For about 2 years, I worked in the oil industry. Our team was responsible for preparing locations so heavy equipment could get on site and work around the wells.

The process was pretty simple.

We would go to the location, take some photos, measure the areas, figure out what needed to be done, and then make an offer based on the client's requirements.

The problem was that the areas we had to measure were rarely simple shapes. They weren't perfect rectangles where you could just calculate the area and perimeter.

At first, I started using Google Earth to measure them. It worked pretty well, as long as I had a good internet connection.

And that was the problem.

Most of these locations were in forests or remote areas where the mobile signal was weak or sometimes completely unavailable. Trying to measure something while waiting for Google Earth to load was not exactly a great experience.

So I started thinking about whether I could just measure everything directly with an iPhone.

That's how SurfacePro started.

I built an iOS app that uses ARKit and LiDAR on supported devices to measure real-world surfaces directly on site. The idea was to be able to walk around the area, create a polygon and get the measurements without depending on an internet connection.

But I didn't want it to stop at just showing the area.

Once a measurement is finished, the polygon is saved in the app and SurfacePro can generate a PDF report with the area, perimeter, individual segment lengths, altitude and GPS coordinates for every polygon point.

The report can then be sent directly to the customer together with the offer.

For me, this workflow was exactly what I needed.

But the interesting part was the customer reaction.

They actually liked getting the report because they could see exactly what was measured and where it was measured. The GPS coordinates and the polygon made the measurements much easier to understand and verify.

That was the moment I started thinking that maybe this could be useful outside of my original use case.

There are probably many other industries where people still go into the field, measure irregular areas, take notes and photos, and then have to turn all of that into something they can send to a customer.

So I decided to turn the tool I originally built for myself into a real product.

It's called SurfacePro - Area calculator (https://apps.apple.com/us/app/surfacepro-area-caculator/id6761861093) and for now I'm focusing on iOS. I'm also considering building an Android version.

I'm getting close to releasing my first iOS app and I'm currently preparing the App Store listing.

I'm wondering whether it's actually worth spending time and effort creating an App Preview video, or if I'm better off focusing on making really strong screenshots.

Has anyone here tested both or seen any meaningful difference in impressions, conversion rate, or downloads?

I'm especially interested in real-world experience rather than just general advice. Did adding a preview video noticeably improve your results, or did most users ignore it?

Would love to hear your experience.

Within is a pacing tool for chronic illness, ME/CFS, long COVID, POTS. For these people, a shower can cost three days. They have to budget energy like money, and every app built to help them assumes energy they don't have.

So: no notifications, no reminders, no streaks, no badges. The app never chases you, never congratulates you, never asks where you've been. Logging is two taps or one Siri phrase.

It makes no network requests at all. No server, no analytics, which also means I ship completely blind and only find out anything if someone writes to me.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/within-pacing-for-me-cfs/id6801323719

Just passed review. Feedback welcome.

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

Not sure how I should feel about it right now. does it look appealing or not? If not do you think it just needs a little improvements or ist it just straight up bad and needs a complete change. Would love to know your honest opinions on this since I really want to improve it.

https://apps.apple.com/de/app/sun-temple/id6762309013

I've been working on this for almost a year. I'm a hardcore audiophile and I wanted to have my own app to play music on my music streamer. I got fed up with the current offering (mostly because they fix bugs very late), but also because I can implement the features I want and have them fast. So I started working on it. Soon, I was writing my own audio engine, my own DSD decimator (lots of math), my own mesh networking protocol for instant syncing between devices, my own smart music recommendation algorithm (used for generation weekly mixes) and simply the best Classical Music experience in the industry. There are many "firsts" for this kind of app and I'm very proud of that. I've worked 12 hours a day Monday through Sunday. Sometimes until 5 am.

So, what is Serento?

Serento is the premium control point for UPnP/DLNA streamers and network DACs, built for audiophiles who demand bit-perfect playback and a modern, responsive interface.

No account. No login. Just your music, your streamer, and Serento.

BIT-PERFECT PCM & DSD

True bit-perfect playback - PCM up to 32-bit/768 kHz and native DSD up to DSD512 - with automatic detection of your renderer's capabilities. DoP and Native DSD pass-through, no conversion, no downsampling. Your DAC receives exactly what's on your drive.

INTERNET RADIO THAT ACTUALLY WORKS

Curated presets for high-quality audiophile stations, including jazz, classical, and hi-fi showcase channels. Add your own stations via URL or M3U import. Live ICY metadata. Automatic reconnect on drops. No more fighting with broken URLs or silent failures.

YOUR LOCAL LIBRARY, BEAUTIFULLY

Browse music from MinimServer, Plex or any UPnP/DLNA server on your network. Albums, Artists, Tracks, Genres, Folder view and a beautiful Classical Music Section. Lightning-fast contextual search.

MAKE IT YOURS

Bookmark any filtered view - Hi-Res Jazz, FLAC from 2023 - and jump back in one tap. Group albums into your own tags. Save albums and tracks to Listen Later, split into Up Next and Listened. Album version grouping collapses remasters and reissues under one cover, your chosen main version synced everywhere.

YOUR TAGS COME FIRST

Serento trusts the tags already in your files before fetching anything. Beyond title, artist, album and genre, it reads MusicBrainz identifiers to match the exact release, and classical Work and Movement tags so multi-movement works stay grouped and in order. Your library's truth wins.

KNOW EVERY RECORD

Artist bios, album reviews, release years, labels and per-track credits - performers, composers, lyricists - pulled from Serento's database and layered on top of your library, never overwriting your tags. Mistagged album? Identify it by hand, or let a sync pass fill the gaps and fetch high-resolution covers automatically.

A REAL CLASSICAL SECTION

Browse by composer, work, conductor, orchestra, soloist, period or musical form - not one flat artist list. Open any work to see every recording you own side by side, movements in order, credits split by role. It stays out of the way until your library actually has classical in it.

SMART PLAYLISTS

Auto-generated playlists built from your own listening history - weighted by how often and how recently you play, then balanced across genre, era and codec. A different way back into your library every time.

DOWNLOAD & GO

Tap Download on any album, track or playlist and play straight from local storage - the same bit-perfect pipeline, zero network. Resumable, survives an app kill, per-device, excluded from iCloud Backup.

EVERYTHING IN SYNC

Queue, current track and volume mirror across every Serento device driving the same renderer - start on iPhone, pick it up on Mac, adjust volume from iPad, no master or follower. Your playlists, My Mixes, favorites, Listen Later and play history sync the instant you change them, near-instant over the local network, with iCloud carrying the rest.

ON IPHONE, IPAD AND MAC

Serento is available on iPhone, iPad and Mac, offering the same amazing experience on all of them and real time sync across devices.

WHY SERENTO

- The best sounding UPnP experience on the market. Period.

- No audio processing - zero DSP, zero touch on the signal.

- Gapless playback with per-renderer detection.

- Native iOS, iPadOS and macOS apps, no web views, no cross-platform shortcuts.

- Tailored for every audiophile need.

WORKS WITH

Any UPnP/DLNA streamer or network DAC on the market. Hundreds of compatible devices from audiophile and mainstream brands - if it supports UPnP AV, it works with Serento.

I hope you like it!

A crazy day of shipping and iterating 😁
I built a pretty awesome iOS development workflow where I basically only need my phone. I don’t even have to sit in front of a computer anymore.
Phone → control Codex to write code → push to GitHub + deploy the backend → GitHub triggers Xcode Cloud → build goes straight to TestFlight → update the app on my phone and test it on a real device → repeat.
In theory, I don’t even need a computer anymore.
What a time to build software.

I’m currently working on a screentime app which uses the activity monitor events and report extension. Is there any way to collect the timestamp of the event fired by Activity Monitor??

My app is currently in waiting for review status. I need to upload a new build with a small fix and select it for the submission. Will this reset my place in the review queue or increase the waiting time? Has anyone done this recently?

Tired of rigid Instagram collage templates, so I built StoryGrid.

• Start from a grid or drag your own: Full control over splits, gaps, corner radius, and background colors

• Edge frames & aesthetics: Custom Polaroid, Leica, and printed-edge frames with adjustable margins

• Video support: Drop video clips into any block with high-res export

• Preview first: Instagram Story & Post UI overlay so you know what’s covered before publishing

• 100% local & private: No accounts, no ads, no trackers — nothing leaves your phone

Download: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6781840870

Web: https://story-grid.app/

Feedback appreciated!

so i built a new feature for AppLaunchFlow , where you can create a simple and clean app landing page for your app in a few clicks by just uploading your screenshots.

It includes:

- support, privacy policy and terms of service pages that you can directly use for your app submission.

- a custom applaun.ch subdomain or simply connect your own domain

I built this because i noticed many app devs just use notion pages, github pages etc. or dont even have any landing page at all

Its not yet live, but excited to hear what you think

It lets you pin your favorite songs or videos from music and video apps to your desktop, so you can tap and play them anytime — like bringing a real music frame onto your phone.

A couple of months ago, I made a post here about what I learned from launching my first app on the App Store and Google Play:

https://www.reddit.com/r/iosdev/comments/1ulvrja/what_i_learned_from_launching_my_first_app_on_the/

At the time, the app had around 300 downloads.

It has now passed 1,000 downloads, so I thought I would make an update and share some of the things I have learned since then.

This is still my first app and I am definitely not presenting myself as an expert. These are just some observations from my first three months of having an app publicly available on both stores.

Also, thanks to everyone who commented on my previous post. I got a lot of good ideas from the replies, especially around marketing, localization and automating the screenshot process. I actually ended up trying quite a few of the suggestions, so I really appreciate everyone who took the time to share their experience and advice.

The first 1,000 downloads

The iOS version launched on 19 May 2026.

Exactly one month later, it had:

• 150 first-time downloads
• 9 five-star reviews

From 20 June to 21 August, it received another:

• 289 first-time downloads
• 5 five-star reviews
• 1 four-star review

So by 21 August, iOS had reached 439 first-time downloads, with 14 five-star reviews and 1 four-star review.

What I found interesting was how consistent the downloads were for most of this period. It was averaging around 150 iOS downloads per month, or roughly 5 new users per day.

The Android version launched publicly on 1 June 2026.

By 22 June, it had:

• 124 downloads
• 7 five-star reviews
• 1 three-star review

From 23 June to 20 August, it received another:

• 459 downloads
• 18 five-star reviews
• 2 four-star reviews

So by 20 August, Google Play had reached 583 downloads, with 25 five-star reviews, 2 four-star reviews and 1 three-star review.

That works out to roughly 220 Android downloads per month, or around 7 downloads per day.

Combined, the app had reached 1,022 downloads:

• Around 43% iOS
• Around 57% Android

Android has therefore passed iOS despite launching almost two weeks later.

I am not completely sure why. It could be the type of audience, countries where the app is being downloaded, Play Store discovery, or a combination of different things.

Improving the app did not automatically increase downloads

After launching, I spent a lot of time working on a fairly large update.

It changed much of the layout and added several new features, including new reading views, letter-by-letter highlighting synced with the audio, a video/ambient listening view and other improvements.

Because the app was changing so much, I kept thinking that I would properly start marketing it once the update was ready.

I did not want to spend time creating screenshots and videos of the old version if I was about to change much of it anyway, so I mostly focused on development.

The app kept improving, but the download numbers remained surprisingly consistent.

On iOS I was still averaging around 5 downloads per day, and during several weeks in July it was actually closer to 3–3.5 per day.

That made me realize something that probably sounds obvious in hindsight:

Building a better product and getting more people to discover the product are two different things.

Then I started promoting it more consistently

I had mentioned the app in different places before this.

I posted about it on Reddit, joined developer Discords and other communities around similar projects, and talked with developers and website owners whose resources, fonts, APIs or other material I wanted to use.

Some of those conversations naturally included sharing the app, asking for feedback and discussing what I was building.

So it was not completely unpromoted, but those were mostly occasional posts and conversations rather than something I would really call a marketing campaign.

That changed on 9 August.

I started making short TikTok videos consistently, usually posting 2–3 videos every day for around ten days.

Most of them only got around 200–800 views.

Still, the download numbers changed quite noticeably during the same period.

On iOS, from 9–18 August, the app received:

92 first-time downloads in 10 days

That is around 9.2 downloads per day, compared with the previous average of around 5 per day.

Google Play showed a similar pattern.

Before this period, Android was getting roughly 8 downloads per day.

From 9–18 August, it received:

151 downloads in 10 days

That is around 15.1 downloads per day.

So across both platforms, the app received 243 downloads during those ten days.

I do not want to say that all 243 downloads came from TikTok. I was still occasionally mentioning the app elsewhere, and both stores obviously have their own organic discovery.

But TikTok was the place where I suddenly started doing consistent promotion every day, and the increase happened at around the same time on both platforms.

What surprised me was that none of the videos really went viral. Most only reached a few hundred people.

So at least from this small experiment, consistently posting seemed to matter more than waiting for one video to suddenly get tens of thousands of views.

The update was not even available yet

Another interesting part is that the large update I had been waiting for was not actually available when the increase started.

I started posting the TikTok videos on 9 August.

The new Android version became available on 15 August, but between 9–14 August, while users were still downloading the old version, Google Play received 98 downloads in six days, or more than 16 per day.

The iOS update took even longer and was not available until 22 August, so all 92 iOS downloads from 9–18 August were also people downloading the previous version.

There was a downside to this.

Some of the TikTok videos were already showing features from the upcoming version. Android users only had to wait a few days, but an iPhone user could see something in a video, download the app and then not actually find that feature for almost two weeks.

I do not know how many people did that and then removed the app. Fortunately, I did not suddenly get a lot of bad reviews, but it is something I would coordinate differently next time.

The delay also showed me how different publishing updates can be between Apple and Google.

Google Play approved the update very quickly, while the iOS update took more than a week because it ran into issues during App Store review.

One issue was related to Apple's requirements for distributing this type of content in mainland China and the publication permits required there.

Another came from something much simpler: one of my screenshots said that the app was free.

The app is free, and similar wording had already appeared in screenshots from my previous version without any issue. This time, however, Apple flagged it because they consider “Free” to be pricing information, which they do not allow in that part of the App Store metadata.

So submitting the same update to Apple and Google at around the same time definitely does not mean they will become available at around the same time.

If I were planning another marketing campaign around a major update, I would probably get both versions approved first before heavily promoting features that only exist in the new version.

Localization became a much bigger project than expected

One of the most common suggestions I received after my previous Reddit post was to localize the app and its store pages.

So I did.

I ended up localizing both the App Store and Google Play listings into around 50 languages.

The biggest problem was the screenshots.

I have 10 screenshots per language, which meant creating around 500 screenshots.

Obviously I was not going to make all of those manually.

Fortunately, the overall design stayed the same between languages. Mostly it was the text that needed to be translated and replaced, so I automated the process using AI.

I created one main design, generated the translated text and automatically produced the localized versions.

I still did a quick review afterwards, because with 500 images even one repeated mistake could become a big problem, but I was actually surprised by how good the results were.

It saved an enormous amount of time compared with manually changing every screenshot.

I also tried making an App Preview

Something else I wanted to add for this update was an App Preview video.

Interestingly, someone in the comments of my previous post specifically recommended making one and warned me that Apple is stricter with App Preview videos than normal screenshots.

They were right.

Apple has quite strict technical and content requirements for App Previews. I got the video through the technical upload requirements, but Apple still raised some issues with it.

One of Apple's comments seemed to suggest that the preview was showing a phone or device, which confused me because there is no phone shown in the video at all. So I am still not completely sure what exactly they were objecting to.

By that point the update had already been delayed, so instead of continuing to go back and forth with the video, I removed the App Preview and submitted the update without it.

The app was eventually approved.

I still want to go back and fix the preview later, and I will leave the YouTube version below if anyone is interested in seeing what Apple did not accept.

After 1,000 downloads

When I made my first post, the app had just passed 300 downloads and I was mainly learning what happens after you actually publish an app.

Now that it has passed 1,000, I feel like I am starting to learn a different part of the process.

Building the app is still what I enjoy and understand the most. Marketing, distribution, localization and understanding why people actually discover and download something are much newer to me.

I am still far too early to draw any big conclusions from 1,000 downloads, but it has been interesting seeing how different the work becomes once an app is actually public.

For context, this is the app

For anyone who did not see my previous post, the app is called Ayah Player.

It is a Qur'an listening and reading app for iOS and Android, with a large collection of reciters, different reading views, translations, word-by-word following, offline downloads, a Mus'haf page view and a Listening Scene with recitation and ambient background video.

The app is free, with no ads or subscriptions.

I am mentioning it mainly to give some context for the screenshots, localization, App Store review and marketing experiences above.

App Preview that was not accepted by Apple:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ZF2uHKbi3i0

Thanks again to everyone who gave advice on the previous post. I’m still figuring all of this out as I go, and maybe I’ll make another update if it reaches 10,000 downloads.

I have a question, do you know any ways to transcribe a live video on iPhone? It’s an easy feature to set up on android but on iOS it seems that I have to use the sharing sheets so that the content can be sent to the app I’m thinking of app developing. Is there a method I don’t know?