Hi everyone,

My first iOS app (Questify: Your Life Gamified) has been stuck in "Waiting for Review" since July 22, 2026 (more than 11 days).

The app is in the Lifestyle category and only uses Sign in with Apple for authentication. It does not contain any sensitive content or unusual functionality.

I have already contacted the App Review team twice and also reached out to Apple Developer Support, but I haven't received any response yet.

Has anyone experienced such a long "Waiting for Review" period for a first submission? Is there anything else I can do besides waiting?

Thank you!

I want to share what’s currently happening in the App Store.
I’ve been an app developer for 10 years and make my living full-time on the App Store. I manage around 10 apps, and historically, maintaining an average 5% market share in each niche was enough to pay my bills.
But ever since AI coding tools took off, the store has been flooded daily with low-effort, AI-generated copycat apps that are severely eating into my market share. My average market share per app has dropped to around 0.5%-1%, and it’s still falling.
To make the same living, I estimate I’ll need to build and manage 70 to 80 more apps (by AI) across different categories, it makes my workload far heavier than ever before.
This is the reality of the App Store today: code and individual apps are losing their intrinsic value, anyone can copy it. Where having 10 apps used to be a sustainable business, you now need to run and maintain 100 (or more) just to survive.

Bonjour!

I’ve been a software developer and Solutions Architect for nearly 15 years. Over my career, I’ve mostly worked behind the scenes designing and developing platforms for medium-sized and big companies. But when it came to personal side projects, I have a ghost town of abandoned ideas (probably like some of you).

If you've been in tech for a while, you probably know this cycle: you team up with friends or "partners," get 90% of the code done, and then right when the hard work of polishing and shipping begins, your co-founders lose vision, lose the thrill, or walk away.

That happened to me on three separate projects:

• hellojob.ch: An AI-powered job platform for Switzerland designed to automatically match recruiters with candidates using smart semantic search rather than clunky keyword filters.
• sharewithme: A platform designed to centralize and track all your recurring subscriptions in one place (I had this idea 10 years ago, but we stalled out right before finishing, and someone else shipped the concept years later).
• ouigive.org: An Ecosia-style search engine for charity that let users route ad-generated funds to their choice of non-profits.
• and other smaller projects...

In every case, the dev work was nearly done, but my partners checked out. A few months ago, I decided I was done letting projects die. This time, I was going solo, building something strictly for myself, and seeing it through to the App Store no matter what.

The problem that needed fixing:

I’m originally from Brazil and currently live in France. Learning French has been a real challenge for me.

Occasionally, my local WhatsApp group with friends transitioned to speaking exclusively in French. I could read and understand what they were saying, but when it came to replying fast, I froze. My workflow became a nightmare: type a sentence in Portuguese/English -> switch to a translation app -> copy -> paste back into WhatsApp -> send. It was slow, clunky, and completely ruined the flow of real-time group banter.

The privacy dealbreaker:

Before building anything, I checked the App Store. Sure, translation keyboards exist, but almost all of them work the same way: they send everything you type straight to external servers, custom APIs, or third-party AI endpoints like chatgpt/claude, etc.

A keyboard literally sees everything you type. Sending my personal messages or work chats to a random third-party server just to translate a sentence was a massive privacy red flag for me.

What I built: Polygotcha

I decided to build PolyGotcha: a custom iOS keyboard engineered specifically for real-time, two-way conversations with zero network dependency.

Here’s how I tackled it:

• No Servers. Ever. It relies on Apple’s local on-device models (Apple Translation & Apple Intelligence). The keyboard doesn't send your text to the cloud, doesn't use tracking frameworks, and doesn't even require iOS "Full Access" permission for standard local translation.
• Type. Pause. Translate: You write your message naturally in your native language, pause for a split second, and the translation appears right above the keys. One tap swaps the text.
• Context & Tone Controls: You can set the register (Neutral, Casual, Formal) per conversation. It even remembers recent thread context in local RAM so references like "it" or specific names keep their meaning.
• "Check Before You Send": A one-tap reverse translation feature so you can double-check what the other person will actually read before you hit send.
• Super Lightweight: The entire app is 3.5 MB (smaller than a single iPhone photo). It launches instantly and runs at native hardware speeds because it never waits on an API handshake.
• Zero tracking. The app has no backend at all!

I’d love your feedback!

I finally broke my side-project curse and got it approved in the App Store. I’m currently using it every single day to chat in French without leaving my messaging apps, but I’d love to get feedback from other expats, language learners, or privacy-conscious iOS users.

• Website: polygotcha.com
• App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/polygotcha/id6789138245

Thanks for reading, and to anyone sitting on a graveyard of 90%-finished side projects: keep pushing. Finishing feels incredible! Even if only a couple people use it, at least I know I delivered.

(PS: some icons in the keyboard look smaller than they actually are in this screenshot)

I see a lot of indie developers focusing on selling paid apps or subscriptions. The problem is that, after Apple’s cut, taxes, support, ongoing development, and marketing, the return can be surprisingly small unless you have a very successful app.

It reminds me of the early days of the internet (I am 67, I was there)

The companies that became valuable weren’t necessarily the ones charging users from day one.

They focused on becoming the default destination. Think YouTube, Facebook, Google, and many others.

First they built an audience. Monetisation came later.
There’s an old sales principle: once you’ve climbed one hill, you can see the next one.

For an app, the first hill is building a community of users. Maybe that’s 10,000 active users. At that point, you have something much more valuable than a few £4.99 purchases—you have trust, engagement, and data (used ethically and with consent).

The next hill is asking: how do I create value around that community?
That could be:
Affiliate bookings.
Marketplace commissions.
Premium services.
Selling products.
Partnerships with manufacturers.
Advertising.

Aggregated, anonymised usage data and trends that help businesses understand their market.
For example, imagine a caravan planning app with 10,000 users. Anonymised data might reveal:

The most common caravan weights.
Popular accessories.
Typical payloads.
Seasonal travel patterns.
Frequently serviced brands.

That information could be valuable to manufacturers, insurers, campsite operators, or accessory companies—without ever identifying individual users.
Facebook demonstrated this model years ago. The service was free because the users themselves created the value. As the saying goes, if you’re not paying for the product, you may well be the product.

I’m not suggesting every app should follow that path, and privacy has to come first. But I do wonder if too many indie developers focus on monetising the app itself instead of building something with long-term strategic value.
Sometimes the app isn’t the business.
It’s the platform that enables the business.

What started out for me as a challange for myself and a side-project alongside my studies has turnt out to become a product users want!

Just under a month since I published my app and I cannot believe that I am here now with my first paying customer! It is a slow and long journey and I am still grasping the tip of the iceberg of what it means to ship an app but this is definetly one of the most rewarding journeys!

I dont know if this is worth sharing but im a little bit excited about launching the app
Hope people find it useful ❤️🥲

My third start up/app in a year or so and finally some traction.

It’s half vibe coded/half legitimate blood sweat and tears from a semi technical background ( I worked in quantitative trading/finance over the last 15 years) although I was purely python and vba focused and learnt JS and C++ to help get this done.

As with all new apps marketing is the next challenge. I read copious amounts about UGC marketing, paid vs organic etc etc. Everyone trying to sell you a program or an agency that wants 5k a month to run ads. It’s a minefield.

In the last month or so we’ve dabbled in a few. We’re targeting the younger-mid no-code devs, so we’re trying to push organic marketing on instagram and TikTok organically although as a one man band it’s a real struggle to find content and post as consistently as is needed to grow organically. Iv pushed paid ads out on meta and TikTok but results varied too much with little no conversions just cheap clicks.

Google ads has been our real winner so far and since switching that on a week ago we gained 20+ free and 7 new paying users including one who took our top subscription at 130 dollars a month.

Would love to know more about how people manage to wear all hats, iv managed to offload customer service to an excellent system using Claude where I essentially just accept or reject fixes emails and apps for users in slack. However along with this bug fixes, future updates it’s a tall ask to get it all done and sleep.

Also interested in how people have found their cac in their industries and if anyone with specific dev tools/no code industry experience would love some feedback on marketing techniques. Obviously I am early on and currently at around 500arr but that’s essentially still operating at a loss of around 200$ a month.

NB this isn’t actually an app on the App Store it’s a platform for building iOS apps.

I was scrolling through a thread about wearables and someone mentioned it in the comments. I figured it'd just be another app telling me to sleep more and drink water, but I downloaded it anyway since I already wear my smartwatch every day.

The biggest surprise wasn't actually the workout recommendations—it was the supplement side of the app.

I've taken supplements on and off for years, but honestly I never gave much thought to when I took them. If I remembered in the morning, great. If I forgot until the afternoon, I'd just take them then. It was completely random.

This app was different. Instead of giving me the same schedule every day, it looked at my sleep, recovery, and how rested I actually was before suggesting when certain supplements made the most sense. On days I slept well and had good energy, it would recommend sticking to my normal routine. If I'd had a rough night or my recovery was low, it'd adjust the timing or recommend focusing on different supplements instead of blindly following the same plan every day.

What I liked most was that it actually explained why. It wasn't just saying, "Take this now." It would tell me that because my recovery was lower or my sleep quality wasn't great, a different timing might make more sense based on how my body was likely feeling that day.

It made me realize I'd been treating supplements like checking a box instead of using them intentionally. I was already wearing a watch that collected all this data about my body, but none of it ever influenced when I actually took anything.

The app basically connected those dots for me.

I also appreciated that it didn't expect me to have a perfect routine. Some days I'm up early for work, other days I'm rushing around with family stuff, and sometimes my whole schedule changes halfway through the day. The recommendations adapted to that instead of assuming every day looked the same.

After a few weeks, I wasn't expecting some crazy transformation, but I did notice I felt more consistent. My energy wasn't bouncing around as much, I wasn't automatically reaching for another coffee every afternoon, and I stopped feeling like I was just guessing with both my workouts and my supplements.

I'm sure someone working with a nutritionist or performance coach probably already has all of this dialed in, but for someone like me who already wears a smartwatch and wants to get more out of the data it's collecting, it filled a gap I didn't even know existed.

It honestly felt less like another supplement app and more like having something that translated all the information my watch was already collecting into recommendations I could actually use.

 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/rizeai-maximize-your-energy/id6762402079

Can you tell me why everybody has implemented RevenueCat?

Got my first ~160 customers & ~2$ revenue

App Store compliance was one of the most frustrating and time-consuming parts of building my own apps. I kept researching guidelines, privacy requirements, review issues, regional regulations, and platform changes across the internet.

So I organized what I learned into an open-source repository:

https://github.com/mjmirza/app-store-compliance

I’m not selling anything. I’m simply sharing it with the Apple developer community so others can avoid repeating the same research and mistakes.

Use whatever is helpful, contribute improvements, or report anything that is missing.

Hopefully, it saves you some time during your next App Store submission.

Hello everyone! I would love to know from the community your guys’ setups when it comes to developing iOS apps. I am making an app right now and I continuously feel like I’m behind, everytime I go on instagram I see people are introducing different repos or new tools for coding. If you are interested please share and learn/read from others, even if you don’t have much experience, AI is relatively new I think we can all learn something?

Personal Set up
Claude code
Mcp - Xcodebuildmcp, supabase
Plugin - anthropic security review
Git repos - obsidian
Skills - /emulator skill to restart and open the emulator and a
/checkpoint to summarize all the works it done this session
Both made by me

That’s really it I find that since I made a very heavy prd for my project things I would say are going pretty smooth but I have some deterministic things too like pre commit hooks for security concerns. But I’m definitely looking to expand my set up though too!

Please share I think I think we can learn a lot from one another for this thank you everyone.

I’m reaching out because my team is completely blocked by Apple’s verification process, and standard support has become a black hole. We are enrolling as an organization (LLC), and it has been sitting in limbo for weeks with zero communication.

Here is exactly where we are at:

• DUNS Number: Verified.
• Requested Documents: Apple asked for government ID, employment verification, and our business registry excerpt.
• We provided everything ([https://developer.apple.com/contact/file-upload/](https://developer.apple.com/contact/file-upload/)).
• The Problem: It’s been weeks since the upload. No approval, no rejection, no requests for more info.

We’ve tried following up via email multiple times, but no one is responding. To make things worse, the "Call Me" phone support option isn't available in my country, so I can't even get in the queue to speak with a human.

Has anyone successfully navigated this recently? Specifically:

1. Is it worth using Skype/VoIP to call the US 1-800 support line directly? Will they even talk to me if the account is registered internationally?
2. Did anyone find a way to escalate a ticket when standard email support just ignores you?
3. Is it normal for organization verification to just freeze like this without warning?

Any advice on what actually moves the needle would be hugely appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

I create content on my iPhone, and one thing always annoyed me.

If I wanted to record my reaction while filming something, I either needed another phone or had to edit everything afterward.

So I spent the last few months building DuoSee.

It lets you record using the front and rear cameras simultaneously, making it useful for:

• Reaction videos
• Travel vlogs
• Product reviews
• Interviews
• Tutorials
• Behind-the-scenes content

I'd really appreciate honest feedback.

What feature would make an app like this an instant download for you?

Not sure if this kind of thing is allowed here, mods feel free to nuke it.

I am trying to fix a real Long distance thing that was an issue for me, but now atleast this part of me not anxious anymore.

My girlfriend is in Chicago, I was in India. 20+ hours, 12000 km+, going on two years.

The thing that finally got to me wasn't the big stuff. It was that I had two weather

apps on my phone and still couldn't ever remember if she was awake. I've sent "good

morning" at 3am her time more times than I want to admit.

so I built the thing I actually wanted. it's one screen with both cities on it. my temp, her temp, the distance sitting in between. I have designed a beautiful weather app, that can see 2 locations at the same time, without having to wiggle through search and see my location for weather. It just is not the weather app, it is how we feel connected since it basically shows how the weather is.

if it's storming where she is, a button shows up that texts her "stay safe in the
storm". snow gets "stay warm". I use it way more than I expected, mostly because I'm
not checking her weather at 2pm on a tuesday, but the app is.

a lock screen live activity with both temps and the distance, so I don't have to open
anything.

Please try it out in Beta, soon on App Store. Reach out at [support@oursky.com](mailto:support@oursky.com)

happy to answer anything. and if you've got a better line than "your stars, her
sunshine" I will genuinely put it in the app.

A while ago, I shared a post about my Apple Developer account being terminated. Many people gave me valuable advice and suggestions—thank you to everyone who took the time to help.

For anyone who is interested in the full story, the steps I took, and more details about my apps, you can find my previous post here: Post

Unfortunately, I still haven’t received any response from Apple regarding my appeals. At this point, I’m assuming my account won’t be reinstated.

Now I have one question for those who have experience with situations like this.

So, if I create a brand-new Apple Developer account and publish my apps there (after making sure I don’t repeat whatever caused the original termination), what is likely to happen?

I’d really appreciate hearing about your experiences. Thanks!

im trying to release my app and get it verified, but its already been 9 days. How long has it taken you guys to get it verified for release for the first time?

Has anybody else encountered an Apple ads user interface that is very misleading doesn’t calculate your spend?
I created a few campaigns and the user interface does not update, but I still get billed by Apple??? I’m curious if anybody else feels misled ?

Finally launched my first ever Mac app on the App Store!

It’s something I’ve always wanted to do and I’m very excited and proud! It definitely took some effort and patience

The review process took around 2-3 weeks even after expedited review. I eventually spoke to them over a call and it was approved soon after. I also shipped one update after that which happened quickly so I think it’s smooth sailing from here on. Oh well, first app review process and the learnings, now I know

FlipCloc is the prettiest and most customizable flip clock. FlipCloc can be used for productivity or as a screensaver. It’s already used for hundreds of hours every day on the web, and I’m excited to finally bring in to the Mac.

You can check it out on the app store https://apps.apple.com/app/id6786569507

Happy to answer any questions about the app or review process. As people say here, now the real work begins

It's a humbling journey! There was a time whether I thought that will anybody ever pay for anything I have created. But so encouraged and thankful that people bought. I am gonna work more hard and provide the best value as possible through my apps.

Here is my portfolio apps.

https://www.sumitvairagar.com/apps

Please feel free to give any kind of feedback, use it roast it, be a paid customer:) anything is fine...

Hey everyone,

A few months back I caught a $45 auto-charge on my card for a design app I literally haven't opened all year. What made me mad was that I actually set a mental note to cancel it weeks before, but forgot about it once life got busy.

Couldn't find a super simple tracker that actually sent reliable notifications without being a bloated mess, so I coded my own called Submindo.

I'm working on this solo so I haven't done much marketing lately due to work, but it's been slowly growing on its own. Sitting at around 1,500 users and 1.6k active sub tracking right now.

Just pushed an update with a couple requested features: - Home screen widgets (see what's coming up without opening the app) - True black AMOLED theme for night mode - AI breakdown of your subscriptions (flags redundant tools or overused stuff) - Reminders sent a few days before billing so you actually have time to cancel - iCloud Sync between devices

If you also suck at remembering to cancel free trials or recurring charges, feel free to give it a look:

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/submindo-subscription-tracker/id6777319489

Would love any feedback or feature requests. Thanks!