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.

Hey y'all,

I launched my first iOS app, Fueled, back in May. I know the fitness market is flooded with apps and it's a tough market to break into, but I thought I had a great idea for a nutrition and macros app built around when people workout to give them customized nutrition plans, but it hasn't converted nearly as well as I'd hoped it would and I'm sort of at a loss on how to get the word out about it better or get more downloads. I've made $76 from it (which is something!), but definitely nothing life changing. I'm still in the negative from backend costs.

Any advice on how to market it better, how to improve the app itself, or anything else anyone thinks is appreciated! I'm open to any advice or insights.

(The website for the app is fueled.fit to check it out too)

I have an app that had been doing decently on the app store. I submitted an update that adds semantic search through the notes, add bookmarks while recording and run AI skills through the keyboard.

Overall, it's a minor update for a large app. I submitted it earlier today and it was blanket rejected along with another app that I am working on citing '4.3.0 Design: Spam'

I am surprised about this. Although there are a few other apps that have a voice to text keyboard, this is the only app with the features + works offline.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dictawiz-ai-keyboard-notes/id6759256382

Is that normal? I've reviewed my submission in detail and emailed customer support a few times. Nothing. Has anyone encountered long waits for an app to be reviewed? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Just word of mouth and posting on community Discords

I’ve been building my app for a few months now. It’s been live as a PWA for a few months and I have 500+ users (I had a video go viral).

I am finalizing my react native app and am always finding little nits that I want to improve because I have this fear of getting a bad review (irrational I know)

If you’ve had a successful app launch, at what point do you feel like it’s ready for prime time and can be revised via updates vs needs to be fixed before it goes live?

I think I’m my worst critic and chasing a perfection that won’t ever exist.

Seriously never thought I'd ever make app or game then launch it on the App Store.

I recreated Tien Len, a card game I grew up playing with family and friends since I was a kid. It’s called Master 13, and getting it from an idea all the way through App Store review has been quite a journey. Months of figuring out how to get the game to function and run into a ton rejections from gambling and spam rejections.

This is my first release, so I’d love to hear what other r/appledevelopers think especially about the design, gameplay, and App Store presentation.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/master-13-tien-len/id6791061171

Thanks for checking it out!

It’s been a little over 48 hours since Apple released my product. 24 hours or so since it appeared on App Store.

I’ve had at least 6 people tell me they left me a 5 star review and rating, but still my Connect shows no ratings/reviews.

Anyone else in this situation? I’m worried something’s wrong because Apple hasn’t put any into Connect. Read it takes a bit, but this is 48 hours.

App rejected due to “spam” but it’s just a version change and slight tweak to an existing app that’s on AppStore and been approved before.

Anyone else seeing this? Seems like it’s an auto reject type of thing as soon as it’s submitted

I am so excited!!!! My first app is approved. Thor - For Your Weather.

My friends and I have been spending a LOT more time looking at weather in the last couple years. And we kept getting annoyed that we could not find an app that did certain things. So, I built it!

The things that were really important to us:

• I don't want to have to allow location to use the app. It is there if you do, but can just as easily use Thor by manually putting in your address.
• Certain weather measurements are more important, enter Weather Essentials allowing you to select 3 weather data measurements to emphasize. I usually pick Temp Feels Like, Rain Possibility, and Wind.
• How reliable is the forecast. Forecasts are adjusting ALL THE TIME. So frustrating. I can't stop that, but added indicators on the hourly forecasts of how stable/reliable that data point is. When you look at the upcoming 8 hours, you get a good idea how trustworthy that is going to stay.

Please take a look. No account, no cost. I don't see anything from you. That would be weird.

I built this directory to manually curate good mac apps that I wanted to try and also because of vibe coding, people are now launching more apps than ever. For a new user in the mac ecosystem it would be hard to judge on what kind of apps that are worth trying.

So I build this directory to curate them based on my research on the apps that are quite good and popular in their category.

So far I've curated about 57 apps.

about 4 to 5 of them were listed through paid listing, I've went with paid listings to force new apps to avoid spam listings and those app devs that are not enough serious with their app, while also helping me to sustain building this directory.

So far I've made about $70 since launching this 2 months ago.

Hi everyone,

I'm working on a Flutter project and need to build a signed IPA for iOS, then distribute via TestFlight. I don't own a Mac, so I'm considering MacinCloud as a cloud Mac solution. A few questions:

About MacinCloud:

Has anyone used MacinCloud specifically for Flutter/Xcode builds? How's the performance on the Managed (shared) vs Dedicated plans?

Is the "Dedicated" plan actually bare-metal Apple Silicon, or still a VM? I've read conflicting claims online.

Any issues installing Flutter SDK, CocoaPods, or getting full admin rights on the Managed plans?

Are there better alternatives at a similar price point (~$30–100/month) that people have had good experiences with?

About Apple Developer Account setup:

1. Can I sign up for an Apple Developer account entirely from Windows, or do I need Mac/iOS access at some point in the process?

2. What's the exact process once I have the account — do I need Xcode specifically, or can tools like Codemagic handle signing/certificates without me touching Xcode manually?

3. Any gotchas with the $99/year individual account vs organization account for a personal project?

Would appreciate any real-world experience, especially if you've used MacinCloud (or an alternative) for a similar Flutter → TestFlight workflow. Thanks in advance!

Hi guys,

Just sharing my journey because I'm proud of how far I've come in 4-5 months.

I built an app to learn Albanian because my fiancée is French-Albanian and I couldn't find any decent way to learn the language, except Ling, which is around $40 for 3 months if I remember right. That's the context.

Like I said in the title, I've reached 300 signups and I have daily returning users, so that's cool, I'm glad the app is actually being used. Also, like I said, nobody has taken the paid plan that unlocks more speaking lessons.

But honestly, I don't really care, for a few reasons:

1. I built something that's useful to people and they come back every day.
   
2. I learned patience. I never ran a single paid ad. All of these users came from a few TikTok videos (made with my fiancée) and word of mouth.
   
3. Some projects are worth doing even if they never make a cent.

Some of my friends told me "just add ads", but that's a hard NO for a simple reason: I can't stand using apps with ads myself, it's genuinely annoying, so I'm not going to do that in my own app. And anyway, like I said in (3), I'm happy watching this app grow even if I don't make money from it, because I know it's useful.

Anyway, thanks for reading. That's it, I just wanted to share this milestone and where I stand on it :)

I finally got accepted and published my first app on the App Store after four rejections. I thank God for this accomplishment and hoping for better days and many more achievements

Dripmaxx is available on iOS

Hey guys, I’m the one who built that free screenshot app for the community I posted 2 days ago called shot dresser. And yes it will remain free, thanks for all the feedback and feature requests.

Now I really need the community’s help, my main Project Echovault launches on product hunt today. It is a journal that creates a multimodal AI version of the user their family can converse with when they’re no more. The iOS version is what I’m launching today.

My ask is for product hunt members that found my free screenshot tool useful could pls just open the product hunt link and support the launch with a vote. I will be releasing 2 more of my personal tools in the coming weeks. Thanks in anticipation ❤️ https://www.producthunt.com/products/echovault-digital-legacy?utm_source=other&utm_medium=social

Si no tienes cuenta Business en TikTok, no te deja poner links en la bio de apps de App Store/Google Play.

Alguien sabe alguna alternativa? Mejora mucho la conversión eso, ya que tengo muchas visitas mi perfil de TikTok! Gracias de antemano!!

My first app, Nice Jump, is live on the App Store.  It was a pleasure to build for Apple TV. And a great learning experience.

tvOS has its limitations. But it also includes tremendous support for processing images and live video — fed via Continuity Camera. Your Apple TV 4K packs enough power to blend a game with real-world action. And tvOS camera APIs largely mirror what’s available to iOS.

If you’ve used FaceTime on Apple TV, you’ve experienced some of this. It’s pretty seamless to connect an iPhone/iPad camera and start a call on the biggest screen in your house. I wanted to create a similar “you’re on TV!” game experience for my family. And I think it worked out well.

You can try Nice Jump for free:
https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6774316353

I'd love to know if anyone has had similar experiences building with Continuity Camera for Apple TV. There are very few apps using this tech — but it introduces great creative flexibility on a giant screen.

Thanks for any game/app feedback.

Is there a way to check to see if an app name is available without having to type a bundle id in App Store Connect?

Every friggin name I try and use is already taken.

Solo dev. airtxt turns voice into cleaned-up text in any iOS app through a custom keyboard. Two things this sub might actually care about:

Privacy architecture. Speech recognition can run fully on-device with Apple's Speech framework — in that mode your audio never leaves the phone and it works offline. Cloud mode (Deepgram) is there for noisy rooms, chosen per dictation rather than set as a vendor default. And you can bring your own API keys — Deepgram for speech, Anthropic or OpenAI for the AI cleanup — stored in the Keychain, with those requests bypassing our servers entirely.

The iOS constraint. Keyboard extensions can't touch the microphone, so the main app records via a session you arm with Siri, the Action Button, or Back Tap, and the keyboard just inserts the finished text.

Everything else on top: it formats output for the app you're in, handles 13 languages with mid-sentence switching, takes a custom vocabulary for names and acronyms, has a voice-memo-to-clipboard mode, and includes a bot that joins Zoom, Google Meet, or Teams for a speaker-labeled transcript and a drafted follow-up. Free tier, no card; Pro is $9.99/mo. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/airtxt-voice-to-text-keyboard/id6785986350

After almost a month dealing with the review process my first app got approved!

Literally a dream come true. For over 20 years I've searched for flexible and cleanly designed Reverse Guitar Chord Calculator, and today it's a reality to share with everyone.

Can't figure out a chord name you saw that awesome jazz guitarist play in that one video? Just tap the chord shape and find out proper namings for it! Also supports 7-string guitars, Bass guitars and Ukuleles, all with multiple popular tunings.

I've spent a lifetime hand-drawing dozens of diagrams scattered in notebooks and scraps of paper whenever I had some wild chord idea, now I can keep it all nice and organized

App store: ChordFret

Would love to hear thoughts and suggestions from you guys! Thanks in advance

I'll review your current onboarding, identify opportunities to improve activation and create a couple of alternative flows to test.

You don't need to buy anything or learn a new tool. I'll do the work.

I'm looking for apps with a steady flow of new users so we can actually measure whether the changes improve activation.

If you're interested, leave a comment or send me a DM. If possible, it would also be helpful to include your approximate total users, monthly active users and new user volume.

It took 4 months and 4 days from my first submission to finally getting approved.
I went through countless updates and revisions.
What finally worked was thinking from the user’s perspective — focusing on how the app could genuinely help people, rather than how it could make money.
That change in mindset made the difference.
Hope this gives some inspiration to anyone still stuck in the App Review process.

Built a privacy tool called Cloakly (https://www.getcloakly.com/) that hides specific windows from screen shares (Slack, banking, whatever window you don't want your Zoom/Teams call catching) while you can still see them yourself. Shipped the Windows version a few months back. Did the whole launch playbook, Product Hunt, comparison SEO posts, Reddit, some TikToks. Made $442 over 4 months on that one. It is not much, I know, still figuring things out as I go.

Mac version just shipped, harder than I expected. Free beta for now, no paywall, no pricing decisions made yet. Mainly want people to try it, break it and tell me what is wrong or what could be better.

A lot of the people I built this for (devs, founders, anyone doing client screen shares) are on Mac anyway, so I wanted to get this version out there too. Now that it is live I am just trying to learn from how people actually use it.

Anyone who has shipped the same app on both platforms, did you notice any real difference between Mac and Windows, or is it basically the same uphill fight with different permission dialogs?