1. App Store Boost

When an app is just launched on the App Store, Apple usually give a boost for a few days where your app name will get recommended in the autocomplete of the App Store search bar so make sure to target a keyword with good amount of popularity.

So for example your app is an interior designer ai app, you can use this app name format:

<popular keyword> - <your app name>

interior design ai - Miya

If you get lucky, this will bring hundreds or thousands of downloads in the first week depending on the popularity of the keyword that you targeted.

2. ASO (App Store Optimization)

Target high-intent keywords in your app name and subtitle.

Create high converting screenshots (sell the benefit/outcome instead of features).

Create an eye catching icon to stand out from the app store search results. This will increase conversion (impressions -> downloads). I use ChatGPT or Nano Banana to generate icons.

3. SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Just a single page website where you're targeting high-intent keywords that people are searching for on search engines like Google. You can use Google Trends for free to search for high-intent keywords that have good popularity. Or you can also use a paid tool like Ahrefs, Keywords Everywhere etc... but Google Trends is usually good enough as a start.

In my experience, it's easier and faster to rank for your target main keyword if it's present on the domain name itself.

Another side effect of SEO is there's a good chance that you'll also get recommended by LLMs like ChatGPT.

4. Organic UGC

Create content that you can cross-post on multiple social media platforms like Tiktok, Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, etc...

You can use formats like tutorials, problem -> solution, listicle, meme, storytelling.

You have 2 options:

a. Short-form videos (e.g, face reaction that catches attention + demo of your app).

b. Slideshows (3-6 images) which are significantly easier and faster to make. You can scale this to many accounts to maximize reach and chances of going viral. You can do this manually or fully automate it. I personally started the manual way but I have now fully automated it with my own tool called DistributionMaxx because I now have 16 accounts and it now takes a lot of time and effort to manually manage them.

For organic UGC, the funnel is:

views -> app downloads -> purchases

5. Apple Search Ads

You can target high-intent keywords that people are search for in the app store. I recommend reading this free detailed guide written by Ivan Sparrow.

I hope this post helps someone to get their first users and paying customers.

Happy to answer any questions if you have any.

I recently shipped a new room scanning mode in Voxelio that turns an iPhone scan into a realistic 3D scene.
This kitchen was captured entirely on an iPhone 17 Pro!

What surprised me most is that this feature also brought me my first paying subscribers.
It’s still early, but seeing someone actually pay for something I built felt like a pretty big milestone.
I’d love feedback from other iOS devs - both on the scan quality and on how you’d think about improving/converting a feature like this.

https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6764829442?pt=128471088&ct=reddit&mt=8

I make a Markdown reader for macOS and iOS. You point it at a folder and read what is in it.

For months the onboarding did the obvious thing: explain the idea, then ask you to connect a folder. The numbers were bad in a specific way. Of the people who reached the end of onboarding, only about half ever opened a document. But of the people who did connect a folder, 92% opened something immediately.

So the app was not failing to deliver. It was asking for homework first. Read the flow back as a to-do list and it is obvious.
Save your AI output as files —> Put them in one folder —> Connect that folder. Three chores before anything renders.

Someone who downloaded out of curiosity has none of that set up, meets a system file picker with nothing useful to point it at, and leaves.

The fix was to ship something to read. On first launch the app writes a small folder of example documents into its own container and attaches it as a connected root, with no picker involved.

Four things about that turned out to matter more than the idea itself:
• It lives inside the app’s own container, so it needs no security scoped bookmark and no sandbox grant.
• It does not count toward the free tier’s folder limit. Otherwise the folder I shipped spends one of their free slots on a folder they did not choose, and the first folder they actually pick hits a paywall.
• It does not fire the activation analytics event. Otherwise it inflates the exact metric it exists to move, and the before and after become unreadable.
• Removing it is permanent. A folder that reappears after you dismissed it is spam.

The part I did not expect: last week someone bought the paid unlock after about eight hours in the app without ever connecting a folder of their own. They read the bundled examples, met a prompt, and paid. I had been thinking of the demo content as a warm up for the product. For that person it was the product.

Happy to go into the analytics side if anyone is curious.

Hey everyone! I’ve been working on Luma, a gamified screen time app (here’s my introductory post if you’d like to check it out: https://www.reddit.com/r/iosdev/s/f7l5Qoelh0).

After a week of sharing the app and analyzing metrics in App Store Connect and PostHog (thanks to those who suggested PostHog, it gives much more insight than Apple), I’m realizing my onboarding could use some work.

Currently, only ~2.5% of downloads end up creating their first routine.

I’d love to get your feedback based on your experience:

1. Benchmarks: Are these numbers typical/decent for early stage, or what conversion rate should I realistically aim for?
2. Onboarding flow: Mine is very functional (users just set up their first routine right away). How do you design yours to keep users engaged?
3. Architecture: Do you hardcode your onboarding into the app (requiring App Review for tweaks), or do you use remote/plug-in tools (server-driven UI, onboarding services, etc.) to iterate faster?

Would love to hear your thoughts and recommendations. Thanks for your time and help!

Hi! I’m the dev behind PostSpark, a tool for creating beautiful image and video mockups of your apps and websites.

I recently launched a new feature: Mockup Animations.

You can now select from 25+ devices, add keyframes on a simple timeline, and export a polished video showcasing your product. It’s built to be a fast, easy alternative to complex motion design tools.

Try it out here: https://postspark.app/device-mockup

Hi! I made a new interval timer app with the intent to stand out from the many others. In addition to tap controls and voice control, my app introduces camera gestures!

You can use different hand signals in front of the camera to start, pause, resume and complete the workout.

I thought this would be nifty if you've got sweaty palms in the gym or if you have your phone far away from you and you want to take a break, etc

The app is here:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/interval-timer-workouts/id6798002636

If you want to actually be a beta tester for this, I'll give you lifetime for free. Just DM me. It's my way of saying thanks to anyone who takes time out of their day to try this out.

My first game made it through the review process. It is totally free with some premium upgrades that are totally optional.

Check it out please, give me some feedback on ways to improve it, any hitch that you see, etc. Thanks a bunch, happy coding!

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/air-hockey-max-arena/id6800162948

I noticed that just watching numbers tick up didn’t feel rewarding enough at the end of a long focus block.

So I added a little gamification: every time you finish a focus session, a physical tomato drops into your daily jar. Seeing them pile up throughout the day makes staying consistent feel like a mini-game rather than a chore.

What do you think of this visual reward idea? Does physical visual feedback help your focus?

I'm surre I had auto-renewal turned on for my apple developer membership since I've ben atuomatically charged since 5 years. This year, I got a pop-up saying my membership is about to expire and to make sure it's on auto-renewal. I followed the link to my profile, it said "renews on ... " but that pop-up still remained whenever I opened App store connect. When the day of renewal came, I was informed that my membership expired and to download the app to renew my subscription. Online it said I could renew it in browser too, but I didn't see the option. However, neither did I see the option when I downloaded the app. I reached out to Apple and within 3 days they let me know to check the app again and that the option to renew should re-appear and my apps would become available again on the App store. I did that and it was true.

However, now I am subscribed through the Apple subscription option on their app. Given what happened with app revenue for Apple dropping drastically this year because the stripe interface for payments is now allowed to be interateg more smoothly into apps interfaces, made me wonder if Apple is somehow trying to compensate for the losses in app revenue by moving Apple developer payments through their app system?

Given it's a public company and a bigger drop in app revenue may impact their stock price, do they try to mitigate that?

I spent the last month building my first iOS app and it finally made it through App Review.

It’s called Gyminion a fitness tracker where you can track workouts, nutrition and progress, with a virtual pet that reacts to your consistency.

The idea was basically to make tracking workouts feel less like filling out a spreadsheet and more like a game.

Building the app was honestly the fun part. Now I’m finding out that getting actual users is a completely different problem lol.

I’d really appreciate any feedback from other iOS devs, especially on the UI/UX or onboarding.

Happy to answer anything about building it too.

link: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6798301039?pt=128556977&ct=reddit_launch&mt=8

While building Monymo, my SwiftUI work and earnings tracker, I ran into timer accuracy issues whenever the app went into the background.

The fix was surprisingly simple: stop treating the timer as the source of elapsed time.

Now I store timestamps and session state, then calculate the actual elapsed time when the app becomes active again. The one-second timer is only used to update the UI.

Handling pause and resume made it a bit more complicated, but this approach completely removed the drift I was seeing after backgrounding or reopening the app.

How do you handle long-running timers in your iOS apps?

Hey everyone,

I just found out about App Clips recently and I can't figure out why they are not everywhere.

Instant experience, easy way to showcase a product, no conversion barrier... and yet I barely ever see them in the wild. I also guess a lot of non-tech users don't even know it exist. Is this a chicken and egg problem ?

Why aren’t more developers and apps using them? Is it the limits / setup / discovery issues, or something else I’m not seeing?

Would love to hear real world stories:

• Anyone here successfully used App Clips for acquisition or growth?
• Coolest examples you’ve seen or built?
• Any growth-hack style results

I’m developing Recapp (a US sports highlights app, "like ESPN & TikTok had a baby") and one idea I'm playing with is letting fans watch a game's highlight or breaking news stories via App Clip - giving them a taste of the app without downloading it.

Any advice or similar experiments you’ve seen?

Thanks in advance - curious what the community thinks.

Has anyone here tried this out?

Hi - I’ve just released my first iOS game. The game is nothing special, but wanted I small win in the dev space. Looking for advice on I game ads.

• I’ve added ads for extra hints - I.e. watch an ad get more hints. To me this is fine as the user opts in and accepts.

• My concern is the interstitial ads, I’ve currently configured one to pop up every 10 completed games. Though it lags a bit one triggered so it appears randomly through the next game. Plus I haven’t gotten google ads approved for all advertisers so the ads I get are these AI gf bots that look way too young (I was playing on the train and this ad comes up it’s so weird)

Ultimately, I would like some ads but not a fan of how it is configured atm and would completely drop ads if it makes the game annoying to play.

My game is a generic puzzle with levels 1-1000. I was thinking rather than having a 10 game counter, have an ad level to unlock the next level. E.g finish level 10 unlocks Ad level, watch ad unlocks level 11 etc.

Thoughts and advice is appreciated. Thanks

I build an AI fitness app for people who usually train alone like me called ZYM: Live AI Video Coach: it's useful when you are not sure about your exercise form and blindly train for a long time alone not seeing any progress. Or you can also see it as a cheaper and more accessible option than private trainer.

Since we've launched for a while with no paid user yet, I'm curious how did you get the first batch of paid customers and how did you test willingness to pay before you had enough traffic for statistically meaningful pricing experiments? Any feedback or suggestion would be appreciated, and happy to chat!

Seems like we’re all on here doing the same things building apps, looking for feedback/testers, sharing launches, and trying to get users.
So I made a Discord where we can actually connect, share our apps, get feedback, find testers, and help each other out.
It’s brand new, so come help us build the community 🤝
https://discord.gg/wyWruDYTG

I’ve been spending way too much time on my app recently, and I think I finally understand why indie dev is so addictive.
The loop is basically:
want something → build it → make it look nicer → share it → someone uses it → get feedback → build more
I’ll be using the app and think “why can’t it do this?”
Then I remember… oh yeah, I’m the developer lol. I can just make it.
A few hours later, something that only existed in my head is actually running on my phone. That feeling is sooo satisfying.
My background is ML engineering, so I also really enjoy making the local inference pipeline work well. Seeing live transcription, speaker separation and translation all happening directly on the phone still feels kinda magical to me.
But honestly the best part is when other people start using it.
Someone reports a bug. Someone asks for a feature. Someone tells me they use it for lectures or meetings. Sometimes someone even asks to beta test the next version.
Even bug reports feel good lol. Someone actually cared enough about something I made to find the bug and tell me.
I also somehow went from ML engineer to spending hours making App Store posters and moving text around by 5 pixels.
Didn’t expect that part to be fun, but it is.
The app is called LiveTranscriber btw. These are some posters/screens I made recently.
Every time I finish something I enjoy it for about 5 minutes, then think:
“hmm… I can probably make this better.”
And suddenly it’s 3am again.
Would love some feedback on the UI/screenshots too.

Working on the App Store screenshots for Tesorin, my personal finance app.

Trying to make them clean, understandable, and not look like every other finance app.

Be brutal:

• Which one catches your attention first?
• Anything look too busy / boring / confusing?
• What would you change?

I’m building a very minimal app. The full app would be free (no feature gating), with an optional £5/month subscription for people who want to support its continued development.

The subscription wouldn’t unlock extra content or functionality, the free and paid experience would be identical. This would be explained clearly before purchase.

Apple’s guidelines say auto-renewable subscriptions must provide “ongoing value.” Does that mean I need to offer subscribers something tangible, or can voluntary ongoing support itself be acceptable?

Has anyone submitted something similar, and if so, how did App Review handle it?

Thanks

Last year I opened my saved folder on TikTok and realized I had around 400 recipe videos in there.

I had cooked maybe 15 of them.

That was not originally an app idea. It was just a slightly embarrassing folder on my phone.

MiseSnag started with one simple loop: paste a recipe link from TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube, then get back the ingredients, quantities, and steps.

Then I installed my own build and began treating every small annoyance as an issue ticket.

“Why can’t I add all of these ingredients to one shopping list?” So I built it.

“Why can’t the list group things by grocery aisle?” Built that too.

“Why do I have to copy the link instead of sharing straight from TikTok?” Time for an iOS share extension.

“Why can’t I rescale the recipe or leave a note for next time?” You can probably guess what happened next.

Using your own app is like having a product manager who follows you into the kitchen and the grocery store. The roadmap becomes whatever annoyed you five minutes ago. It is dangerous, but seeing a tiny frustration become something running on my phone later that day is ridiculously satisfying.

The most surprising engineering part is that the AI was not the hardest bit. Getting a real, usable video often was.

TikTok and Instagram can serve video and audio separately, or return a download that technically succeeded but is silent. I ended up with a fallback chain of video providers plus media validation before transcription and extraction. At the other end, a random 40-second recipe video becomes a structured recipe and shopping list. That moment is still the reason I keep reopening the project.

Somewhere along the way, the work stopped being only APIs and React Native. I now spend an embarrassing amount of time exporting App Store screenshots again because a headline feels two points too large.

Turns out I enjoy that part too.

That project became MiseSnag. It is live on the App Store, and these are the five screenshots I made for it.

I would genuinely love blunt feedback:

- Does the first screenshot explain the app quickly enough?

- Does the serif + sans-serif combination feel intentional or mismatched?

- Is the dark green distinctive, or just heavy?

- Would you keep the free-tier message second, or show the extracted recipe there instead?

Hey everyone,

I just released Luma: App blocker, an app I built to block distracting apps and websites through routines.

The idea came from seeing how expensive many Screen Time apps are, especially from a LATAM perspective, and from friends dealing with gaming (casino) and other apps.

Building it was a challenge but Apple’s Screen Time APIs were probably the hardest part. I wanted more flexibility than just “block these apps.”

I also skipped Rive, as everything suggested for cool animations, for v1 and built the animations from multiple animated pieces instead.

App Review took around 4 days, with almost daily reviews, which is weird since i read takes up to 4 weeks, as some other people over here mentioned. Some issues seemed automated, but the final feedback was actually pretty useful. For example, when you deal with subscription, you have to add the app first for review, the go to subscription, add the group and individual plans from the page (first time doing that in case someone need)

It’s live here:
https://apps.apple.com/co/app/luma-app-site-blocker/id6794456289?l=en-GB

If anyone wants to try it, I’d really appreciate feedback. Happy to talk about the technical side or App Review too, what do you think about the design? All the feedback you give is really helpfull as it has been on the Appstore since last thursday.

Once again, thank you so much and have a great day.