I recently shipped Fint, a privacy-first finance tracker, to the App Store as a solo developer, with zero backend. No servers, no accounts, all data stays on the user's device. It's also open source if you want to see how any of this is implemented.
I leveraged Apple's own frameworks to make that possible: Core Data for local storage, CloudKit for optional cross-device sync, and on-device Vision OCR for receipt scanning.
I wrote up the full architecture, including a three-day CloudKit production bug and the tradeoffs of building local-first, here: Article Link
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