r/iOSProgramming

Everyone talks about how you should design a product that helps you or fixes a personal issue, don't just build something you think people will like.

For me, I spent the last 6 months building an app for my "why", and now I find myself using it every day. Both my partner and I, as well as lots of my friends travel for work, and I think I found a niche to fill.

What was your "Why", and did your product help? Did you end up using your own app?

I have developed my own multiplayer game for the App Store, so I uploaded it, filled in all of the details, and as I was doing the Age Ratings questionnaire, I thought about usernames. Currently, I have not developed a system to filter usernames at all, so someone could enter an offensive username on signup and others could see it easily. Knowing that, how should I mark the User Generated Content and Profanity sections? I put "Yes" for User Generated Content, and "Infrequent" for Profanity, but just wanted some clarity on what the marks should be for something like this. There is nothing else in the app which would warrant any kind of profanity or user-generated content marks.

https://preview.redd.it/pds2gy0i240h1.png?width=1200&format=png&auto=webp&s=25a48f26df3a8d4bc21a1cb5e8e8b85a979f7b93

Hey everyone, I built an app called Biddie.

My neighborhood has been using a Facebook group for local auctions, but Facebook keeps changing how the app works and it has caused nonstop headaches. So I decided to build something made specifically for neighborhood auctions.

Each neighborhood gets its own auction group, items start at $1, and auctions run for 24 hours.

It’s meant to be simple. No shipping, no random far away buyers, just local neighbors bidding on local stuff.

Tech Stack

Biddie is built as a native iOS app using Swift and SwiftUI.

For the backend, I’m using Firebase for things like accounts, app data, images, notifications, and crash reporting. I’m also using Google Analytics so I can better understand how people are using the app and what needs to be improved.

The app uses Google AdMob for ads, and MapKit for the location and neighborhood side of things. I'm hoping that the ads are non-intrusive enough to make people okay with them. I don't want to riddle the views with Ads

For building, testing, and releasing updates, I used Xcode, GitHub, TestFlight, and App Store Connect.

Development Challenge

One of the bigger challenges was making auctions feel simple in the app, while still keeping everything working correctly behind the scenes.

When someone places a bid the app has to update the auction, show the current highest bid, and keep things clear for everyone looking at that item. I also wanted to keep witht he spirit of how our local group already runs (on Facebook) Every item starts at $1 - or really $0 but minimum is $1 sale price and runs for 24 hours, so there isn't a lot for users to figure out.

Another challenge was making sure the app felt local. I didn’t want it to feel like one giant marketplace. One of the biggest reasons I never use Facebook marketplace for example.

The whole point is for neighborhoods to have their own auction groups, so people are bidding on stuff near them and dealing with real neighbors instead of random buyers far away.

AI Disclosure

I self-built with AI help!

While I did build and design the app myself I did use AI to help me with things like brainstorming, bug diagnosis and, writing copy.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/biddie/id6758863986

U.S. only. This is my first app and was difficult enough so I’ll try tackling other local/countries in the future.

I know my biggest hurdle will be marketing it - im not very good at it but I'm just doing word of mouth including sharing a post on Facebook groups in different neighborhood groups in my area. I don't want to spend anything on ads but I was looking at the admob advertising as I have never seen that as an option.

I have spent about a year maybe a little more on this, if you count all the months of brainstorming and discussing with people in my community. I also want to thank Kavsoft because I have been watching the videos for years and practicing, playing around till I finally did it!

Edit: Turns out the Xcode simulator can't render Liquid Glass properly on my M3 MacBook Pro. Runs fine on a real device. A quick sanity check would have saved me a lot of time.

—

TL;DR — Liquid Glass seemingly unusable on iOS, even in the simplest possible example app.

I've spent several days locked in a battle with SwiftUI, trying to implement a toolbar in an iOS app that I'm working on. Desperate and exhausted, I'm here to ask the good folks at r/iOSProgramming.

So, using .toolbar and ToolbarItem(placement: .bottomBar), I keep running into the same issue. Even a simple button will not render correctly, flickering wildly between white and clear on press.

Thinking it might be a problem with my app specifically, I created a brand-new Xcode project, added a .toolbar, and observed the exact same behavior.

Here's the code to reproduce the issue:

import SwiftUI

@main
struct BottomBarTestApp: App {
  var body: some Scene {
    WindowGroup {
      ContentView()
    }
  }
}

struct ContentView: View {
  var body: some View {
    ZStack {
      Color.orange.ignoresSafeArea()
    }
    .toolbar {
      ToolbarItem(placement: .bottomBar) {
        Image(systemName: "person")
      }
    }
  }
}

#Preview {     
  ContentView() 
}

Okay, so maybe I'm still doing something wrong with the .toolbar / .bottomBar API. Let's try taking literally everything else out of the equation, with just one single view using the interactive glass effect:

import SwiftUI

@main
struct BottomBarTestApp: App {
  var body: some Scene {
    WindowGroup {
      ContentView()
    }
  }
}

struct ContentView: View {
  var body: some View {
    Circle()
      .frame(width: 128, height: 128)
      .glassEffect(.regular.interactive())
  }
}

#Preview {     
  ContentView() 
}

Still flickering. I feel like I must be missing something here, because it seems really unlikely that Apple would ship something this broken, and that they wouldn't have fixed it by now.

Is Liquid Glass really just broken completely, or am I doing something wrong?

Post:
I noticed that around 8% of my users are using iPadOS, even though my app is only designed and tested for iPhone.

I’ve been hesitating to officially support iPad because I don’t own an iPad and I’m not sure how different the UI is supposed to be. Right now, the app uses a simple native iOS design that works well on iPhone, but on iPad it’s basically just stretched iPhone UI.

For those who’ve been through this:

• Is it worth officially supporting iPad at this stage?
• Do iPad users expect a fully adapted UI, or is a “scaled-up iPhone app” acceptable?
• What’s the minimum effort needed to make an app feel “good enough” on iPad?

Would appreciate any advice from developers who’ve dealt with this before.

I have weekly and yearly plan, yearly plan has an introductory 3 day free offer. But what if I wanted to do 50% off on the yearly plan for a year, and still offer the 3 day free offer? Or like offer codes for free 2 weeks off.

Would I have to make new subscription offerings? Or can I do this with existing subscription offerings.

Adding a simple "Send feedback" screen (text box + submit) to a small SwiftUI app and trying to figure out where to send it without overbuilding.

Options I'm weighing:

  - Direct Discord/Slack webhook — dead simple, but the URL sits in the client and can be extracted/spammed. Fine for beta, sketchy for public release?

  - Supabase table with insert only RLS, optionally pinging Discord server-side. Feels "correct," bit more setup

  - Tiny proxy (Worker/Vercel/Edge Function) to keep the webhook secret.

  - Managed SDKs — Instabug, Sentry, Canny, etc

   For people actually shipping:

  1. What do you use, and would you pick it again?

  2. Is a client-side webhook really a problem in practice, or am I overthinking the spam risk for a small app?

thanks for you rhelp!

We’re a small, laid-back team focused on building solid products—no unnecessary process, no endless meetings. Just people shipping features, fixing problems, and helping each other out.

We’re looking for iOS developers (at least ~3 years of experience) who enjoy building real apps and improving user experience.

What you’ll do:

Build and improve iOS apps

Add new features and fix bugs

Work with APIs and backend services

Improve performance and app stability

Help ship updates and maintain live apps

Tech stack (flexible):

Swift (UIKit / SwiftUI)

REST APIs / GraphQL / Firebase

Git, basic CI/CD, testing

What you get:

Remote (US / EU / CA preferred)

$37–$49/hour (based on experience)

Part-time or full-time

If this sounds like your kind of work, send a short intro + your location 📍

I keep wondering why Apple doesn't let us localize App Store product page metadata the same way we localize in-app strings now with an .xcstrings file right inside Xcode.

I'm talking about the description, What’s New, promotional text, subtitle, and anything else that needs translation per language. Imagine just adding these strings to a catalog, seeing at a glance which languages are already done, what's missing, and what needs an update exactly like we do with in-app content. No more copy-pasting into App Store Connect or chasing version control manually.

It would be incredibly convenient to track translations, stay on top of updates, and keep everything in sync alongside the app code. Why do you think Apple hasn't built this yet? Is it a deliberate separation, or just not a priority? Curious to hear your thoughts.

Other than screen recording directly, what third party tools are the best for putting together a video preview for the app store?

Rotato?
Screen studio?

I am playing around with simple app development with help from Claude (I don't know how to code myself) and want to understand if I expose my Macbook to any possible risk from corruption or prompt injection. Conceptually speaking, is there any way how the Mac could become corrupted simply by what would be written in the code in Xcode (eg through Claude accidentally prompt injecting any malicious code and me copying it)?

I'm building a similar app as Walkup Pro (for my son's baseball team). They have the ability to link apple music accounts (I'm assuming MusicKit). What I'm struggling with is that their app has the ability to fade in/out a portion of the song (eg, 15s chunk), but I don't see them manipulating the system volume. If I pull down the control center I don't see my volume change during the fade up/downs.

For me this seems completely unavoidable. If I want to fade audio with MusicKit I have to use MPVolume​View and adjust the system volume (or at least, thats how I understand it).

Things work as they should now, the fades are correct and I'm happy with the functionality, but I'm curious how this other app did it so cleanly.

Thanks!

I have an app targeting global markets — for long Russia has been one of my top markets for downloads, yet the paid conversion rate is very low(<1%). I didn’t take it seriously until recently a Russian user reached out asking if they could pay without an Apple ID. I started to think that maybe they have common issue paying through Apple these days🤔.

I asked AI and it says it might be true due to US sanctions, but I still don’t have a clear picture. Does anyone know more about this? And if it’s true how do you cope with it?

After a few hours of coding, TapAnimals is about to go live on the App Store.
The concept is embarrassingly simple: tap an animal card, hear the sound and name. But the journey to ship taught me a ton.
Technical decisions worth sharing:
Audio: I went with AVAudioPlayer with all sounds bundled in the app rather than streaming. Adds ~8MB to the bundle but means zero latency and zero network dependency — critical when a 1-year-old is waiting for the elephant sound.
SwiftUI animations: Used scaleEffect + spring() for the tap feedback. Toddlers love the bounce. This single interaction detail got the best reaction during testing (my kid).
No backend: The app makes zero network requests. No analytics SDK, no crash reporter, no feature flags. Surprisingly liberating. The privacy policy is one paragraph.
App Store review: Taking about 24 hours. The iPad screenshot requirement caught me — you need 2064×2752 for 13" iPad even if your app is iPhone-first.

Biggest lesson: Shipping beats perfecting. Version 1 doesn't have half the features I planned. But it's in the store and real kids are tapping elephants.
App Store: [link when live]
Repo/stack: SwiftUI, AVFoundation, no third-party dependencies.

What would you add to v2?

I've been having trouble with search results but I think I determined the problem.

My app's name is "att app: Nearby File Sharing"

When I search as "att app" with space in the middle, my app doesnt show up. But it shows up when I write "attapp"

Is it because of the word "app" in it? Should I rebrand with no space or is there any other solution to this?