Hey guys!

For the past 3 months i've been working on a tiny IOS app - Yap.

It's a voice first journaling app that automatically sorts your thoughts and allows you to easily look back.

I am someone that has journaled for more than 10 years now, but i'm slowly finding it more and more cumbersome to do so after a long day.

Privacy is obviously super important here, so Yap uses on-device models and locally hosted LLMs by me (so the big tech don't train their models on your journal). All the data is saved on device and can be exported at any point.

If you install the app you get it completely for free - forever. At some point i'll have to start charging people but the founding members keep theirs for free.

LMK what you think and if you get a second, i'd LOVE an upvote on product hunt :)

Hey folk,

I've been working on an app that got completely shutdown by Apple.
The app is not released and i'm not sure if I'll be able to release it ever.

The app is a screen time blocker that cannot be disabled. The idea is quite simple:

1. You make a commitment "For the next 7 days, i'll use Youtube less than 30m a day"
2. You pledge some money "If i go over my limit, I'll lose 5$". The app doesn't charge that amount immediately but only if you fail your commitment (through stripe i save the card for the commitment duration)
3. If you go over your daily limit, i show you a blocker that shows "Continue and lose 5$" or "Close Youtube for today"

Basically, you have somehting to lose if you fail your commitment. But lose no money if you make it. Even deleting the app doesn't work. The app is free and i wanted to make half the commitment go to planting trees.

I posted about it and got quite the traction so i decided to build it. Sadly after 3-4 reviews i got the hard no from apple.

As per their review:

>Guideline 3.2.2 - Business - Other Business Model Issues - Unacceptable

Issue Description
The app includes features that charge users when they do not meet personal targets or goals. Apps with these penalty-based payment features are not appropriate for the App Store.

Next Steps

It would be appropriate to remove any features that charge users a monetary penalty when they do not meet personal targets or goals.

Was hoping to get other's opinions on whether there's anything i can do.

I even considered removing the commitment money and releasing it fully for free (i already built it anyway), but that sort of defeats the purpose - without the commitment, you can always stop it or delete the app. At that point you can just use apple's built in screen time restrictions.

Any ideas? (here's a video of the app if you're interested)

Hey everyone!

I'm a ML engineer that grew up watching Twitch.

I recently made a survey with just over 200 mods/streamers (twitch whispers ftw) and a lot of the feedback overlaps. Majority of manual moderation (banning, timeout, delete) falls on sexual abuse (esp women streamers), plain toxicity, group attacks and self-promotion.

Although most streamers have tools like Nightbot, sery_bot, etc manual moderation is still the main way to handle these issues. Especially with chat being creative to avoid keyword lists and regex..

From the people I surveyed, Automod is mostly set on low. There was actually a very detailed study done on it covering where it falls short (mainly false positives, published on arxiv).

What is Modcheck?

ModCheck is context-aware Twitch moderation that runs in the background.

It reads what's actually happening in the stream - what the streamer is doing (audio and video), the game, title, bio, the mood of chat, recent messages, chatter history, 7TV emotes, etc.

You define the rules and actions. Instead of regex you write rules in plain English. I call them "Judges". A few examples:

• Boundary Judge - "Flag viewers who are sexually commeting on my appearance, body or clothing." Catches stuff like "you'd get way more viewers if you showed more skin js" (real message btw..)
• Self-Promo Judge - "Flag viewers advertising their own stream." The classic "come check out my channel" etc
• Backseat Judge - "Flag unsolicited gameplay advice. Allow tips if I've asked chat for help.". singleplayer walkthroughs
• Toxicity, Racism and any other custom rules you may have

When a message is flagged, the judge gives it for a mods/streamer review with the reason. Alternatively, it can automatically take a mod action (banning, timeout, delete). The more it's used the more accurate it becomes!

Of course, context works the other way too.

"Kill the white" can sound bad out of context, but if you're in a game with a white blob enemy on screen, it's just gameplay. That missing context is exactly where AutoMod falls down.

Setup

First, I'm currently running a free tier if anyone wants to try it out (covers 10k messages per month).

To start, you sign in with Twitch and select which channel you want to moderate (either yours or a channel you mod for), then you setup your judges and (optionally) add modcheck_bot as a mod to your channel (if you want it to do more than just flag messages to you).

Onboarding takes less than 5 minutes overall and it lets you test the platform out.

For the interested, lmk and i can run a demo for your stream (no setup from your side) and DM you the results :)

Where Modcheck is today

Modcheck is in beta but it's fully functional. I'm building this solo , yes, but i'm fully focused on improving it. I'm extremely proud to say that we've got some streamers using it already.

Ultimately I want this tool to be useful. Every piece of feedback is welcomed :)

Happy to go into how it works under the hood. Let me know if you have any questions or feedback!

--

PS: thank you to all the mods and streamers that participated in my survey

A few weeks back i posted here asking which design to go with for my weekly challenge app. THANK YOU so much for all the input! I iterated on the branding as per your feedback and released the app.

It's the first time i'm building a RN/Expo app so I wanted to share my findings, frustrations and some of the commands/choices i made.

quick brief: every week the app gives you a small dare. cold showers, talk to a stranger, phone-free mornings, etc. you commit for 7 days and take one polaroid as proof. Over time you build your "Scrapbook" with memories

Project Structure

I ended up going with a typescript monorepo. Simple stuff: bun/hono server, RN client and Tanstack Start webapp. I'm actually quite happy with the setup i did, used a common biome and tsconfig across the board. For sure something that

stack: expo, uniwind (tailwind for rn), zustand (app state) + react query (server state) + sqlite + kvvm (storage)

Was quite happy with this setup, will for sure use it again for my next project. If you want more info, I've documented the setup here.

Expo dev

I had to move away from Expo GO almost immediately as some the packages i use are not supported. Setting up a dev server is quite easy but the Camera doesn't work on simulators!!

Sadly, i bit the bullet and paid 99$ apple dev profile so i can test on my phone. This became the main testing device I used.

Expo builds

Once i had something to show, I pushed it to Test Flight so my fiance/friends can play with the product. I HIGHLY recommend doing this as you get a LOT of feedback early on. There are so many things i didn't see whilst developing, it's crazy man (skill issue too i'm sure).

Initially I used expo's cloud offering to build and submit the app to apple connect. That was a huge pain in my ass.. well over 90m for a build...

I've got a mac so i decided to build locally. It took me like 1-2 hours to setup, but I got a pretty good flow:

1. First build the project (be sure to set EAS_LOCAL_BUILD_WORKINGDIR as it will fail otherwise)EAS_LOCAL_BUILD_WORKINGDIR=$HOME/eas-build-tmp bunx eas-cli@latest build --local --platform ios --profile production
2. Submit using the Transporter app - worked perfectly

Takes around 10m e2e using a macbook pro with 16 gigs of ram. Not bad

Apple review was weirdly chill

3 days end to end, fast and friendly. two gotchas worth knowing:

1. You have to test on ipad even if your app isn't for ipad. when an iphone-only app runs on ipad the screen (ironically) ends up tiny and that's where my layout broke and my review got declined.
2. You NEED to put your terms of service link in your app store description? Strange cause there's already a field for this, but required. Cause of this my second review failed.

Reviewers also flagged a couple of genuinely nice optimisations for me. cheapest QA pass i've ever had, honestly.

Building solo with claude

Got way better with practice. Mostly about setting up the right context (CLAUDE.md files, splitting work into discrete tasks). still very much learning here - genuinely curious how others are doing it. Lmk if you want my setup.

All i can say is that the impeccable skill did some heavy lifting! - but you still need to rely on your brain. don't just ask it to take YOUR decisions.