Indie & Startups

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Developing an app is hard. But there is something harder: Promotion. There are ways to promote. But it takes time to learn. It will take time to learn... 

Here is my app:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mindjournal.app

This is our first app.

It took two months for us to develop.

We used Cursor AI.

It's a journaling app with AI support.

We had to buy MacBook Air and iPhone 16e for developing the app for App Store side. It was the biggest expense. 

Hope it turns out well. Thank you. 

Edit: After several tests, it has become clear that the app is available in the USA and the page does not open in the EU. However, you can search for and download the app from the list in the EU, but you cannot click on it. Thanks to everyone.

Hi everyone,

I’m hoping someone here has experienced this before.

I recently launched my very first iOS app. The app was approved by Apple and the status in App Store Connect is currently “Ready for Distribution”.
For the first few hours after release, everything worked perfectly:
The App Store page loaded normally.
Users could open the product page.
The app could be downloaded.
However, a few hours later, the App Store page suddenly stopped working on all iPhones.
When users tap the app in the App Store, they either get:

“This app is currently not available in your country or region”

or

“The page could not be loaded. Please try again.”

Things I’ve already verified:
App status is “Ready for Distribution”.
Distribution method is Public.
The app is available in 175 countries, including Belgium.
No pre-order is enabled.
No changes were made after release.
The App Store URL exists.
“View on App Store” from App Store Connect opens correctly.

Example App Store link:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/elsy-shared-collections/id6773616091

I’ve already contacted Apple Developer Support, but haven’t received a response yet.
Has anyone experienced something similar? Could this be an App Store propagation issue or some hidden regional/storefront problem?

Thanks a lot!

Every Sudoku app I tried had ads, popups, or some streak thing nagging me to come back. So I made my own.

It's called Calm Sudoku. Free daily puzzle plus 30 to start, and if you like it there's a one-time unlock for the full set (300 puzzles, three difficulties). No subscription, no ads, no accounts, works offline.

All the normal stuff (notes, undo, check, reveal, history) is free. I'm not paywalling how you play, just how many puzzles you get.

Made it mostly for myself, but figured some of you might want the same thing. Would love to hear what you think! 🙂

Calm Sudoku on the iOS App Store

I've been trying to learn Japanese for ~2 years or so, primarily on Duolingo (streak of 500+ days!). I realized that I honestly wasn't learning anything. Every time I tried to write something from scratch instead of just tapping tiles, I couldn't.

So I built Shinme! It's a from-zero course which focuses on developing actual Japanese writing skills. Each lesson comes with its own vocab and grammar content. In order to completing each lesson, users need to complete a set number of translation exercises which are graded.

Shinme fully supports custom deck/card management too, so learners can import what they already know. Exercises are generated dynamically, so that exercises are tailored to what the user already knows.

The first six lessons are out right now!

It's in beta right now and the costs are on me, so there are some usage limits while I keep the AI costs sane. I would love feedback: what is confusing, what broke.

https://shinme.app/

If you hand your laptop to someone for a few minutes, they can still open Messages, Photos, Notes, Mail, WhatsApp, browsers, password managers, and other personal apps. I wanted a way to protect specific applications without constantly locking my entire Mac.

I looked around for solutions, but most were outdated, paid, abandoned, or didn't feel native to macOS.

So I built FaceGate.

FaceGate is a native macOS app that lets you lock individual applications and unlock them using Face Unlock, Touch ID, or a password.

A few things I focused on from day one:

• Everything runs locally on your Mac
• No cloud processing
• No accounts
• No telemetry
• No subscriptions
• Fully open source

Features:

• Face Unlock powered entirely on-device using Apple's Neural Engine - little impact on cpu and gpu resources.
• Fast authentication with very low memory and CPU usage
• Liveness detection to prevent photo and video spoofing attacks
• Touch ID and password fallback
• Per-app unlock timers
• Automatic re-lock on sleep, wake, or screen lock
• Custom schedules for automatic lock/unlock periods
• Tamper protection that prevents FaceGate from being quit, disabled, or uninstalled without authentication
• Runs quietly from the menu bar with minimal system impact.

The entire project is written in Swift and designed specifically for macOS.

This is still actively being developed, and I'd genuinely love feedback from Mac users.

Some questions:

• Is app-level locking something you've wanted on macOS?
• Which apps would you personally lock?
• What security or privacy features would you like to see added?

Website: https://facegate-applocker.vercel.app/

GitHub: https://github.com/dweep-desai/FaceGate-Mac

If you think I did a good job, please feel free to leave a star on my github repo - means a lot to me.

Feedback, feature requests, bug reports, and contributions are all welcome. I'd love to hear what you think.

Static screenshots get scrolled past. A few seconds of motion makes people actually stop and look at your launch, your landing page, your ads.

Problem is that usually means hiring an agency for 10k or learning After Effects. Built Raylight so you can just do it yourself. Browser based, drop your product shots on a timeline, add cinematic effects, and export. The film above was made 100% in Raylight just animating shapes and images.

I’ve been working on Murmur, a local text-to-speech app for Apple Silicon Macs.

The new feature I’m building is called Projects / Story Studio, and it solves a problem I kept running into:

TTS tools are fine for one-off clips, but messy for actual audio projects.

If you’re making a podcast segment, audiobook chapter, course lesson, ad, or game dialogue, you usually need multiple speakers, multiple takes, pauses, reactions, music, edits, exports, and a way to come back to the project later.

So I built a project-based workflow:

Write a script → assign voices → generate dialogue → edit clips on a timeline → add music/SFX → export final audio.

It supports things like:

• multiple scripts inside one project
• Host / Guest / Narrator / Character speakers
• inline tags like [pause], [laugh], [chuckle]
• per-block regeneration
• timeline editing with waveforms
• media lane for music and SFX
• ripple editing and gap tools
• WAV/M4A export
• transcript and stem export

Everything runs locally on Mac, so long scripts and voice samples do not need to be uploaded to a cloud service.

I’m still polishing the workflow and would love feedback from Mac users, especially people who make podcasts, audiobooks, courses, YouTube narration, or game dialogue.

Check it out here - no sign-up needed: https://typocalypse.florianrudaj.com/

It's a little project I've had fun working on this weekend. If it sparks any interest I will continue working on it. Feedback is very welcome :)

Still a bit stunned typing this. Three months ago I was refreshing Stripe hoping for one sale. Now there's a small but growing group of people paying every month to keep their apps from leaking.

CheckVibe is a security scanner for vibecoded apps shipped fast with AI tools. You paste a URL or hook up a GitHub repo and it surfaces what's leaking: secrets in the frontend, open database rules, missing headers. Two of us, fully bootstrapped, no funding. Three months in and we've done about $7k in gross volume, 200+ all time paying customers, 5k signups. Public Stripe link in case anyone's seen too many fake numbers: https://profile.stripe.com/checkvibedev/ZumatA0Y

A few things that actually worked:

TikTok slideshows have carried us. Aesthetic Pinterest-style backgrounds with tool names overlaid, five slides, no branding on the account. One hit a million views and is still quietly sending signups weeks later. 15 minutes to make. As a 2-person team that can't afford to spend hours on content every day, this format is unreasonably good.

Cold outreach worked, but only the version where I scanned the prospect's app first and DMed them what I found. Generic pitches got ignored. Useful findings got replies almost every time.

Paywall design was a 3x lever. The first version blurred all results, which felt clever and barely converted. Switched to one that just shows the count of critical issues with the actual findings locked. Conversion tripled. Curiosity beats obfuscation.

What nearly killed me was mobile activation tanking compared to desktop and not catching it for weeks. Onboarding had too many steps on small screens. Cut two and the gap basically closed overnight.

If you've shipped something with AI tools and haven't really checked what's exposed, checkvibe.dev runs in 30 seconds. Scan for free, only pay if you have issues. Almost every app I've scanned came back with something.

One thread I posted here last week got me 13 paying customers in about 5 days.

But this thread only got 3 upvotes. Top comments called me a snakeoil seller and said I made up my customers. 39k views, mostly "nice try buddy".

I just kept replying. Stayed calm, answered everyone, even asked the ones roasting me what they'd actually want to see.

And the whole time it was quietly outselling everything else I'd posted.

My guess is the people buying were the quiet ones watching how I dealt with the ones going at me.

One spike though, mostly dead after 48h.

Anyone else pulling real customers out of Reddit, or did I just get lucky once?