Lorin Nicolae

I finished off my website with the landing pages of my apps, at lorinnicolae.dev. I developed apps for timing a car's performance, weather forecast, weather warnings, wedding planner, border waiting and more. A 🧵on the (most important) apps I developed: #buildinpublic

@seraleev My most profitable app also does that, and my last update was approved about a month ago. Back to the drawing board, I guess. Too had this pattern (the discounted paywall) was bringing quite a bit of money.

Ok, let’s break it down. Guideline 5.6 – Developer Code of Conduct The main issue is manipulative behavior. Showing a discount right after the user declines creates pressure and triggers FOMO. Apple doesn’t want developers pushing users at the exact moment they’ve said no or creating a sense of urgency like “now or never”. Before, App Review often ignored this pattern. Now, with the rise of AI apps and scams, enforcement has become much stricter. If you show $39.99 and then immediately drop to $29.99, the user starts to feel like they were misled from the beginning. This breaks pricing transparency and ultimately, damages trust in the App Store.

Really strange behavior from this @RevenueCat user. Has anyone seen anything like this? His profile keeps getting new aliases. And he's got 3 Firebase tokens, I get that he might have switched phones, but there are a lot more aliases than there are Firebase tokens.

@matteo_spada Send

100K monthly downloads. $1m MRR. 2995 keywords in the US alone. This niche app cracked the code. Want the full report on on their keyword strategy? Comment "send" and like the post👇

@iamkordjan @filippkowalski Would like to get significantly more aggressive with the paywalls though, better highlighting the value and perhaps gating more features. Perhaps I offer too much for free.

@iamkordjan @filippkowalski I’m on this side. Most of my apps do gate certain functionality, but also display ads just to annoy people to get them to convert. But I feel like ads are too much of a headache to deal with at €2.0 cpm, and uselessly degrade the experience. Thinking of removing them.

It turns out that making content free but blocking it with ads might have been a good idea. I just had a record-breaking sales day for my Android app, with over $150 in one day. On the other side, I got 2, one-star reviews from long-time users who complained that they now need to watch an ad, which honestly upset me, because the ad is really non-aggressive and user-friendly (if you can call an ad like this). Afterwards, I realized I'm fine with it. They can find plenty of similar free offerings, and my app is tailored to a specific TAM. I'm tired of building apps for people who expect everything for free.

@Pirat_Nation @ForgetfulHatter I actually reported this a couple of weeks ago or so. My report was unsuccessful, apparently it does not violate their terms. So I’m pretty sure they’ll accept pretty much everything at this point, as long as the advertiser pays.

@ForgetfulHatter Even if you remove some more will appear

@RodrigoIbarrasa @StevenCravotta Yes, if it's hard paywall, just make no claim that the app can be used for free. Or even better, mention at the very bottom of the description that to use the app, a subscription/purchase is necessary. I would be very surprised if Apple rejected that.

@lorinnicolae @StevenCravotta Where exactly you claim in your metadata that your app can’t be used for free? Just no mentioning nothing related to “free”?

Guess when I added a hard paywall...

@RodrigoIbarrasa @StevenCravotta I don't think they can force you to do that as long as you don't claim in your metadata that your app can be used for free. I am pretty sure I encountered apps in the App Store that are hard-paywalled and have no functionality without paying.

@lorinnicolae @StevenCravotta No, I read it here on X about a guy who was rejected by Apple. Then he needed to add a 5 secs time out to show the “x” close button

@Gsandec @StevenCravotta Agreed. Seriously considering hard paywalling all my apps.

@StevenCravotta Freemium is over. I’m thinking in launching my iOS app paid from the very first moment

@RodrigoIbarrasa @StevenCravotta It’s not as far as I know. Do you have any specific rule from the guidelines that prohibits it?

@StevenCravotta How you handle Apple approval? As I know, a hard paywal is against policies

From submission to approval in just 13 minutes. I'm really impressed with how fast Apple reviewed and approved my update that fixes the @RevenueCat issues in mainland China. Hopefully, there will be no more Chinese user complaints on IAPs from now on.

@BlochHarry @filippkowalski Yes, using @RevenueCat's plugin. It's working well and has been for a few years now. I recommend that you use such an SDK and avoid the headache of not only implementing, but then maintaining it yourself with all the changes the Apple and Google make. Leave that to someone else

@lorinnicolae @filippkowalski Have you gotten IAP to work with ionic android? I could never get them to work on android side

I have this one app on iOS that gets less than a few downloads a day, a total flop, but on Android, it's growing. I think that if I'd release it only on iOS I'd probably ditch it, but with data from Android, I'm willing to put more effort into it. And since it's Flutter, it costs me nothing to support both platforms.

@filippkowalski What I think is also important is which markets you target. Most of my apps are centered around the EU/Estern EU. Sure, there might be more money on iOS (like many say), but if I have 5x more Android users, can the iOS version bring 5x per user to make up for that? Probably not.

@lorinnicolae even though statistically iOS brings more revenue, it seems like for indies like us it's harder to start there because the competition is also higher

Update: seems that upgrading @capacitorjs and @RevenueCat seems to have fixed it. Crash rate has been 0% for the past few days. Will keep an eye on it. I now noticed that I had an ANR reported yesterday. Hopefully this doesn't turn into a recurring issue.

Update: it wasn't AdMob, I've still seen a couple of crashes in Play Console. Migrated to @capacitorjs 6. Took the opportunity to also upgrade to @RevenueCat's purchases-capacitor 8.0.0. Just sent the update to Google for review. Hopefully this fixes it.

@Ionicframework @capacitorjs I've found discussions that it might be caused by a malformed ad delivered by AdMob. In the meanwhile, I disabled the ads in this app to see if it helps. Sure, I might miss a couple hundred $ in ads, but it's better than getting over the bad behaviour threshold.

Has anyone else had an increase in the Play Console reported crash rate on their apps, without doing anything? My app is build in @Ionicframework with @capacitorjs. The crash is caused by [base.apk!libmonochrome_64.so], and I have no idea how to debug it. #GooglePlay #crash

@drbarnard Pretty sure they are busy working on creating other bureaucratic (and vague) requirements for us 😏

The EU must know… are you a trader? revenuecat.com/blog/growth/am…

@sowenjub @CSolanaM @cosmincodes @damien_elledge Really confusing. The EU is trying to make things better, but I'm not really sure that the end result is usually the expected one.

That's if you’re a trader though. If you are a not a trader they won't display anything it seems. Its really confusing because it's to protect consumers “If you’re not a trader, consumers be informed that (…) consumer protection laws won’t apply to contracts between you and them.” But then I don't get why an individual that is not an org would pick the trader option.

Just logged in App Store Connect and got this (scary?) message. Did anyone else receive it or am I the only one in this situation ? I'm not even sure if I'm a trader or non-trader provider account...and the link to "learn more" doesn't even work...