r/iOSDevelopment

I built a little guy who lives on Mac!

what is it? a physics-driven buddy that hangs from the top of your mac screen like a tiny bungee friend. flick him, he swings. drag the cord, he slides. ⌥Space and he's gone. peak vibes for a doom-scroll-adjacent workday.
the tech
🧮 real verlet rope sim, fixed 120Hz step,
🛌 sleeps properly — 0.0% idle CPU when you're not touching him
🔐 licensing lives in the macOS Keychain
🖼️ drop any PNG to hang your own logo/sticker/pet
🍎 50+ buddies — originals, cars, flags, the whole cast
shipped at $4.99 lifetime
the fun part: the landing page has a live in-browser physics playground — you can grab and flick him right in the browser before you even download. go play with him:
→ https://hangbuddy.app

Quick backstory: I'm not a developer. No CS degree, never written a line of Swift before this. But I kept missing return deadlines, forgetting free trials before they turned into paid subscriptions, and losing track of invoice due dates — so instead of just complaining about it, I decided to try building the fix myself using Claude Code (Anthropic's AI coding tool) as my actual dev partner.

The result is Untilly: you photograph a receipt, contract, invoice, or trial confirmation (or upload it as a PDF), it detects the relevant date, and reminds you before it's too late. A few decisions I made early on:

The AI only ever suggests a date — you always confirm it against the real document before it's saved. I didn't want a "trust the black box" tool for something people rely on.
No account, no cloud, everything stays on your phone.

Different wording for different situations (a return deadline feels different from a trial about to charge you, so the app treats them differently).
What surprised me building this without a coding background: the app itself came together faster than I expected, but everything around it — App Store Connect, subscription setup, tax forms, privacy questionnaires — ate at least as much time as the actual product. Nobody warns you about that part.
I also tried adding a Share Extension (send a PDF straight from Mail/Files into the app) and had to abandon it after fighting an entitlements bug for hours — sometimes you just cut scope and ship what works.

It's live now on the App Store, free to try with a few tracked items, optional premium for unlimited: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6792659522

Curious whether other non-technical folks here have tried building with AI tools instead of learning to code or hiring out — did it actually hold up once you got past the prototype stage?

Netsight is a network scanner and security toolkit I built solo in Swift 6 / SwiftUI, targeting iOS 26. It does live LAN scanning, device fingerprinting (OUI/DNS/HTTP), a force-directed topology map, on-device AI analysis via Apple Foundation Models, and CVE lookups against the NVD database.

Happy to answer anything about the architecture or the security tooling.

Download it here: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/netsight-wifi-tools/id6775736000

I built Stamped because finding great iOS apps started to feel like playing hide and seek.

The App Store tends to surface the same big brands year after year. Apps with large marketing budgets and established audiences get most of the visibility, while independent developers with genuinely useful apps often launch and disappear before anyone discovers them.
Then I started building my own apps and experienced the other side of the problem. Getting your app in front of real users is just as difficult as finding great apps in the first place.

That’s why I created Stamped.
Stamped is a community driven iOS app discovery platform where users can discover new apps, follow creators, leave ratings across five categories, and help quality apps gain visibility based on community feedback instead of marketing budgets.

If you’re an indie developer looking for more exposure, or someone who enjoys discovering apps beyond what’s featured on the App Store, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

https://stampedios.com/welcome

A few weeks ago, I released new app on the App Store. It got some traction on Twitter, so I opened App Store Connect feeling hopeful about the sales numbers. Instead, I saw "Not Enough Data".

I refreshed it few hours later. Same thing. I checked again the next day. Still not enough data. I actually saved a screenshot of this.

It is not only a launch-day problem. You ship a big update, announce it on Reddit or X, start an ad campaign, or unexpectedly get some attention, but the analytics are always behind.

So I built InitSignal. It is deliberately much narrower than a traditional analytics SDK. You add a lightweight Swift package to your app, and it sends one event when someone opens the app for the first time. After that, the SDK goes quiet.

Privacy was a constraint for me, I wanted the App Store privacy nutrition labels stay as minimal as possible, so the SDK only sends the basic context needed to make each signal useful. No identity, sessions, screens, or behavioral history. At the same time, the goal is to give developers as much useful information as possible without invading their users’ privacy.

The dashboard shows for each download:
- the app version
- device
- OS
- storefront

For paid apps, InitSignal uses storefront pricing to estimate gross revenue and proceeds after Apple’s cut.

I also added Slack and Telegram for notifications, which I've been using with my own apps for the past few weeks, and the dopamine hit is real.

I recorded a quick walkthrough showing how InitSignal works:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YajsKsYLdi4

Tech Stack
- Node.js and TypeScript with Postgres for backend and API
- React and TypeScript for the web app dashboard

Development Challenge

The interesting problem was deciding what “new” means without identifying or continuously tracking a user. The SDK stores a local first-launch marker so later launches send nothing. It also uses StoreKit 2 app transaction metadata to avoid reporting an existing customer as newly acquired when they first install a version containing InitSignal. The API deduplicates retry attempts on the backend.

It's available today, would love to hear your thoughts or any feedback!
https://initsignal.com

The Swift SDK is here:
https://github.com/InitSignal/initsignal-swift

If you ship iOS or macOS apps, how do you currently deal with the reporting delay after a launch or major update?

I built an app: Donefolio based on a habit I’ve kept for 9 years.

When I was a student, I had a feeling of emptiness. Whenever I looked back the past of my life, it felt like I hadn’t done anything.

I was tired of making New Year’s resolutions year after year, only to find that they were difficult. That made me feel so guilty and frustrated until I found a new way: Record every meaningful thing I’ve done.

It could be finishing a book, watching a TV series, exercising consistently for a week or month, taking a new trip to a new country or city, climbing a mountain like mount Fuji.

I kept this habit for 9 years. It changed my life.

During my senior year of university, I wanna turn it into an app, but it is hard to build cuz my iOS skills weren’t good.

A few months ago, I finally built Donefolio.

You can record the things that mean something to you and mark every country and city you’ve visited on Donefolio’s map.

Seeing all those experiences come together is really satisfying feeling.

Donefolio also has a bunch of share templates, so you can share your achievements and memories to social media.

I also added features like yearly review, visual summaries and milestones to help you look back on what you’ve achieved.

Download link：

https://apps.apple.com/jp/app/donefolio-achievement-tracker/id6798359115?l=en-US

Hi everyone,
I’m Mikel, a developer living in Gdańsk.
Over the last several months I’ve been building Happening because I always had the same frustration:

What’s actually happening around me right now?
I found myself jumping between Google Maps, Facebook Events, Instagram and various websites, but there was never one place showing what was happening in the city at that moment.

So I decided to build it myself.

Happening is a live city map where people can discover cafés, bars, events, interesting places and live Signals happening around them right now.

The app has just launched on the App Store, and before I continue improving it I’d really appreciate honest feedback from people who actually live in or know Gdańsk.
App Store:
https://apps.apple.com/pl/app/happening-live-city-map/id6780158881

A few questions for you:
Would you actually use something like this?
What’s missing?
What would make it genuinely useful for you?

Thanks! and please don’t hold back. I’d much rather hear honest criticism than fake praise. 🙂

After a lot of late nights, I finally launched my first iOS app: PixelPlay: IPTV Player.

It’s an IPTV player built specifically for iPhone & iPad.

I wanted something that felt more native to iOS and less cluttered than most IPTV apps.

Current features:
• M3U & Xtream support
• TV guide / EPG
• Multi-screen view
• PiP support
• Face ID protected channels
• No ads
• One-time unlock for $9.99 (no subscription)

Still super early, and I’d genuinely love honest feedback from iOS users.

What would you improve in an app like this?

App Store:
https://apps.apple.com/app/pixelplay/id6769178677

I've been working on my first full development project solo for about 3.5 months now, it started off as a simple math battle concept and quickly grew into something else.

The core mechanic is that math is the gameplay, I felt that turning mistakes into an opportunity to reinforce problem areas could be a fun twist on a tired genre. I spent months designing levels, animations, sounds, and music tracks to accent the level designs. Every additional item sparked more curiosity and exploration on my part, this is where I learned that scope should have been a top priority. What I estimated to take 2 months easily turned into 3.

I mixed in 6 mini-games to break the monotony and keep it casual, most casual games are played in short intervals so I wanted the game to feel like something you could come back to without feeling frustrated or bored. I genuinely had my hand on the design the entire way.

I don't think I would have been able to do all of it so quickly without the help of Anthropic's Claude Code CLI, I had some very light understanding of Xcode from previous attempts to learn Swift. I knew the terminology and the concepts but AI assistance genuinely made things more approachable and fun for me. Having that confidant to guide me through questions and blockages was honestly what kept me going.

It's true what they say about Kids Category games being very difficult to break into, but it ultimately boiled down to being in compliance with some common sense guidelines and designing with parents and younger audiences in mind. AI excels at this, if you really lean into its ability to research current guidelines it can save you hours of frustration trying to decipher documentation.

The part I hadn't planned for was the extra slow review process, my game was rejected 3 times in a row, but here's the thing: it was never my code that was the issue or my lack of compliance, it was literally App Store Connect reviewers not being bothered to read notes. That back and forth alone took almost 2 weeks to get past because each review took 3-4 days.

My advice, just be explicit and offer up annotated screenshots of the user flow and any area you think the reviewer might get stuck on. I wanted to shout "Come on, It's obvious!" but the friction points were understandable and easy to communicate with the help of AI. I think a lot of people panic and think they need to change something, most of the time communication just needs to be clearer.

To be clear, AI isn't a magical problem solver, it confidently walked into plenty of dead ends with me and I had to verify everything myself. It's like a very fast junior partner, it acted as a sort of assistant that orchestrated mundane tasks and tests to help streamline my production.

TestFlight was one of the nicest surprises, I was so worried about IAP not working, getting sandbox accounts running and receiving actual human feedback to test my changes was one of the most important things to do to find quirks and imperfections that affected flow. I can't wait to work on my next project and apply everything I learned from this one.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gizmos-math-arcade/id6791430789

Website: https://odysseylogic.com/gizmos-math-arcade/

I've never really been a social media person. At all.

About 45 days ago I basically decided I needed to stop ignoring it and actually learn how to promote my apps, so I started posting consistently and figuring things out as I went.

Since then I’ve had around 6.5 million total views across everything, which sounds like a lot, but when I look at it next to the actual number of people who downloaded my app, it’s honestly not that impressive. I’ve had around 30k downloads in total.

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been doing roughly 500–1,600 downloads a day and around 150–300 purchases/subscriptions a day, depending on the day. I’ve had a few days where I picked up around 1,500 new subscribers, but I obviously can’t rely on those kinds of spikes.

The funny thing is I haven’t spent anything on ads. I’ve just been doing everything myself.

And I’m still trying to understand why some platforms work and others just... don't.

Facebook, Instagram and TikTok have been pretty disappointing for me. Most of my actual downloads and sales have come from Threads, and I’ve started getting some word of mouth from X too (I literally only started posting there yesterday). I’ve also just started using Reddit, hence this post.

What I’m trying to figure out now is how to get to a point where 1,000+ downloads a day is normal rather than something I occasionally hit.

Ideally I’d like to do that without spending a bunch of money on ads. I know that probably sounds unrealistic, but getting to 30k downloads without spending anything sounded pretty unrealistic to me 45 days ago too.

So for anyone here who has actually grown an app organically, what would you do?

Would you just double down on the platform that's already working, or keep trying to figure out the ones that aren't?

And is there something I'm missing about why an app can get millions of views but relatively few downloads?

I'm still very new to all of this, so I'm genuinely interested in hearing what other people would do in my position.

If your iPhone and iCloud storage are full — you can upgrade your iCloud plan.
Or you can use PhotoDump Export (lifetime) for the price of one month of iCloud subscription.

It’s a utility that exports all iCloud Photos directly to your external drive even when your iPhone has no free storage. Works on iPhone, iPad, and M1+ Mac.

Lots of presets: from “only Favorites” and “only Videos” to “more than X years ago” and “larger than X MB”.

All selected photos and videos go into a Safe to Delete album so you can review and free up your iCloud storage.

No tracking, no analytics. Private by design.

privacy: https://saparjohnick.github.io/photodumpapp/privacy.html
app: https://apps.apple.com/app/photodump-export/id6785649717

I built an app: Donefolio based on a habit I’ve kept for 9 years.

When I was a student, I had a feeling of emptiness. Whenever I looked back the past of my life, it felt like I hadn’t done anything.

I was tired of making New Year’s resolutions year after year, only to find that they were difficult. That made me feel so guilty and frustrated until I found a new way: Record every meaningful thing I’ve done.

It could be finishing a book, watching a TV series, exercising consistently for a week or month, taking a new trip to a new country or city, climbing a mountain like mount Fuji.

I kept this habit for 9 years. It changed my life.

During my senior year of university, I wanna turn it into an app, but it is hard to build cuz my iOS skills weren’t good.

A few months ago, I finally built Donefolio.

You can record the things that mean something to you and mark every country and city you’ve visited on Donefolio’s map.

Seeing all those experiences come together is really satisfying feeling.

Donefolio also has a bunch of share templates, so you can share your achievements and memories to social media.

I also added features like yearly review, visual summaries and milestones to help you look back on what you’ve achieved.

Download link：

https://apps.apple.com/jp/app/donefolio-achievement-tracker/id6798359115?l=en-US

Finally published my app on app store, happy! Id appreciate if you guys checked it out and told me if i need to add or change anything, ive been working for 5 months on it 🥹

Background: I've been a product designer for 12 years, mostly fintech (Revolut, Itaú, some others). Never shipped an app myself. Six months ago I started actually writing code instead of handing off Figma files, and this is the first thing I've built end to end.

The idea

I kept watching salespeople, real estate agents, watch dealers, yacht brokers.. lose deals because they forgot things. Not big things. Small ones. What the client's wife's name was, which property they liked, what got promised three weeks ago in a WhatsApp thread nobody scrolls back through.

CRMs exist for this, but nobody in that world uses them. Because using a CRM means stopping the sale to go type in a form, and no one selling a $2M yacht is going to do that.

So I built the opposite: a custom iOS keyboard that surfaces client context inside whatever app you're already in. You open WhatsApp, start typing to a client, and everything you know about them is right there above the keys.

What actually broke

Custom keyboard extensions on iOS are their own special hell:

• Memory limit is brutal (~30-60MB before iOS kills you). My first version tried to load client data directly in the extension and got terminated constantly. Had to move everything to a read-only App Group cache written by the main app.
• No network access unless the user grants "Full Access," which triggers a scary system warning. Had to design the whole thing to work offline-first.
• Extension lifecycle is unpredictable — it gets killed and relaunched constantly, so any state you hold has to be reconstructable from disk in milliseconds.
• Debugging is miserable. Breakpoints in the extension work maybe 40% of the time. I spent an embarrassing number of hours with print statements.

The AI part

There are around 30 AI capabilities behind it (drafting responses, extracting facts from voice memos, matching clients to inventory). My first architecture was one giant system prompt handling everything. By capability #5 it was a mess — changing one thing broke three others.

Ended up rebuilding it as a thin router + isolated specialists. Each capability gets its own prompt with a hard scope declaration and a token cap. If a specialist gets asked to do something outside its scope, it returns OUT_OF_SCOPE:x and the router re-dispatches. Sounds obvious in hindsight. Wasn't obvious at capability #4.

Where it is now

TestFlight approved, Google OAuth verified (that took three weeks and a video that YouTube auto-removed for "sharing personal information" it was fake demo data). First version works. No users yet.

Built with Cursor + Claude, mostly at night after the kids sleep. Budget: about €200/month, which is the Cursor subscription.

What I'd like feedback on

• Is this shit really cool?
• Would love to know if the "AI that doesn't talk to your clients" positioning lands, or if it sounds like I'm just describing a limitation.

Happy to answer anything about the iOS extension pain specifically. Learned a lot the hard way.

Hey everyone,

I’m currently looking for a few people to test my new iOS app through Apple TestFlight. The beta is completely free of course and I’m mainly looking for honest feedback from developers and people who regularly test new apps.

If you’re interested, you can join the beta here:

https://testflight.apple.com/join/b4A6myp4

Would really appreciate anyone who takes the time to try it out and share some feedback.

Thanks!

So after the pain of building a golf app through various other app builders and like loveable and bolt and then coding it solely through a rented mac I found all the other issues users like me get frustrated with bridges and capacitors to staple together react native then various issues trying to struggle with apples body tracking and vision technology.

Coding agents have gone so far now but the key has been to structure and prepare them for building in swift is imperative to generating working complex apps. The idea behind this was that i wanted to be able to A rebuild my own golf swing analyser within the app and B make sure that it works first time of build so the rest is iteration.

The big issue with all of this is the need for a fleet of macs (semi solved) so each users get a build built on Xcode 26, this at small scale is actually my biggest cost even vs llm costs per user which even with our free giveaway actually acts as a decently priced lead (wont disclose exact figures).

Weve only been live for around 4 weeks and have seen 300+ users with a bunch of paid sign ups as well. Still loss making but to be expected so pl;ease dont try and run me dry on llm calls (there are loads of provisions for limiting and api abuse etc and i am eagled eye and will catch you almost instantly!)

Whilst i love our system and its my blood sweat and tears over the last 6 months our customer service is what i believe is the most important and impressive part of our system with all messages being answered and fixed with 1 hour so far through a web of agentry work with human sign off.

Interested to hear thoughts and happy to share the link and a possible free pro account to users whoa re super interested so drop me a message be super critical generate a free app and let me know what you think!

Orchapp.dev