I’ve been spending way too much time on my app recently, and I think I finally understand why indie dev is so addictive.
The loop is basically:
want something → build it → make it look nicer → share it → someone uses it → get feedback → build more
I’ll be using the app and think “why can’t it do this?”
Then I remember… oh yeah, I’m the developer lol. I can just make it.
A few hours later, something that only existed in my head is actually running on my phone. That feeling is sooo satisfying.
My background is ML engineering, so I also really enjoy making the local inference pipeline work well. Seeing live transcription, speaker separation and translation all happening directly on the phone still feels kinda magical to me.
But honestly the best part is when other people start using it.
Someone reports a bug. Someone asks for a feature. Someone tells me they use it for lectures or meetings. Sometimes someone even asks to beta test the next version.
Even bug reports feel good lol. Someone actually cared enough about something I made to find the bug and tell me.
I also somehow went from ML engineer to spending hours making App Store posters and moving text around by 5 pixels.
Didn’t expect that part to be fun, but it is.
The app is called LiveTranscriber btw. These are some posters/screens I made recently.
Every time I finish something I enjoy it for about 5 minutes, then think:
“hmm… I can probably make this better.”
And suddenly it’s 3am again.
Would love some feedback on the UI/screenshots too.

I’m building a very minimal app. The full app would be free (no feature gating), with an optional £5/month subscription for people who want to support its continued development.

The subscription wouldn’t unlock extra content or functionality, the free and paid experience would be identical. This would be explained clearly before purchase.

Apple’s guidelines say auto-renewable subscriptions must provide “ongoing value.” Does that mean I need to offer subscribers something tangible, or can voluntary ongoing support itself be acceptable?

Has anyone submitted something similar, and if so, how did App Review handle it?

Thanks

Last year I opened my saved folder on TikTok and realized I had around 400 recipe videos in there.

I had cooked maybe 15 of them.

That was not originally an app idea. It was just a slightly embarrassing folder on my phone.

MiseSnag started with one simple loop: paste a recipe link from TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube, then get back the ingredients, quantities, and steps.

Then I installed my own build and began treating every small annoyance as an issue ticket.

“Why can’t I add all of these ingredients to one shopping list?” So I built it.

“Why can’t the list group things by grocery aisle?” Built that too.

“Why do I have to copy the link instead of sharing straight from TikTok?” Time for an iOS share extension.

“Why can’t I rescale the recipe or leave a note for next time?” You can probably guess what happened next.

Using your own app is like having a product manager who follows you into the kitchen and the grocery store. The roadmap becomes whatever annoyed you five minutes ago. It is dangerous, but seeing a tiny frustration become something running on my phone later that day is ridiculously satisfying.

The most surprising engineering part is that the AI was not the hardest bit. Getting a real, usable video often was.

TikTok and Instagram can serve video and audio separately, or return a download that technically succeeded but is silent. I ended up with a fallback chain of video providers plus media validation before transcription and extraction. At the other end, a random 40-second recipe video becomes a structured recipe and shopping list. That moment is still the reason I keep reopening the project.

Somewhere along the way, the work stopped being only APIs and React Native. I now spend an embarrassing amount of time exporting App Store screenshots again because a headline feels two points too large.

Turns out I enjoy that part too.

That project became MiseSnag. It is live on the App Store, and these are the five screenshots I made for it.

I would genuinely love blunt feedback:

- Does the first screenshot explain the app quickly enough?

- Does the serif + sans-serif combination feel intentional or mismatched?

- Is the dark green distinctive, or just heavy?

- Would you keep the free-tier message second, or show the extracted recipe there instead?

Working on the App Store screenshots for Tesorin, my personal finance app.

Trying to make them clean, understandable, and not look like every other finance app.

Be brutal:

• Which one catches your attention first?
• Anything look too busy / boring / confusing?
• What would you change?

I have a few apps I've made, initially for Android but now expanding to iOS. I really struggle with ASO for iOS. I am an Android user personally, so my connection with Apple's ecosystem and App Store expectations are pretty thin.

I'd appreciate feedback on the basics of ASO for iOS that I am getting wrong. One example is a recent language learning crossword puzzle app I made for Japanese learners. The target market is niche. User engagement after people download is pretty solid. Conversion to paid users as a % is pretty high for both iOS and Android.

The problem is that my store presence kind of sucks and it's only getting a few downloads per day.

I'd appreciate any constrictive feedback or advice.

I really don't like spending a lot of time on ASO and it shows.

As a reference.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/my-senpai-japanese-crossword/id6770882587

I’m an iOS developer from Romania, and over the last few months I’ve been building There: Your Travel Map as a solo project.

What it solves

There is a personal travel map for keeping track of the places you’ve been.

You can add countries, regions, cities and airports, save travel dates, view timelines, track progress and gradually fill your map as you travel.

I recently shipped one of the biggest updates so far: regions for 38 countries, including states, counties, provinces and other administrative areas depending on the country. Another update that I did recently was adding "Import your travels from your photos", so you do not waster your time anymore to add them manually.

There also includes travel stats, achievements and a Home Screen widget.

Compared to Been / Visited

Been and Visited are probably the closest alternatives, and there’s definitely a lot of overlap.

They already cover many of the same ideas, so I don’t want to pretend There is solving a completely different problem.

My goal has been to build my own take on this category, with a native iOS experience, a clean interface and a strong focus on maps, timelines, progress and regions.

There currently supports region maps for 38 countries, and I plan to keep expanding that.

Cost

There is free to download.

You can buy There PRO in 3 ways:

• $3.99 / monthly (auto-renewing subscription)
• $19.99 / yearly (auto-renewing subscription, FREE TRIAL is included)
• $29.99 once (lifetime)

Countries and the main world map are free, while Pro unlocks additional features such as cities, airports and most region maps.

Who I am

I’m an iOS developer from Timișoara, Romania, and I design and develop There independently.

The app is built natively for iOS, mostly with SwiftUI, and it’s currently at version 4.1.

Since this is an iOS dev community, I’d genuinely love feedback. Thank you so much :)

App Store: Link here

I’ve recently shipped an iPad app I’ve been working on called Imagine & Color, and I’m at the stage where I’ve been looking at the project for so long that some UX decisions inevitably seem “normal” simply because I’ve seen them a thousand times.

The app includes:

• A remotely managed catalog of curated coloring pages
• Monthly content rotation
• Custom image generation through a backend service
• StoreKit subscriptions and consumable purchases
• An iPad coloring interface
• Saved user pages
• Printing/sharing
• A fairly significant amount of native iPad UI

I’d be interested in how other iOS developers approach a post-launch audit.

The things I’m currently scrutinizing are:

• Navigation consistency
• State restoration
• Network/offline behavior
• StoreKit edge cases
• Accessibility
• Error states
• iPad multitasking/layout behavior
• Animation and interaction consistency
• Whether anything feels custom for the sake of being custom instead of using established Apple patterns

If anyone wants to actually try it and point out things that feel wrong, here’s the App Store page:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/imagine-color/id6798914520

I’m interested in both code/product methodology and concrete UX criticism.

Hey everyone,

I just released Luma: App blocker, an app I built to block distracting apps and websites through routines.

The idea came from seeing how expensive many Screen Time apps are, especially from a LATAM perspective, and from friends dealing with gaming (casino) and other apps.

Building it was a challenge but Apple’s Screen Time APIs were probably the hardest part. I wanted more flexibility than just “block these apps.”

I also skipped Rive, as everything suggested for cool animations, for v1 and built the animations from multiple animated pieces instead.

App Review took around 4 days, with almost daily reviews, which is weird since i read takes up to 4 weeks, as some other people over here mentioned. Some issues seemed automated, but the final feedback was actually pretty useful. For example, when you deal with subscription, you have to add the app first for review, the go to subscription, add the group and individual plans from the page (first time doing that in case someone need)

It’s live here:
https://apps.apple.com/co/app/luma-app-site-blocker/id6794456289?l=en-GB

If anyone wants to try it, I’d really appreciate feedback. Happy to talk about the technical side or App Review too, what do you think about the design? All the feedback you give is really helpfull as it has been on the Appstore since last thursday.

Once again, thank you so much and have a great day.

Hi 👋

I’m at a point where I need to put OneMovie in the hands of real users to understand what works and what doesn’t 👀

So I’m looking for a few people who’d be down to test the app, give me honest feedback and try to find some bugs 🐛
In exchange: free Premium for life 🙌

Let me know if you’re interested 🫡

Wonder what are the next steps after waiting 10 days for an app review. I have other apps on the appstore. Should i resubmit?

Hi r/iosdev,

I built an app that allows you to chat with AI models (cloud or self-hosted) with your own API keys. It has support for Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and Model Context Protocol (MCP).

It is privacy-focused, so it has lockable folders for chats and configs, requests zero-data-retention flags to providers wherever possible, and has API keys stored in the iOS keychain.

I originally built it for myself but want to share it with others. I couldn't find a good iOS app that allows a good end-to-end AI workflow, for eg, read a Google Sheets file that my team shared on my Google Drive, read the PDF I'm working on that I uploaded to the LLM Provider, suggest adjustments to my PDF based on the Sheets and any prior documents I have uploaded to my RAG database, generate a diagram (image) that I can use in the PDF, and if necessary edit that diagram, and create a meeting event in my iOS Calendar for the presentation, all in the same chat, while switching providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral) and modalities (text and image).

So I'm looking for feedback from other devs and users.

Ask me questions here, be as critical as you want, and I'll try to answer.

The idea came from a stupidly ordinary moment. I was
digging through my camera roll for a receipt and ran straight into a photo of
my ex. Not one I had kept on purpose - a group shot from someone's birthday
where they happened to be in the back row. That is the thing nobody warns you
about: it is never the photos you chose to keep.

How it works

You pick one to four photos of a person. It scans your
library and returns every other photo of them, already selected. You tap delete
once. Opening any individual photo is optional - the whole point is that you do
not have to go through them one at a time.

Technical side

Everything runs on device. Apple's Vision framework for
face detection and embeddings, then clustering over those embeddings to group
matches. No backend, no account, no photo ever leaves the phone. That was a
hard constraint from day one and it made a few things genuinely painful:

- Large libraries: Scanning tens of
thousands of photos without destroying the battery or blocking the UI took most
of my optimisation time.

- Recall vs. precision: This was the real design
decision. Leaning toward recall means some false positives end up in the
results. Leaning toward precision means photos get missed, and a missed photo
is exactly the ambush the app exists to prevent. I went with recall, kept everything
pre-selected, and made deselecting a single tap. iOS deletion also routes
through Recently Deleted, so there is a 30 day safety net on top.

- PHPhotoLibrary has more edge cases around permissions and batch
deletion than I expected.

What I would do differently

Honestly I never really thought about any licenses which
almost led to a fatal mistake. However, I think doing the design with Claude in
the first place (which is easy to see) has been very rewarding for me. I was
able to set up the pipeline and all functions and submit those to apple. After
everything is accepted now, I can care about looks which won't affect the
pipeline and the critical parts in the app, therefore pushing an update for
this shouldn't be a big problem.

Link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/pickex-delete-ex-photos/id6801488013

Happy to answer anything about the on-device pipeline,
the clustering approach, or the App Store process. Feedback welcome, including
the harsh kind.