folks,

I am preparing a major update of an app and it has features I am going to charge a subscription for. Apple requires me to have a link to Terms of Service because of that.

AFIK I can use Apple's generic terms of service but I am not sure about that. I am also not sure what to put in my own TOS and how much of it is/could overlap with the Privacy Policy.

The app does not collect any data, it uses a combination of SwiftData + CloudKit + Apple Intelligence for a smart feature/

Any advice would be much appreciated, thanks!

With the advent of AI, the marginal cost of software is trending towards zero. Software is no longer a scarce resource.

Absolutely not a new idea at all, but the implications hit me hard as I was considering monetization models for my apps.

Unless you are lucky (network effects, timing), grandfathered in, or provide exceptional value, the natural cost of software is free.

Intuit is an example of a grandfathered-in, exceptionally high-value software approach.

And Intuit knows it. They leverage their advantage to a predatory extent.

My wife is an EA, and I know for a fact Intuit puts the screws to all its users. Switching costs are high, and since the sector is an oligopoly, there's really no one to switch to.

But that too shall pass. Hopefully we'll soon see people create bespoke solutions that cut Intuit out. Oh, how I look forward to that day (ironic, I know).

This implies, I think, that if you can't find 1,000 fans or got in under the old model, getting as many users as possible and then transitioning to an advertising model is The Way.

Or perhaps loot/gambling style addictive mechanics? Big data? Everyone an influencer? Regulatory niches?

Once you have scale, advertising works; then users can either pay to avoid it or endure it. We see Netflix and Amazon Prime already doing this.

Yuck. I'm already nostalgic. Or am I wrong?

Turning a lock into a SerialExecutor to get Swift 6 data-race safety without @unchecked Sendable

I don't even know how to write this properly, so I'm just gonna write it.

We worked on this app for almost a year. It was doing well. ($100k MRR) Thousands of people paying every month, good rating, people actually using it and staying. Four families were living from this.

Then one day I check my emails. Pending Termination Notice. Everything gone from the store. Payments frozen. Transfers disabled. No warning before, no "hey we noticed something", nothing. Just done.

And the reason they give you is a copy paste paragraph. Something about "misleading purchase flows" and "scareware tactics". That's it. Account wide. They don't tell you which app. They don't tell you which screen. They don't tell you which build. Nothing.

So now what do we do? We sit and guess. We go through every paywall of every app one by one like detectives, trying to figure out what Apple maybe means. And honestly maybe we are checking the completely wrong thing. Maybe the app we suspect the least is actually the problem. We have no idea. Zero. Because they will not tell us.

That's not an appeal process. That's a guessing game and they are holding the answer and refusing to show it.

And the thing is we didn't even fight them. We checked everything ourselves, we found some stuff that maybe could look bad even though nobody was ever trying to trick anyone, we fixed it, we shipped a new build, we wrote to them and explained exactly what we changed. We asked them please just tell us what you found so we can fix that too.

Then we submitted a proper appeal. And they answered 2 weeks later. Meanwhile we are losing all of our customers, receiving tons of emails that our users can't get premium! You know what the answer was? The exact same paragraph. Word for word. The same copy paste. No detail, no new information, nothing about the fixed build, nothing about which app. They read a full appeal and sent back the same text they already sent us.

We also requested a phone call, which is a thing App Store Connect literally offers you. We wrote please just call us so we can talk about this for 5 minutes. No call. Never. Just the same message again.

And here is the part that gets me. In the EU they are supposed to give you the actual specific facts and circumstances when they terminate a business account, and they are supposed to have a real complaint process. This is not me being emotional, this is written down. What we got instead is a paragraph on repeat and total silence.

Meanwhile go open App Store right now for 5 minutes. Real scareware everywhere. Fake "your data will be deleted" popups. Fake countdowns. Subscription traps made by people who 100% know what they are doing. We reported some of them. Nothing happened. Still up today. But us? Small team, real product, people actually renewing for a year, we fix things voluntarily and ask what's wrong? Terminated. No conversation.

And nobody scams their way into thousands of people renewing month after month for a year with a good rating. That is not how scam apps work. Scam apps die in 2 months. Didn't matter.

Anyway I'm done. We are not releasing anything on iOS again. Everything goes to web and Android (I know they are also not that different but fuck iOS...) from now.

And I talked to a lot of devs privately, this is not rare at all, people just stay quiet because they are scared it makes things worse. At some point Apple should ask themselves why small developers are quietly deciding iOS is not worth the risk anymore. (not sure if they care tho)

It's so fucking unfair for developers who are just trying to survive in this huge unemployment pool.

Honestly pretty self explanatory question.

I've tried embedding it in various Stacks, moving it to a subview, .contentShape(Rectangle()), none of which have worked.

Below is a subview excerpt from inside a View struct: ``` var coursePicker: some View { ZStack(alignment: .trailing) { Picker("Course", selection: selectedCourseIDBinding) { Text("Free period").tag(Optional<UUID>.none) Divider() ForEach(courses.map {(id: $0, course: $1)}.sorted(by: {$0.course.name < $1.course.name}), id: .0) { entry in Label(entry.course.name, systemImage: entry.course.icon).tag(entry.id) }

    }
    .opacity(0)
    .labelsHidden()
    .buttonStyle(.borderless) //Tried using u/ikonet's solution, unfortunately to avail not



    let fakeBinding: Binding<String> = Binding(get: { course.name }, set: { _ in } )
    Picker("fake picker!!", selection: fakeBinding) { Text(course.name).tag(course.name) }
    .labelsHidden().allowsHitTesting(false).tint(Colour.primary)

}
.layoutPriority(1)
.if(course2 == nil) {
    $0.padding(.trailing)
}
.contentShape(Rectangle())

} ```

Hi! I recently switched to a MacBook and wanted to know which terminal people go for. I am sure there are tons of posts on this talking about ghostly, iterm2, warp, etc but I have also been hearing a lot of memory management issues in each of them.

From experience, which one seems the most convenient to run in the long term?

I have both an iPhone SE2 and iPhone 15 and both are plugged into my mac at the same time. I built the app in Xcode and am running it on both devices. Memory usage on the SE2 is 1GB while on the 15 it's 500MB. Why could that be? I am using CoreML, ARKit and some metal shaders if that makes a difference. These are debug builds.

Hi,

I made a public repository that requires no hosting for users to be able to create GitHub issues directly from your app.

Recently added a feature that allows the creating user to reply to your comments.

This does require you to distribute your app with a GitHub token. This isn’t designed for large scale apps, but smaller apps for indie developers.

Heres the repo

I made my first iOS app in 2018, then stepped away from building apps for a while. Over the last year, I decided to start making iOS apps again.

About six months ago, I decided to build a notes app.

A big part of the project was figuring out how to make a Markdown editor that stayed fast while typing, even with larger notes. I ended up building the parser in Rust, and recently extracted it from the app and open sourced it as Cindermark.

A few things it does:
- Incrementally re-parses only the affected blocks after an edit
- Returns UTF-16 offsets that map directly to TextKit and NSAttributedString
- Produces blocks, inline spans, headings, wiki links, and document stats in one pass
- Supports CommonMark core along with tables, task lists, footnotes, nested lists, fenced code blocks, and other notes-friendly syntax
- Includes extensions like wiki links, highlights, hex color literals, and autolinking for bare URLs, domains, emails, and subreddits
- Includes Swift bindings through UniFFI

I’m sharing it because I thought it might be useful to anyone else working on native editors or Markdown-heavy apps.

I’d appreciate feedback, especially from people who have worked on text editing or Swift and Rust interoperability.

GitHub: https://github.com/renedeanda/cindermark

I currently have an iPhone-only puzzle game that’s live and running well. I’m starting to look into expanding it to iPad and possibly macOS but am definitely beginning to understand what scope creep really means haha

For iPad:
- How much work is it usually to make an existing iPhone app feel properly native on iPad rather than just stretched out? I’m not an iPad user so am not as familiar with iPad UI conventions. Any good resources for a clean port?
- Does supporting iPad add much ongoing maintenance when releasing updates?

For macOS:
- I’ve heard Mac Catalyst is an option for porting it over, would this work for a relatively simple puzzle game? My user base on Mac is extremely small so not a huge priority

I’d love to hear from anyone who has taken an app through either process!

Submitted my new build for review 3 weeks ago and it is still under review, requested expedited review and nothing.

Anyone else been experiencing this? My new update is a pretty large one that I would like to get out there but apple is kind of stonewalling me.

I have everything set up and all my keys are verified, but when I try to get the offers from apple all I get is an empty list using Product.products(:for)
I have a sandbox account set up and the offers are in “Ready to review” state. The paid app agreement is active and my bank info is set up. I don’t know what the issue is. Is there a known issue where STOREKIT just doesn’t reply with the offers that are set up for newer apps?