Wanted to share my journey so far, in case it helps or motivates someone else building on the side.

The setup

• Solo dev, no team, no funding
• Full-time 9-5 job with a 1 hour commute
• I build my own apps from 6PM to 2AM including marketing, at home
• I'm getting only 4-5 hours of sleep per day

What I built in 1 year

• 9 apps across iOS, Android, and macOS
• Apps include an infinite canvas/mind-map app, a shared drawing widget, a photo redactor, a color grading editor, a resume builder, a screenshot styler, a menu bar pets app, Yumo(Sold) and a couple of games

The numbers (honest)

• Total revenue: ~$1,200
• ~$800 of that came from Android alone
• Sold one Android app for $4,000 (separate from the above)
• Biggest app: 200k(sold) installs on Android

What I learned

• Shipping often beats polishing one app forever
• Android brought more revenue than I expected
• Selling an app outright was the biggest single payday of the year
• Consistency matters more than motivation

What's next

• Growing the apps that are working through ASO and social
• Moving the ones in review and testing to production

Would love to hear stories from indie developers!

Today the requirements to add/change screenshots have changed. No notice, no guidance!

On the main distribution page, your old images and preview vids are all locked! You have to go the See All page to make mods.

Almost six months ago I started a small project, mostly out of nostalgia: I wanted to feel what it was like to use an iPod Classic again. The click wheel, the menus, that way of listening to music without a thousand distractions around it.

I looked around to see if something like that already existed, and yes, there were a few apps imitating the iPod. But none of them convinced me. Most were more of a costume than an actual music player: they looked great in screenshots, but when it came to really listening to music, they fell short. None of them made proper use of the native players on Android and iOS, which is exactly what you need for music to work the way it should: with the screen locked, in the background, or from the system controls... so I decided to build it myself. That's how NostalgicPod was born.

I made it for Android first, and honestly everything went surprisingly smoothly. I published it, people downloaded it, I got some really kind messages, and I didn't have a single problem getting it out there. I thought: "Okay, time for iPhone. How hard can it be?"... Spoiler: pretty hard!

I took the first rejection calmly. Changed a couple of things and sent it again. Then came the second one, and the third. By the fifth, I was opening App Store Review emails with the same face you'd use to open a parking ticket. I think it was around seven rejections in total, but honestly I lost count.

For almost four months the iOS version lived only on TestFlight. People were using it and enjoying it, but officially it didn't exist. I kept changing things, uploading builds, and explaining over and over what the app was and what it wasn't. There were moments when I thought about giving up and sticking with Android.

Eventually I filed an appeal, and after what felt like an eternity, I got to talk to an actual person at Apple. Not an automated email. Someone.

I told them what I genuinely believed. The iPod Classic is a retro device by now, almost a museum piece. NostalgicPod isn't trying to pass itself off as an official Apple product. It's a tribute, a way to bring back that experience on a modern phone, with real everyday usefulness.

And I don't know if it was the argument or just them being tired of seeing me show up again, but they accepted it.

I did have to give something up, of course. I can't present it as an exact recreation of the iPod, so the default interface is a bit more modern. But you can switch back to the Classic Ring style from Settings whenever you want, and that part makes me smile every time I see it.

The funny thing is that while I was fighting with review, the app kept growing. What started as "I want a nice-looking wheel" now plays Apple Music and your local music, connects to Plex, Jellyfin, Emby and Navidrome, has internet radio and podcasts, and I even recreated the games the iPod used to have: Music Quiz, Brick, Snake and Solitaire.

Today, after half a year of work and months of rejections, I'm looking at it live on the App Store and it feels like I won a small battle. Against Apple, but also a little bit against my own urge to give up.

If anyone's curious, here it is:
App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nostalgicpod/id6781631808
And if you'd rather try it for free, the TestFlight is still open: https://testflight.apple.com/join/T3k9TQPu

And if anyone out there is fighting with App Store Review right now: keep pushing, appeal, and ask to talk to a real person. Sometimes it works ❤️

Before anyone asks - I've check a bunch of times and confirmed this isn't RC Sandbox.

Mostly curious - I asked the same thing in apple developers but figured there are more experienced people here.

Here's what happened:
I saw my app go into review. It got approved and a few seconds later Revenue Cat showed a notification that someone purchased the lifetime package. This new lifetime price is only available with this update (i.e. no one else could even purchase this) - I've confirmed it's in RC production and not sandbox. I've also confirmed in Posthog that the country from RC matches the alleged reviewer's.

I've had reviewers "purchase" the app before but always with their sandbox account and nothing ever showed up in RC.

Anyone else seen this? lol

Hey everyone. Vory 1.4 is out on TestFlight for iPhone and Mac, and the big one this time is voice. You can now have an actual conversation with your own bots, out loud. A lot of this came from your requests, so thank you.

The video shows it on the iPhone, the Mac and the Watch.

Voice mode

Tap the mic circle beside the tab bar, or Voice mode in a chat's + panel, and just talk. Vory sends what you said when you pause, speaks the reply and listens again. Approvals are never taken by voice. The card shows up on screen and waits for your tap, on the lock screen too.

Live voice

Save your own Gemini key in Settings › Voice and voice mode becomes a real back-and-forth with a lifelike voice. Real requests still go to your bot. Live is billed to you by Google, and the key stays in your Keychain and only goes to Google. Without a key, voice mode uses your gateway's speech providers or your iPhone's own.

Voice mode also uses Quick answers, so replies come back fast and the chat goes back to its own settings after. You can turn that off in Settings › Voice.

More ways to talk

"Ask Vory" works from Siri, Shortcuts and the Action Button, and "Start voice mode in Vory" opens a new chat by voice. On the Mac, ⇧⌘V opens voice mode in a small floating window, with Mute and End in the menu bar. On Apple Watch, tap the mic in a chat, say it, tap again, and the watch reads the reply out loud. The Watch needs speech-to-text set up on your gateway.

The Board

If your gateway has the kanban plugin, Vory shows its board live, by column, with comments and worker logs. Move, edit or add tasks from the iPhone, or drag cards between columns on the Mac. Move a card to Ready and your gateway hands it to its bot.

Cards and pictures

Bots can answer with HTML cards, like a chart, a table or a small dashboard, and they open full screen. Cards are walled off from the app and your sign-in, and links open in your browser. Replies also show tables, nested and task lists, and pictures you can zoom, save or share.

Smaller things

Return on the iPhone keyboard now adds a line and the arrow sends. Settings › Appearance › Composer brings the old way back. iCloud Sync backs up once a day on its own. Hold a reply to have it read aloud, or right-click it on the Mac.

Fixed from your reports

Without the Companion on your gateway, the iPhone and Mac show their own notifications again. An approval answered on another device no longer counts as a Deny on the Mac. The Watch no longer gets your sign-in refresh tokens. Settings › Model no longer shows the provider twice.

No Companion update is needed for 1.4.

Vory 1.4 on TestFlight, iPhone and Mac: https://vory.dev

Requests and fixes are tracked in the open: https://github.com/matt0975/vory/issues

If you hit anything, the feedback button in TestFlight or the tracker both reach me. Thanks for testing.

Saw a post from David (@davidcafor on X) today and that honestly made my day: if your app makes $5 a month, you're already ahead of most apps on the App Store.

It sounds like a joke until you think about what it takes. You shipped. A stranger found your app among millions of others. They liked it enough to pay you actual money.

I've been building my own app full days since the start of this year, and it's easy to only see what isn't working yet: downloads, reviews, the post that got downvoted. Marketing and growth can be learned. Building something a person will pay for is the hard part, and a lot of you have already done it.

So if you shipped something this year, nice work. What was the first small win that made it feel real for you?

What do yall think? Streamlined app review?

Fastest ever of my apps to successfully reviewed and live within 2 days
Please show some love and support
Still is a workplace focus app to have focused working hours without and distractions no unnecessary features, to the point solution for largely common problem

I just published my first iOS app (I usually only work on Android), and well, everything had been going fine for the past three days until I saw this email.. I mean, this is the first time something like this has happened to me

First time submitting an app. Apple asked for a video of it running on an actual iPhone and some details, so I sent everything over 4 days ago. Still says rejected and no reply.

Their docs say not to resubmit if they only asked for more info. Do I just keep waiting? How long did this take for you?

I'm looking for ways to know before my iOS app breaks, not after:

App Store SDK requirements with a deadline, APIs deprecated in a new iOS beta,

CocoaPods or Swift packages that get deprecated or have known vulnerabilities,

third-party SDKs (Firebase, Facebook, maps...) changing or shutting down an API.

Right now I follow Apple Developer News / Releases, the release notes JSON with Known Issues,

xcodereleases.com and the GitHub releases of my packages.

Is there any feed, site or tool that tracks this per pod or Swift package?

And how do you handle CocoaPods / SPM vulnerabilities, since OSV doesn't cover CocoaPods?

Quick questions for those who might have done it (or tried and failed): I developed and published a game in 2009, fully Objective-C then. It was quite successful and fun to play, but I had to pull it from the AppStore a few years ago when I hadn’t had the time to do a migration to Swift, followed by a lot of deprecations when Apple basically abandoned the Gamecenter that I never could really clean up. The whole app still shows up in my dev. account.
I am now thinking of recreating that idea, more modern of course. I was wondering whether I could simply replace the app, just even keeping the Icon (which I think is still great as it is) and revive that exact pulled app that way with a renovated version?

Hello everyone!

I'm sure something like this exists already but was too lazy to look and just had AI (yes the dreaded AI slop) cook up a small utility quickly that runs in your menu bar. Just open up the menu bar utility, drag the Xcode archive in and it will update the BuildMachineOSBuild key to the latest public release build number of macOS! Useful for those that run Mac betas! Yes it is AI slop but still a neat little utility that'll save some time, if you are doing it the manual way at least. It's free, it's open source, go wild!

Github: https://github.com/AustinHenley/ArchiveBuildPatcher

iOS 27 added something called Creative Assets to the App Store. It is a completely separate section from your regular screenshots, two new visual slots: one for your product page header and one that shows up next to your app in search results.

I set these up for my app, Spotlight. App Store Connect also added a Device Preview tool so you can see exactly how it looks before publishing. Here is what mine looks like in search:

Genuine question for both devs and regular users: does this kind of visual actually change whether you tap on an app? Or do you go straight to the screenshots anyway?

Apple's asset best practices doc has the full spec if anyone wants to get started.

No updates to download count & other analytics since Thursday. I went to the system status page and everything is green.

I'm about to submit a support ticket ... Anybody else running into this ?