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u/ELGALS52

▲ 1 r/VibeCodeDevs

Apple approved my app on the first submission. No rejections. Here's everything I did

Apple approved my app on the first submission. No rejections. Here's everything I did including surviving 3 days of Screen Time API hell.

Just shipped Mindbrake it blocks your social apps and makes you solve a math, physics, or coding challenge before you can open them. Earn minutes by answering correctly. Miss it, stay out.

First submission. Zero rejections. I think a few things made the difference.

The review notes were a full test script. Not a cover letter. A step-by-step walkthrough: how to get past the paywall with a sandbox account, how to trigger the Screen Time shield, what happens if they don't want to grant FamilyControls authorization (the app has a full mock mode so there's no dead end). Reviewers are humans reviewing dozens of apps a day — I made their job easy.

The mock fallback saved me. If the reviewer didn't want to deal with real Screen Time permissions, they could still see the entire core loop working: pick an app, get a challenge, earn minutes, get unlocked. No feature behind a wall they couldn't test.

Clean privacy story, no ambiguity. No accounts, no data leaving the device. The apps you block are an opaque iOS token — Mindbrake never knows which specific apps you picked. I spelled that out explicitly because FamilyControls apps get extra scrutiny.

The hard part wasn't the review — it was getting to submission.

Screen Time took me 3 days to stop breaking. The bug loop was: blocking works, unlock doesn't. Fix unlock, re-blocking breaks. Fix that, the same app won't re-lock after multiple sessions in a row. The root issue was that my app and its 3 extensions were each talking to different ManagedSettingsStore instances.

Getting paid as a Mexican developer is a separate project. Apple's banking and tax approval process for LATAM is not documented anywhere useful. It took longer than I expected and almost delayed the launch. If you're building from Mexico and haven't started that process yet — start now, not when the app is ready.

App is live with a 7-day free trial: https://apps.apple.com/app/mindbrake/id6766659926

Happy to answer anything about Screen Time, the extension architecture, review notes, or the LATAM payments setup.

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u/ELGALS52 — 1 day ago
▲ 10 r/iosdev+2 crossposts

Apple approved my app on the first submission. No rejections. Here's everything I did

Apple approved my app on the first submission. No rejections. Here's everything I did including surviving 3 days of Screen Time API hell.

Just shipped Mindbrake, it blocks your apps and makes you solve a math, physics, or coding challenge before you can open them. Earn minutes by answering correctly. Miss it, stay out.

First submission. Zero rejections. I think a few things made the difference.

The review notes were a full test script. Not a cover letter. A step-by-step walkthrough: how to get past the paywall with a sandbox account, how to trigger the Screen Time shield, what happens if they don't want to grant FamilyControls authorization (the app has a full mock mode so there's no dead end). Reviewers are humans reviewing dozens of apps a day — I made their job easy.

The mock fallback saved me. If the reviewer didn't want to deal with real Screen Time permissions, they could still see the entire core loop working: pick an app, get a challenge, earn minutes, get unlocked. No feature behind a wall they couldn't test.

Clean privacy story, no ambiguity. No accounts, no data leaving the device. The apps you block are an opaque iOS token — Mindbrake never knows which specific apps you picked. I spelled that out explicitly because FamilyControls apps get extra scrutiny.

The hard part wasn't the review — it was getting to submission.

Screen Time took me 3 days to stop breaking. The bug loop was: blocking works, unlock doesn't. Fix unlock, re-blocking breaks. Fix that, the same app won't re-lock after multiple sessions in a row. The root issue was that my app and its 3 extensions were each talking to different ManagedSettingsStore instances.

App is live with a 7-day free trial:

https://apps.apple.com/app/mindbrake/id6766659926

Happy to answer anything about Screen Time, the extension architecture, review notes, or the LATAM payments setup.

u/ELGALS52 — 1 day ago
▲ 7 r/VibeCodeDevs+2 crossposts

ChatGPT image is a lifesaver

You should start using ChatGPT’s image creation more, it has become so good and has helped me a lot to build some aspects of my new app Mindbrake, like the screenshots as I said and the logo, I used it to create the App Store screenshots for my app and it’s just great. I didn’t had to pay for a screenshot generator nor for an artist, I’m so happy with the result. What you see is completely created by chatgpt, I just took some screenshots myself from my app and gave them to him, he proceeded to create a viral and professional set of screenshots for my app. My app Mindbrake lets you complete stem challenges and questions for minutes for your apps, it’s been helping me a lot since I’m a comp sci student and these last months I’ve been losing so much time on my phone, but after Mindbrake I have lowered my screen time to like 3 1/2 hours a day. Can’t wait for the app to be released so you can all try it!!!

Pd: the image I added to the post is a collage of 3 of all the screenshots of my app, I did this because I can’t upload more than one screenshot, so the weird AI filter you see on the images isn’t actually part of the screenshots but something that happened when I asked chat to create a collage with those 3 photos.

u/ELGALS52 — 4 days ago