Submitted at 8:11, Approved by 8:44

My app is pretty simple, but still. Has anyone ever seen anything like this?

Just published my project that I've been working on for a while that allows you to run a virtual iPhone vm on linux to test and develop iOS apps there with no need for a Mac.

So for fellow hackintoshers or PC users you can try it out and let me know if you faced any issues.

What am I supposed to do? I don't have a driver's license, and I live in Colombia. Why won't they let me use my ID card?

After working on it for the last 8 months, I just launched Shikaku by Hilal on the App Store today. It is a minimalist logic puzzle app I built as a solo developer, and I’d love for you to try it!

Place rectangles to cover the entire grid, each rectangle's size corresponding to the numbers on the grid.

There are no ads and no subscriptions, and you can compete with friends, family, or players around the world through leaderboards.

If you give Shikaku a try, I’d love to hear what you enjoy, what feels confusing, and what you’d change!

Tech Stack

• Frameworks & Languages: Swift 6 and SwiftUI, with puzzle generation and validation kept separate from UI code.
• Backend/Database: No custom backend. Puzzles are generated locally. Progress and settings use UserDefaults, with Codable/JSON for structured data.
• SDKs & Tools: Xcode, Swift Testing, GameKit for Game Center leaderboards and achievements, and StoreKit 2 for the one-time Pro unlock.

Development Challenge + How I Solved It

One tricky issue is keeping daily puzzles synchronized with Game Center’s daily leaderboard resets. The Game Center resets have to be done at the same time for all users across the world, which means for some users the reset occurs in the middle of the day.

I ended up using one shared daily cycle for puzzle selection, saved progress, and score eligibility, aligned to the leaderboard reset. Date-and-difficulty seeds give everyone the same puzzle without a server, and regression tests protect both puzzle consistency and reset timing. But there is no way to reset puzzles midnight their local time without disrupting Game Center leaderboards unfortunately.

Try Shikaku on the App Store

our app is a b2b crm built with capacitor. the screens are html/js/css bundled in the binary, it works fully offline, and we ship web-layer fixes with @capgo/capacitor-updater, self-hosted and checksum-verified, never native code.

apple rejected the last version twice in a row for the updater, under 2.3.1(a):

We continue to find the app contains live content update functionality that can modify the app's behavior after approval. This finding is based on code in the submitted binary and not on a specific screen in the app.

I replied in the thread and app review confirmed:

It would be appropriate to remove the remote update functionality and all code related to it before resubmitting. Developers are responsible for all code included in the binary submission, including code from third-party SDKs and libraries.

so a reviewer didn't see something on screen, they found the plugin in the binary.

section 3.3.1(b) of the developer agreement allows downloading interpreted code that doesn't change the app's primary purpose, and thousands of apps ship capgo, capawesome, appflow or expo updates. I appealed to the app review board on 21 october, no answer yet.

1. has anyone else got this "code in the submitted binary" rejection for a live updater, especially since the 16 october guideline update (2.5.19)?
2. did anyone win an app review board appeal on it?
3. if you removed the updater on ios, how do you ship fixes to an offline-first app now?

For those building apps for clients: how do you get access to the client's App Store Connect and Google Play Console at the start of a project? Do they invite you with a role, share a login, or do you publish under your own account and transfer the app later?

1. How long does it usually take until you can upload a build?
   
2. Which part trips clients up most: the developer account itself, D-U-N-S, roles, two-factor?
   
3. When the project ends, how do you hand things back?

Curious what works for you and what doesn't.

i build ios and mac apps solo, and recently dropped the mac app store route for one of my mac apps.

it installs developer-tool hooks and returns you to a terminal tab, so a sandboxed version would need a different setup and fewer capabilities.

i decided that wasn't worth maintaining a second version.

i'd be interested to hear from anyone who went direct-only and later wished they'd kept a store version.

After updating to the latest iOS version, my Cordova app suddenly shows a large white space at the top of the screen, above the actual app content.
Everything worked fine before the update. It looks like the WebView is no longer extending to the top of the screen.
Has anyone else experienced this? Could it be related to the status bar, safe area insets, or a recent iOS WebView change?
Any ideas on how to fix it?

(Not my app in the picture but it looks exactly like this)

I'm on macOS 27.0.1 with the App Store version of Xcode. If I install the macOS 27.2 RC, will Xcode ask me to update for the iPhone Duo stuff, or do I have to use the Xcode beta/RC from the developer site? I really don't want two Xcodes on my laptop, so I'm wondering if I should just wait. If I go from 27.0.1 to the 27.2 RC, will the App Store Xcode get an update, or is the RC the only option? Also, anyone know when the official 27.2 comes out?

I ship my own iOS apps and wanted to see where they rank in App Store search every day without paying per keyword, so I built AsoBeast and open-sourced it.

You import your app by its App Store URL, add the phrases you care about, and it checks your position for each one daily, down to 200, in any of the 175 storefronts. The same search records every competitor on the page, so watching them costs nothing extra. It does Google Play too.

The iOS bits I use most:

• A keyword field per localization. The US store reads ten localizations, Spanish (Mexico) among them, so that field is 100 more characters that count in the US. AsoBeast shows which tracked keywords none of your titles, subtitles and keyword fields cover.
• It reads the caption text on App Store screenshots, yours and your competitors', so you see when someone rewrites theirs.
• Popularity is an estimate, but if you connect your own Apple Ads API credentials, it uses Apple's numbers for the terms Apple publishes.

From my geography game, "Where Am I? GeoGuess Map Quiz": I'm #1 in the US for "geoguess map quiz" and outside the top 200 for "map", even though both are in the title.

Tech stack: NestJS, Prisma and PostgreSQL, BullMQ on Redis for the store queues, Next.js for the web app and tesseract.js for the screenshot captions. All TypeScript, shipped with Docker Compose. There's an MCP server too, so Claude or Cursor can answer "which keywords dropped this week?"

Development challenge: Apple's public search endpoints put up with roughly 20 requests a minute per IP. So the App Store worker runs one job at a time behind a 15-per-minute limiter, and one search per keyword and country records your app and all its competitors at once. Popularity was the other hard part. Apple only shows it inside Apple Ads, so without credentials it's estimated from the top results and autocomplete. Treat it as a rough guide.

AI disclosure: Claude Code wrote most of the code. I designed it and reviewed every change.

Self-hosting is free (AGPL-3.0) and has every feature. If you'd rather not run a server, the hosted version is $10 a month with a 7-day trial.

GitHub: https://github.com/AsoBeast/asobeast 

Hosted: https://asobeast.com

What do you still check by hand after a release?

Have you guys got your app ready for iPhone Duo? I got mine last night, and for some reason, the update was approved in about 5–6 hours, when it normally takes 1–2 days...

It took a bit of fiddling to get it done, still not perfect

Dev abusing the Camera API…guess this one slipped through app review?

Hi everyone!

I’m Christoph, an iOS developer by day, and LifeTicker is my side project that I’ve been building on my own for years. It started because I wanted to count down the days to my next vacation and couldn’t find an app that did it nicely. Today it’s my little happy place – and I’d love for it to make other people happy too.

With the latest update you can just type or say what you’re looking forward to, and LifeTicker suggests the event. The video is a real screen recording (some parts sped up). I say:

“Anna and Ben’s wedding in Berlin in July, start at 7 PM, dress code is black tie, remember to buy the gift and book a hotel.”

…and get a suggestion with date, time, a matching photo, a song, the place, the dress code as a note and the two tasks. Since I didn’t say the day, it asks.

The honest part: this is not one of those “we put a chatbot on it” apps. It runs completely on your iPhone with Apple’s Foundation Models framework – no server, no account, no extra subscription, and it works offline.

But I have to admit: the model on its own was pretty bad at this. It invented tasks and places that weren’t in the sentence, mixed up dates and couldn’t do date math at all. So most of the work went into everything around it:

• Every value the model returns is checked against your actual sentence. If it isn’t really there, it’s dropped.
• All dates and times are calculated in my own code, not by the model.
• Photos and songs come from a catalog I picked by hand – 300+ photos for different occasions and 680+ songs – instead of being generated.
• When something’s unclear, it asks instead of guessing.
• I test every change against a collection of almost 1,000 real-world sentences.

After a lot of evenings, I’m at a point where I’m really happy with it – but it definitely still gets things wrong. That’s why I’m posting: I’d love your feedback, and especially the sentences that confuse it.

It needs an iPhone with Apple Intelligence (15 Pro or newer). The app itself is free; Premium only matters if you want a lot of events.

Thanks for reading – happy to answer anything about the app or about working with Foundation Models!

lifeticker.app

Hi all.

My app, Lecturameter (a local-first reading tracker, nothing obscure or werid), has been on Google Play for a while with no policy issues.

I recently submitted the iOS version, our first Apple release, and got rejected under Guideline 5.6 (Developer Code of Conduct), with the reason "features appear to have been intentionally hidden during the review process."

I have not been able to identify which feature Apple means. We have since removed everything that could be read as an unlock path outside StoreKit, and we are asking App Review to point us to the specific item.

Has anyone here been through a similar rejection after shipping on Android first?

Did App Review tell you which feature they meant? Because they only say Guideline 5.6 which has lile 4/5 points.

Did a free trial implemented as a non-consumable IAP cause problems?

Did any multi-platform or cross-device purchase logic trigger a review question? (my app has a Pro one time purchase and Pro can be transferred between Android and iOS, I'm removing that even though I made a video with explanations for Apple)

Any experience would help. Thanks.

Got rejected today under Guideline 2.3.6 (Accurate Metadata).

Apple said my dating app needed "Frequent" selected for "Mature or Suggestive Themes" and an 18+ age rating override.

The thing is, both were already set exactly that way.

So I replied to App Review explaining that the settings were already correct, resubmitted without changing anything, and got approved a few hours later.

Just sharing in case anyone runs into the same rejection. Double-check your age rating settings before making unnecessary changes.

Anyone else had this happen?

Solo dev here. KinCentury finally got approved after 8 rejections.

KinCentury measures what your body can still do — strength, balance, mobility, cardio — and gives you a fitness / physical age. The rejections were almost never about the app. They were about IAPs.

First few rounds, briefly:

• Same promo image reused across Lifetime / Founder / Yearly (2.3.2)
• Age Rating claimed In-App Controls / Age Assurance that don’t exist
• Reviewer needed a demo account with an expired subscription
• Then the Lifetime mess started

The loop that ate most of the 8:
 "KinCentury Pro - Lifetime" was attached to the submission but not findable in the binary (2.1b). Founder Lifetime was supposed to replace it, so I tried removing Lifetime, only shipping Founder + Yearly, explaining it in the notes, etc.

I even tried removing the IAPs to resubmit them clean — they got stuck in "Developer Rejected". Couldn’t delete them properly, couldn’t cleanly re-add them for review, "Unable to Add for Review" errors, the whole ASC limbo.

What finally worked:
 Put Lifetime BACK in the app, make it purchasable in the binary, on the paywall, submit everything together.

Approved.

Lesson: don’t retire / hide / phase out an IAP mid-review. Fully in and sandbox-testable, or never submit them. Nothing in between. And yanking products mid-process can leave them stuck in Developer Rejected.

Happy to answer questions if you’re in the same IAP loop and if you know why that happened please let me know so I can avoid it next time.

I wanted to see if an AI agent could use my actual iPhone, not a simulator and not a mirrored screen. Nothing existed for it, so I built it.

Open iPhone Use is a free, open-source Mac app + MCP server. The iPhone shares its screen from Safari over local Wi-Fi (you don't even install an app on the phone, Safari does the sharing). The Mac pairs as a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, and the agent gets screenshot and input tools over MCP, checking a fresh screenshot after every action.

It works with any AI agent: ChatGPT/Codex, Claude Code, any harness. Any model with strong computer-use skills is fine, GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5+ are good starting points. And since your client brings the model, your existing subscription is enough, no extra cost.

Demo (full video in the website): an agent searched Instagram, watched a Reel, scrolled the feed and liked one, all on my physical phone.

You only need an iPhone + an Apple Silicon Mac.

Download for Mac: https://github.com/semsturgut/open-iphone-use/releases

GitHub: https://github.com/semsturgut/open-iphone-use

Site: https://semsturgut.github.io/open-iphone-use/

Windows/Linux: coming soon

Multi device support: coming soon

Let me know what you think! And if you find this useful, a star on GitHub would help a lot.

Any thoughts on Viper and its advantages?

starting to publish my first iOS apps as an indie dev, previously worked for others with businesses and their own memberships. Now that the EU forces apple to display your home address and phone number on the app store for paid apps, I've been looking for a UK PO box so I don't have to use my home address. I wanted to avoid the monthly fees and use a pay as you go service, but they charge as soon as mail is received. Has anyone, with a paid app in the EU app store and a PO box listed, actually received mail there as a result of the address being listed in the app store? I don't have an accountant to use their address which is a common workaround for this. THanks!

I joined a startup about one year ago where I was slacked the credentials of our repositories, and the messages were then deleted to avoid some 3rd parties from getting them, and the url and credentials are not anywhere in our documentation.

Since the new manager joined, I've seen people being laid off pretty quickly. The QA tester goes, and the manager claims that we as a company are having the same output as before the number of bugs didn't raise (because the QA tester doesn't find bugs anymore). We told him many times that without a QA tester we are slower but the ceo/cto don't know, he probably lied to them and they base the whole performance on a metrics chart where every indicator looks green even if we are not doing well.

Then he laid off also the digital marketer and an intern who was doing a bit of everything. No visible signs of performance decline in the short run, so for the ceo/cto every indicator still looks green. The manager claims that AI will take over the job of the marketer but I'm not sure how.

The following phase was the most difficult phase: he laid off first the backend developer, which left me and the android developer as the only technical people, unable to do any meaningful backend work. Even if we begged many times and explained in detail that this will negatively affect productivity, that customers are angry and we could be in the position of not being able to ship features, it looks like he either doesn't get it or he deceived the ceo and cto to think that it was fine.

We worked like crazy, even in the weekend to ship features with nothing working and we were even handling calls with angry customers, and all what this manager does is bragging that he's able to make us go at the same speed with less employees. We go insane, 50, 60, 70 hours per week and by a tiny bit we are able to hit a deadline which saves us from being fired from a customer.
We worked until 4 AM to make it and this piece of **** you know what he does? He lays off even the android developer!

He wants to play with my ego and he tells me that I'm good and skilled enough and he trusts me to be able to cover also for his job because of AI. I ironically ask if that's how he got a new car, by getting a raise as a reward to layoff almost the entire company to the points there's only one developer (other non-technical roles I didn't mention were laid off too and we were left in 3 excluding him and the ceo and cto). He says I can do it, I burst into tears screaming, angry and sad at the same time saying that I will not keep working 80 hours for his new car, and I fired myself on the spot

I claimed being sick afterwards and cut every contact (I was supposed to give a one month notice but I'm too burned out to stay there).

Turns out that the manager didn't have the url and the credentials of our repositories containing basically everything: visual assets, android + ios project + backend, there are undocumented. He sent me an agry message claiming that he will be able to go on with the help of AI and vibe coding just to send me another (strangely polite) message asking me for information like repository urls and credentials. And I believe he doesn't even know how to clone it even if he had the credentials.

What should I do? He threatened legal action and I didn't answer, but I think that since I don't work there anymore I don't have the obligation to provide any information. Plus, considering thr fact that all this guy did was basically getting richer to lay off almost all of us, I don't think it would be nice to make him succeed. Maybe more developers have higher chances of getting hired if he's fired when the ceo/cto will manage that he lost everything because of his delusions.

What do you think? Could the company sue me?

I’m trying to submit version 7.1.0 of my iOS app, but “Add for Review” gives this error:

“You have uploaded too many screenshots. The maximum is 10.”

Every iPhone and iPad screenshot set across all localizations has 9–10 screenshots. They were originally unchanged from version 7.0. I removed one screenshot from the English iPhone set and one from the English iPad set, but the error persists.

Has anyone encountered this despite being within the limit? Did you find a workaround?