DEV Community: Kei

I made an AI build me an App Store video factory. It made 465 videos. Then Apple rejected them.

Kei — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 09:21:27 +0000

What actually happens when a solo dev hands the tedious part to an AI agent — and the very Apple guideline nobody warns you about

Hi. It's Kei again.

Quick recap for new faces: I'm a solo iOS developer in Japan, I make a lot of small apps, and almost nobody downloads them. I write about it here because it's cheaper than therapy and the comment section is nicer than my download graphs.

Last time I mentioned, almost in passing, that I'd rebuilt the store media for a pile of my apps. A few of you asked how. This is the how. And it's a stranger story than I expected, because the part that broke wasn't the AI — it was Apple.

Let me be precise about what I did, because the internet is currently full of "I generated a video with AI!" posts and I don't want to be one of the dishonest ones.

What I did NOT do

I did not type "make me a beautiful app trailer" into some model and get a finished video. There's no AI-generated footage in these. No AI narration. No AI-written marketing copy. No AI music.

If you're here for magic pixels, I'm sorry. It's more boring and, I think, more useful than that.

What I actually did

I have a lot of apps. Each one needs an App Store preview video, in a lot of languages. Doing that by hand — record the screen, pick the moments, add captions, translate the captions, export at the right size, upload — is maybe an hour per video if you're fast. Multiply that by 20 apps and up to 35 languages each and you get a number that made me want to lie down on the floor.

So instead of making the videos, I made a machine that makes the videos, and I built that machine by pairing with an AI coding agent (I use Claude Code) for basically the entire thing.

Here's the honest division of labor:

The AI wrote almost all the code. The video renderer is built in Remotion — which lets you describe a video as a React component and render it to an actual mp4 — glued together with a stack of Python scripts. I described what I wanted; the agent wrote the components, the export scripts, the font handling, the upload tooling. I reviewed, tested, and told it what was wrong.
The content is 100% real. The footage is my actual apps, recorded in the iOS simulator. The captions are real human translations, pulled from the words my apps already use in each language. The music is a licensed track from Pixabay. Nothing in the video itself is generated.

So the accurate headline isn't "AI made my videos." It's "AI built the factory, and the factory stamps out real videos." Each one is 24 seconds: a 3-second hook with the app icon bouncing in, then full-screen screenshots with a slow Ken Burns zoom and a caption fading in over each one. No voiceover — every claim is burned into the text, so it works with the sound off, which is how App Store videos autoplay anyway.

The machine rendered 465 videos. Twenty apps, up to 35 languages each, about 15 seconds of render time per video. I watched a progress bar for a while and felt like a factory owner. It was, briefly, glorious.

If you want to see what actually came out the other end, the full-screen final versions are live on the App Store right now — here's the pet care one and the chinchilla one. Tap the preview on either page; that's a video the factory made.

Then Apple said no. Twice.

Here is the part nobody warned me about, and the reason I'm writing this post instead of just tweeting a smug before/after.

My videos looked, I thought, professional. Each screenshot sat inside a little iPhone frame — you know the look, the phone bezel around the screen, very clean, very "real product." I was proud of it.

Apple rejected it. Guideline 2.3.4.

The rejection text, which I have now read enough times to recite in my sleep:

The app preview includes content that does not sufficiently show the app in use... Includes framing... Includes device images and/or device frames.

Turns out: you are not allowed to put a phone frame around your footage in an App Store preview video. The video has to show the app basically full-screen, as if you're holding the phone yourself. The cute device mockup — the exact thing I thought made it look polished — was the violation.

And here's the twist that got me a second time: this rule is only for videos. For static screenshots, device frames are totally fine, encouraged even. So my brain had filed "device frames = professional" from years of making screenshots, and I carried that habit straight into video, where it's forbidden. Rejected once (an alarm app). Then, because I apparently don't learn, rejected again on a different app — where I had to pull all 39 already-uploaded videos and resubmit.

In my old design, the actual app screen only took up 44% of the frame. The rest was bezel and background. Apple was, annoyingly, completely right.

The fix, and the small horrors along the way

The fix was to rip out the phone frame entirely and let the real screenshot fill the whole screen. Simple idea. The details were a series of tiny, stupid, character-building problems:

Aspect ratios. My raw screenshots and my video canvas were off by 0.26%. Close enough that filling the frame crops about 2.5 pixels off the top and bottom. I spent an embarrassing amount of time confirming those 2.5 pixels didn't eat anything important.
Bitrate roulette. Apple has a ceiling. I'd set a safe-looking bitrate, and then one text-heavy language in one app would spike just over the limit and the upload would bounce. Going full-screen actually made this worse, because now there's more visual detail in every frame, so I had to re-tune the bitrate per app.
The tofu incident. Missing glyphs render as □□□ (developers call it "tofu"). I had a script specifically to catch tofu before upload. It had a bug that made it detect nothing, ever. So it happily approved two videos that had already shipped with boxes in them. My automated safety net had a hole exactly the shape of the thing it was supposed to catch. Greek was the worst offender — one font turned every accented letter into a box.
The mute trap. My videos are silent by design. So naturally I exported them muted. Apple's uploader rejects videos with no audio track. You need a silent-but-present stereo audio track. "Silent" and "no audio" are different things, and Apple cares about the difference.
Apple has no official upload API for preview videos. fastlane, the tool everyone uses, doesn't support them. So the agent and I had to reverse-engineer the private endpoints App Store Connect's own website uses, and write our own uploader. That's the kind of afternoon that ages you.

What I actually learned

AI didn't save me from the hard part. It moved the hard part. The agent wrote thousands of lines of rendering and upload code faster than I ever could, and that was genuinely transformative — I would not have attempted this by hand. But it can't read your mind about Apple's review guidelines, it can't see that your safety-check script silently does nothing, and it definitely can't tell you that the thing you're proud of is the thing that'll get you rejected. That judgment was still my job. The AI is a spectacular set of hands. The eyes are still yours.

The taste and the taste-checking are the moat. Anyone can now generate 465 of something. Whether those 465 things are right — non-rejectable, non-tofu, actually flattering to the app — is still human work, and it's most of the work.

And no, my downloads did not explode. I know that's the question. Better videos are table stakes, not a growth strategy. But my store pages finally look like they were made by someone who cares, which — after two years of shipping into the void — is a thing I can at least control.

What I'm asking for

Same as ever. If you got this far, thank you.

If you've built any kind of "content factory" with an AI agent — videos, screenshots, whatever — I want to hear where your factory betrayed you. There's always a 2.3.4 waiting somewhere.
If you're a solo dev drowning in localized store assets, ask me anything. I have now suffered through most of the traps so you don't have to.
Or go look at one of the apps and tell me the video's still bad. Genuinely useful.

I spent 2 years building iOS apps by myself. Nobody uses them. What am I doing wrong?

Kei — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 09:21:24 +0000

A solo indie developer from Japan asking for honest advice

Hi everyone. I'm Kei, a 30-year-old woman living in Japan. I've been teaching myself iOS development for about two years now, and I've poured my heart into building apps that I genuinely believe could help people. But here's the thing — almost nobody is using them.

I'm not writing this to complain. I'm writing this because I honestly don't know what to do next, and I'm hoping someone out there might have advice, or at least relate to what I'm going through.

Let me tell you my story.

How it started

I've always loved organizing things. Notes, ideas, plans — I'm the kind of person who has notebooks everywhere. A couple of years ago, I thought, "Why not build an app that works the way my brain works?" I didn't have a CS degree. I didn't have a mentor. I just had YouTube tutorials, Apple documentation, and a stubborn refusal to give up.

Nights after work, weekends, holidays — I spent all of it learning Swift and SwiftUI. There were times I wanted to quit. Times I stared at Xcode errors for hours and felt completely stupid. But I kept going because I believed in what I was building.

Fast forward to today, and I have three apps on the App Store. Three apps that I'm genuinely proud of. And collectively, they have... almost no users.

It's a lonely feeling, honestly.

The apps I built

Let me introduce them — not as a sales pitch, but because I want you to understand what I've been working on and maybe tell me if the problem is the apps themselves.

1. HieroNote — A hierarchical note-taking app

This is my baby. The one I started with.

I was frustrated with regular note apps because my thoughts don't come in neat, flat lists. They're nested. One idea leads to another, which branches into three more. I wanted a note app that could capture that structure — like an outliner, but on my phone.

So I built HieroNote. It uses a tree structure where every note can have child notes underneath it. You can expand and collapse branches, drag and drop nodes to reorganize your thoughts, and dive deep into any branch.

Here's what it can do:

Tree-structured notes — Organize your ideas hierarchically, like folders within folders, but for thoughts
Drag & drop — Rearrange your notes by just dragging them around
Image attachments — Add photos to any note. There's even a slideshow mode to browse through them
Built-in music player — I added the ability to play audio files within the app (I use it for focus music while writing)
iCloud sync — Everything syncs across your iPhone and iPad automatically
Home screen widgets — Quick access to your recent notes (Small, Medium, and Large sizes)
20 languages supported — Including Japanese, English, Korean, Chinese, German, French, and more
Completely free, no ads — I removed ads entirely because I wanted people to actually enjoy using it

That last point is maybe part of my problem — I have no monetization strategy. But I hated the idea of ruining the experience with banner ads in a note-taking app. It felt wrong.

I use HieroNote every single day. For planning my other apps, for journaling, for organizing recipes, for keeping track of things I want to learn. It genuinely makes my life better.

But when I check the App Store analytics... it's basically just me using it.

2. MyDailyEats — A simple food diary

This one came from a personal frustration too. I wanted to keep track of what I eat, but every food tracking app out there wants me to count calories, scan barcodes, and basically turn eating into homework.

I don't want that. I just want to remember what I ate and notice patterns — like "oh, I've been eating too many sweets this week" or "I haven't had vegetables in three days."

So I built MyDailyEats. The whole idea is that logging a meal takes about 5 seconds:

Tap an emoji category (there are 11: rice/grain, bread, noodles, meat/fish, vegetables, fruits, sweets, snacks, drinks, dairy, and other)
Select a portion size (Small, Medium, Large, or Extra)
Done. That's it. No calorie counting, no barcode scanning, no food databases.

I also added some features that I think make it fun:

Achievement system — 12 badges you can earn, like "7-Day Streak" for logging every day for a week, or "Category Explorer" for trying all food categories
Streak tracking — It shows your current streak and longest streak, which motivates you to keep logging
Calendar view — See your eating patterns over time with color-coded dots
Weekly stats — Visual breakdown of what food categories you ate most
Home screen widgets — See today's food log right on your home screen
Share your streaks — Share your achievements with friends

I genuinely believe this is useful. Not everyone wants to obsess over calories. Some people just want a simple, visual way to be more mindful about what they eat.

But again... the download numbers are heartbreaking.

3. Guinea Pig Memories — A diary app for guinea pig owners

OK, this one might sound niche. But hear me out.

I have two guinea pigs. They're named Mochi and Kinako (it means roasted soybean flour, which is the color of her fur). I love them more than I can express.

When I got them, I wanted to track their weight because guinea pigs are prey animals — they hide illness, and weight loss is often the first sign something is wrong. I also wanted a place to keep their photos and daily notes about their behavior.

I couldn't find an app that did all of this well, so... you can probably guess what happened next.

Guinea Pig Memories lets you:

Track daily weight with beautiful charts that show trends over time
Keep a photo diary — Add photos with notes for each day
Export data as CSV — So you can share weight records with your vet (my vet actually loved this)
Community photo gallery — See other people's guinea pigs from around the world (this is my favorite feature — the photos are so cute)
Expert care guide — Comprehensive guinea pig care information available in 9 languages
8 theme colors — Because why not make it pretty

I know the target audience is small. Guinea pig owners who also want to track their pet's health digitally — that's a very specific group. But I thought if I could reach them, they'd love it.

The problem is... I have no idea how to reach them.

Where I am now

So here I am. Three apps that I believe in. Almost no users. And I'm sitting in my apartment in Japan at 11 PM writing this instead of sleeping, because I can't stop thinking about what I'm doing wrong.

Here are my honest questions:

Is it a discovery problem? Maybe the apps are fine, but nobody can find them? I've tried to optimize my App Store listings with good descriptions and keywords in multiple languages, but I don't really know what I'm doing when it comes to ASO (App Store Optimization). I don't have a marketing budget — it's literally zero.

Is it a niche problem? HieroNote competes with massive apps like Notion, Obsidian, and Apple Notes. MyDailyEats is in a market dominated by MyFitnessPal and Yazio. And Guinea Pig Memories is... well, it's for guinea pig people. Am I just picking fights I can't win?

Is it a "nobody asked for this" problem? Maybe I'm building things that only I want? But I genuinely find all three apps useful in my daily life. Doesn't that count for something?

Is it a marketing problem? I have almost no social media presence. I don't have a blog (well, until now I guess). I don't know any influencers. I don't have friends who are developers. In Japan, the indie dev community exists, but it's small and I'm shy.

Should I give up? This is the question that keeps me up at night. I've spent two years on this. Two years of late nights and weekends. Two years of learning and building and debugging. And the result is... silence.

What I've tried

To be fully transparent, here's what I've done so far on the marketing side:

App Store optimization — I've written descriptions in 20+ languages and tried to pick good keywords
Made the apps free or very affordable — HieroNote is completely free with no ads
Posted on Reddit — My posts got automatically removed because my account is new and has no karma (which felt like a cruel joke)
Set up this Medium account — You're reading my first attempt at content marketing

That's... basically it. I know it's not much. I know real marketing requires more effort. But I don't know where to start.

What I'm asking for

If you've read this far, thank you. Seriously. It means a lot that someone actually spent time reading about my little apps.

Here's what I'd love to hear from you:

Honest feedback on the apps themselves — If you try any of them, please tell me what you think. Good or bad. I can handle it.
Marketing advice — How do indie developers actually get users? What worked for you? What's a waste of time?
Community suggestions — Are there communities, forums, or groups where I might find people who'd be interested in these apps? Especially for the guinea pig app — where do guinea pig people hang out online?
General encouragement or reality checks — Should I keep going? Should I focus on one app instead of three? Should I change my approach entirely?

I know this is a lot to ask from strangers on the internet. But I don't have anyone else to ask.

My Pet Weight Tracker Has 9 Apps and 0 Users Who Care About Weight

Kei — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 09:21:22 +0000

How a simple scale app accidentally became a pet photo social network

Hi, it's Kei. The solo developer from Japan who keeps writing about her apps like they're her children. Because they kind of are.

If you've been following along, you know the story so far: I built apps, nobody used them, I cried about it on Medium, and then some very kind strangers on the internet gave me advice. I rebuilt all my screenshots. I kept going.

Today I want to tell you about the weirdest thing that's happened in my two years of indie development.

I built a pet weight tracker. I updated it obsessively for months. And somewhere along the way, it stopped being a weight tracker entirely.

The original idea was so simple

It started with my guinea pigs, Mochi and Kinako.

Guinea pigs are small animals. When they get sick, they hide it — it's a survival instinct. The first warning sign is usually weight loss. So the vet told me: weigh them regularly and track the changes.

I looked for an app that could do this. Couldn't find one I liked. So I built one.

The core concept was dead simple:

Enter your pet's weight
See a chart over time
Export the data as CSV for your vet

That's it. That was the whole app.

Then I thought: guinea pig owners aren't the only ones who need this. Hamster owners weigh their hamsters. Bunny owners weigh their bunnies. Bird owners, ferret owners, chinchilla owners — they all track weight.

So I did what any reasonable developer would do.

I made nine separate apps.

Yes, nine apps

Bunny Tracker
Hamster Care
Guinea Pig Care
Ferret Care
Chinchilla Care
Bird Tracker
Reptile Care
Dog Tracker
Cat Tracker

One for each animal type. Same core functionality, customized for each species — different weight ranges, different care guides, different emoji.

My friends thought I was crazy. "Just make one app with a dropdown menu for animal type," they said.

But here's the thing about pet people: they don't search for "pet weight tracker." They search for "hamster weight tracker" or "bunny health app." Having separate apps means better discoverability for each niche.

Also, I might be a little crazy. I won't rule it out.

And then nobody weighed their pets

I mean, some people did. The app worked perfectly for weight tracking. Beautiful charts, export functionality, multiple pet support — the whole package.

But when I looked at how people actually used the app, something interesting was happening.

People were using the photo diary feature way more than the weight tracking.

They'd open the app, skip past the weight entry, and go straight to adding photos with little notes. "Mochi looking sleepy today." "Max stole a treat from the kitchen." "Luna discovered the box."

I built a scale. They wanted a photo album.

So I leaned into it

This is the part where I could pretend I had some brilliant product vision. I didn't. I just listened to what users were doing and thought, "OK, you want photos? Let me give you photos."

Version 2.0 was a complete transformation.

I added a shared photo gallery — a community feature where all nine apps connect to the same cloud database. You post a photo in Bunny Tracker, and someone using Cat Tracker on the other side of the world can see it.

Let me say that again because it still blows my mind: a hamster owner in Germany can scroll through and react to a chinchilla photo posted by someone in Brazil. Through an app that was supposed to be a weight calculator.

Features I never planned to build

Here's what the "weight tracker" has now:

Five emoji reactions. Because a simple thumbs-up wasn't enough for pet photos. You can send a heart, a paw print, sparkles, and more. People use them constantly.

Species filter. A horizontal scroll bar at the top that lets you browse by animal type — or see everything at once. Want to look at just hamsters for 20 minutes? I respect that and I've built a button for it.

AI content moderation. Every photo goes through an AI check before it appears in the gallery. The AI verifies it's actually a photo of the right animal (no, you can't upload your lunch to Bunny Tracker), checks for inappropriate content, and makes sure nothing weird gets through. It's Claude, by the way — Anthropic's AI. It's surprisingly good at telling a hamster from a guinea pig.

Discord integration. Photos automatically post to a Discord channel when uploaded. I check it sometimes just to see what people are sharing.

Community backgrounds. You can set any photo from the gallery as your app's background. Someone's golden retriever is currently my Dog Tracker wallpaper and I'm not changing it.

A full care guide. Seven sections of health and care information for each animal, localized in multiple languages. Because if someone's using a pet health app, they probably want pet health information.

And yes, weight tracking is still there. It still works great. Beautiful charts, CSV export, all of it.

It's just not the main event anymore.

The numbers

In version 2.0, I had to build the entire photo system from scratch: CloudKit infrastructure, upload pipeline, image caching, hash-based duplicate prevention, reaction tracking...

In 2.1, I added interstitial ads with smart frequency control and Firebase Analytics.

In 2.2, I rewrote every App Store title and promotional text for all 9 apps across 35 languages. (My previous article about the 900 screenshots? That was 2.1. The rebranding was another round of "why do I do this to myself.")

In 2.3, I simplified the premium model. Made CSV export free for everyone. Premium just removes ads now.

In 2.4, more refinements. Stability. Edge cases.

In 2.5 — the version I just shipped — I added date pickers for weight entries, tappable record rows, and widget support preparation.

Six major updates in about two months. For nine apps simultaneously.

I'm tired.

What this taught me

Users will tell you what they want. Not with words — with behavior. I was so focused on building the perfect weight tracker that I almost missed the fact that people wanted a photo app. The data was right there. I just had to look at it.

"Pivot" sounds dramatic but sometimes it's just... leaning. I didn't throw away the weight tracking. I didn't rebuild from zero. I just shifted the emphasis. The weight feature is still there, still useful. But the photo gallery moved to the center, and everything else reorganized around it.

Niche apps can have community features. I know "pet photo social network" sounds ridiculous. But that's basically what it is now, and people genuinely engage with it. Small communities can be incredibly warm.

Maintaining nine apps is exactly as painful as it sounds. Every change gets multiplied by nine. Every bug fix. Every localization update. Every screenshot. I have scripts and templates and automated pipelines for almost everything now, but there's still a baseline cost that never goes away.

I'm still not making money. Let's be honest about that. The revenue from these apps is negligible. Most users are on the free tier, and the premium tier just removes ads. This is still a passion project, not a business.

But when I open the photo gallery and see a new chinchilla photo from someone I've never met, in a country I've never been to, reacted to by three other strangers who also love chinchillas — I don't know, that feels like it matters.

The before and after

What AnimalScale was (v1.0):

A weight tracker
Charts and CSV export
Functional but boring
"Please weigh your pet regularly"

What AnimalScale is now (v2.5):

A pet photo diary with community features
Weight tracking (still there, still good)
Shared gallery across 9 animal types
AI-moderated, reaction-enabled, multi-language
"Look at this chinchilla mid-yawn and tell me you're not having a good day"

Same codebase. Same developer. Completely different app.

Please look at my pets

OK, I'll be honest about what I want.

I want more people to post photos of their pets. The gallery is alive and growing, but it's still small. Every new photo makes it a little better for everyone.

If you have any pet — literally any pet from a goldfish to a great dane — there might be an app for you. And if there isn't, well, my DMs are open for animal type suggestions. (Please don't suggest spiders. Please.)

All 9 apps are free. Find them here:
https://keik.co.jp/animal-scale/index-en.html

Post a photo. React to someone else's photo. Be part of the smallest, weirdest, most wholesome social network on the internet.

What's next

I have some ideas for the future. Widget support so you can see pet photos on your home screen. Maybe a "pet of the day" feature. Maybe expanding to more animal types.

But honestly? Right now I'm just going to ship v2.5, close Xcode, and go weigh my guinea pigs.

Some habits die hard.

— Kei

This is my third post. The first one was about nobody using my apps. The second was about rebuilding 900 screenshots. This one is about how a scale became a social network. I wonder what the next one will be about.

Probably something equally unhinged. Stay tuned.

I just shipped my new app. It's a diary with a cat. Nobody asked for this.

Kei — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 09:21:19 +0000

Meet Logmi — a journal app I designed to feel like an Animal Crossing village, one obsessive UI detail at a time

Hi, it's Kei again. The solo iOS developer from Japan who keeps writing about her apps on Medium like therapy.

If this is your first time reading, here's the short version: I'm 30, I live in Japan, I've been teaching myself iOS development for two years, and I have a small collection of apps that almost nobody uses. I've cried about it on Medium before. People were nice about it. I kept going.

So today I'm here to tell you that I shipped another one.

I know. I know. Another one.

Its name is Logmi, and it's a diary app. With a cat.

But more than that — it's the first app I've built where the entire experience, from the mascot's facial expressions to the way the buttons round their corners, was designed to feel like one specific thing.

I wanted Logmi to feel like an Animal Crossing village.

The aesthetic I was chasing

Here's the thing about most journaling apps: they look like productivity tools. Day One is sleek and minimal. Apple Journal is institutional. Notion templates feel like spreadsheets in disguise.

None of those apps make me want to write down what I ate for breakfast. They make me feel like I'm doing a chore.

The apps and games that do make me want to open them every day all share something in common. They feel soft. They feel warm. They feel like a place. Animal Crossing is the obvious one. But also Stardew Valley, the cooking sections of older Studio Ghibli films, the corners of Tumblr where people post pictures of their hand-drawn bullet journals.

I wanted Logmi to live in that universe.

That meant making a hundred small decisions that nobody is going to consciously notice, but that I hope add up to a feeling.

Meet Romi

The most visible of those decisions is the mascot.

Her name is Romi. She's a small pixel-art cat who lives at the bottom of the screen.

I want to be careful explaining this, because mascots in apps can go very wrong. They can feel pushy. They can feel infantilizing. They can make a serious tool feel like a toy you're supposed to outgrow.

I tried very hard to make Romi the opposite of all of that.

Here's how she works:

She has 43 different facial expressions. Different for morning, evening, after you log a meal, after you finish a streak, when you tap her on the head.
She never shows the negative ones. I drew sad faces and angry faces and grumpy faces, and then I locked them in a folder marked "do not display." Romi will never judge you. She will never frown at you. If you skip three days, she'll just look at you with the same warm face she had on day one and say good morning.
She greets you once per session. Not constantly. Not every screen. Once when you open the app, with a little message that fits the time of day.
She speaks 35 languages. Her name even changes depending on your device language — Romi in English, ロミ in Japanese, 로미 in Korean, and so on through the rest.
She disappears after 5 seconds. Tap her once, she'll say something else. Tap her twice, she goes back to being quiet.

The two rules I made for myself when designing her: never demand attention, and never make the user feel bad. Both of those are violated constantly by mascot characters in productivity apps. I think that's why people hate them.

The buttons. Oh god, the buttons.

This is the part where I sound a little obsessed, but here we are.

I spent more time on the buttons in Logmi than on any other piece of the UI. Probably more than is reasonable.

Every button in the app has:

A specific corner radius that's slightly different from the iOS default — softer, rounder, closer to a marshmallow than a rectangle.
A subtle inner shadow on the top edge so it looks like it's catching light from above.
A press animation that scales the button down to 96% with a spring curve, not the linear ease iOS gives you for free.
A custom haptic — not the standard .medium impact, but a softer one that feels closer to a paper page turning than a switch flipping.

The category picker, where you tap to choose what you're logging, was redrawn three times. The first version was a standard iOS grid. The second was a wheel picker. The third — the one that shipped — is a hand-arranged grid where each category has its own watercolor icon and the spacing between them was tuned by eye, not by a layout system.

I drew over 117 watercolor icons by hand for this app. 13 main categories, plus 56 different cuisines for the meal category, 8 drink types, 16 exercise types, 5 mood faces, and a handful of others. Every one of them is a real PNG file with real brush textures. Where an icon doesn't exist for a custom category, the app falls back to an emoji. Even that fallback was designed.

I know nobody is going to open the app and think "wow, the corner radius on these buttons feels exactly right." That's the point. You're not supposed to notice. You're just supposed to feel like the app is a nice place to be.

What you can actually log

Logmi has 13 built-in categories:

Mood — five faces, that's it
Meal — broken down by breakfast, lunch, snack, dinner, with watercolor icons for each cuisine
Sleep — bedtime, wake time, hours
Exercise — 16 types, each with their own little illustration
Weight
Reading — what book, what page
Water — eight drink types
Purchase — what you bought, what it cost
Photo
Memo — for the things that don't fit anywhere else
Medication
Steps (synced from Apple Health)
And one for tracking, um, bowel movements, because some of you asked your doctor to start logging that and you know exactly why this category exists

You can also create unlimited custom categories with your own emoji, color, and input format. So if you want to track how many cups of tea you drank or how many times you went outside or how many times your cat sat on your laptop, Logmi can do that.

There are 50 achievement badges spread across seven categories, including some secret ones I won't spoil. There's a calendar month view. There's a separate "Plans & Wishlist" tab for books you want to read, movies you want to watch, and places you want to visit. There's a built-in music player so you can journal to your own MP3s. Everything syncs through iCloud — no external server, no account required, your data stays on your devices.

Apple Health integration pulls your steps, sleep, and weight automatically when you tap a button.

It's a lot. I know it's a lot. I have a hard time stopping.

The font choices

While I'm being a UI nerd about this — the typography matters too.

Logmi ships with 10 custom fonts. When you pick the "Cute" font option, the app automatically chooses a different typeface depending on your device language:

Nunito for European languages
Zen Maru Gothic for Japanese
Jua for Korean
LXGW WenKai for Chinese
Mitr for Thai
Baloo 2 for Hindi and Arabic

Each one was picked because it has the same quality as the others — soft, rounded, warm — even though they're completely different writing systems. A Korean user and a Japanese user and a French user should all open Logmi and feel like they're looking at the same app, even though the actual letterforms are different.

I had no idea this was going to take 28 megabytes of font files when I started. It does. It was worth it.

The IAP confession

In my first Medium post, I bragged about how HieroNote is completely free with no ads. I felt morally superior about it. I said I hated the idea of cluttering up a notes app with banner ads.

I'm going to eat my own words now.

Logmi has in-app purchases. Tiered ones.

Free — 7 categories
$1.99 one-time — 11 categories
$4.99 one-time — all 13 categories plus unlimited custom categories

Nothing is gated forever. There's no subscription. There's no limit on how many entries you can write. The free tier is fully functional — you can keep a diary for the rest of your life without paying me a cent. The paid tiers just unlock more categories.

I made this decision because I want to keep building Logmi for years, and "free with no ads forever" is a great way to burn out. If even a small number of people pay $4.99 once, I can keep the lights on and keep adding things. If nobody pays, well, that'll also be informative.

I'm telling you this upfront because my last post was full of moral grandstanding about not charging for software, and I want to be honest that I changed my mind.

Why another diary app, though

Day One exists. Notion exists. Apple Journal now exists, made by Apple themselves. The diary app market is so saturated it's basically a swamp.

So why did I build this?

Because none of those apps feel like a place. They feel like tools. And the apps that feel like a place — Animal Crossing, Stardew, all the games I open at the end of a hard day — none of them are journaling apps.

I wanted to build the thing that doesn't exist: a journal that feels like the kind of game you open just to walk around in.

I genuinely use Logmi every day. I logged my mood this morning. I logged the coffee I just finished. I tapped Romi on the head and she did a little tail flick. I closed the app, and felt slightly better than when I opened it.

If anyone else in the world feels the same way I do — that journaling apps are sometimes too serious for what's actually a tender, vulnerable little daily ritual — maybe Logmi will work for them too.

That's the whole pitch.

What I'm asking for

If you've made it this far, thank you. Truly. Here's where I'd love your help:

Honest feedback on whether the Animal Crossing feeling actually lands. I know what I was aiming for. What I don't know is whether it reads that way to someone opening the app for the first time, or whether it just reads as "yet another cute app." Both answers are useful.
Marketing advice for journaling apps specifically. Pet apps have pet communities. Step counter apps have fitness communities. But journaling is so personal that the "communities" tend to be more like quiet corners of the internet. Where do diary people hang out?
Or just download Logmi and say hi to Romi. That's the easiest one. She's been waiting.

Links

Logmi: Life Log, Diary & Mood — search "Logmi" on the App Store
My website: keik.co.jp

I'm planning to write another post in a couple of weeks about the other thing I just shipped — a complete redesign of my step counter app, MyDailySteps, which got a Studio Ghibli–inspired makeover and 26 new languages in 10 days. That one nearly broke me. Stay tuned if you want the gory details.

Until then, thank you for reading. It still surprises me every time someone does.

— Kei

Hey, it's been a while. I didn't quit. I just disappeared into the App Store.

Kei — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 09:21:16 +0000

A long-overdue check-in from the solo dev in Japan who keeps making apps nobody asked for

Hi. It's Kei.

If you've read my stuff before, you know the shape of this already: I'm a solo iOS developer in Japan, I taught myself to code a few years ago, and I keep shipping little apps into a void that mostly ignores them. Then I come back to Medium and write about it like I'm confessing something.

It's been a few months since the last one. I want to say I was doing something glamorous. I wasn't. I was sitting at the same desk, in the same chair, rebuilding the same apps over and over, one screenshot at a time.

So this is just a check-in. No big launch, no dramatic story. Just — here's what I've actually been doing while I went quiet.

I fell down a screenshot hole and didn't come out for weeks

Someone told me once — actually, a kind stranger named Roman told me this in a Medium comment months ago — that I spend a month building an app and ten minutes on the screenshots, and that this is completely backwards. The screenshots are the thing people actually see. The app is the thing they see after they've already decided.

I couldn't stop thinking about it. So I did the obviously unhinged thing and rebuilt the store media for my entire pet-app line. Nine apps. All of them. New screenshots, new preview videos, in ten languages.

If you want a number: it came out to something like 720 still images and 351 preview videos. I built little tools to generate them because doing it by hand would have taken until next year. Some nights I'd fix one alignment bug at 1am and then realize it was wrong in all nine apps and all ten languages at once, and I'd just sit there staring at the ceiling.

All nine are live now. Did downloads explode? No. But they look like real apps made by a real person now, instead of apps made by someone who gave up at the screenshot stage. That feels like it matters, even if the numbers haven't caught up yet.

The apps that actually shipped

While I was in the screenshot hole, a few things did make it out the door:

MuraLog (the diary-with-a-cat I wrote about last time — Romi is still down there in the corner, still refusing to frown at anyone) got a bunch of updates. She's a little more polished now.
PlantCareDiary got a big redesign and shipped.
MyDailyPets, MyDailySleep, and WorldHolidays all pushed real updates.
And I did the thing I swore I'd stop doing: I started a brand-new app. It's called COLLEMO, and no, nobody asked for it, and yes, I built it anyway. I have a problem.

I also quietly turned one of my apps into something completely different. It used to be a gratitude journal. It's now a dream journal — you write down last night's dream before it fades, and a little AI tries to gently guess what it might mean. (It's for fun and self-reflection, not fortune-telling. I put that in the description twice so nobody yells at me.) Renaming and repurposing an app you already shipped is a strange feeling. Like renovating a house while people are technically still living in it.

The boring confession: the money

In an earlier post I got a little preachy about ads and money. So in the spirit of being honest with the three of you still reading:

I finally sat down and did the math on what all of this actually earns. Ad revenue across the whole portfolio, annualized, is roughly $118. A year.

I'm not going to dress that up. That's not "ramen profitable." That's not even "one nice dinner per month." That's a rounding error for most people reading this on Medium.

And here's the thing I learned staring at that number: you cannot optimize your way out of an audience problem. I spent a while convinced that if I just tuned the ad placement, picked better ad units, moved things around, the number would change. It doesn't. The number is small because not enough people know the apps exist. Every lever I actually control is downstream of that one problem, and that one problem is marketing — the exact thing I'm worst at.

Which, I guess, is why I'm back here writing this.

What I've figured out (and what I haven't)

The stuff I've gotten better at is all the invisible plumbing. I can build an app, localize it into 35 languages, generate a few hundred localized screenshots and videos, submit it, deal with the occasional App Store rejection, and ship an update — mostly without breaking things. Two years ago none of that was true.

The stuff I have not figured out is the only stuff that moves the number: getting a single additional human being to care.

I tried a few things while I was gone. I looked at Reddit again — my posts get eaten by low-karma filters before anyone sees them, which is fair, that's what the filters are for. I've got a stack of blog drafts I never published. I keep hearing "just do Product Hunt," "just do TikTok," "just build in public," and every one of those is a whole second job I don't have the energy for after the first one.

I don't have a clean ending for this. I'm not going to pretend I cracked it. I'm just still here, still shipping, still bad at the part that matters.

What I'm asking for

Same as always. If you made it this far, thank you — genuinely.

If you've ever gone from "nobody uses my thing" to "some people use my thing," I want to know what actually flipped it. Not the generic advice. The specific thing that worked for you.
If you're a fellow tiny-audience solo dev, say hi. It's lonely out here and I like knowing there are others.
Or just go poke at one of the apps and tell me it's ugly. Honestly that's useful too.

Links

You can find everything by searching KeiK LLC on the App Store — that's the developer page with all of them.
My website: keik.co.jp

I'll try not to disappear for so long next time. No promises. There's another app half-built on my desk right now and I already know I'm going to finish it before I do anything sensible about marketing the ones that are already out.

Thank you for reading. It still means a lot every single time.

— Kei

I Rebuilt Every Single Screenshot for My 9 Pet Apps. All of Them. In 10 Languages.

Kei — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 09:21:13 +0000

Hi, it's Kei again. The solo iOS developer from Japan who wrote that post about nobody using her apps.

First — thank you to everyone who read that post, left comments, and tried my apps. I honestly didn't expect anyone to care, and you all made me ugly-cry at my desk. In a good way.

I'm back because I just finished something that nearly broke me, and I need to tell someone about it.

I remade every App Store screenshot for all 9 of my pet apps.

Every. Single. One.

Wait — 9 apps?

Some of you might remember I mentioned Guinea Pig Memories in my last post. What I didn't fully explain is that it's part of a bigger series called AnimalScale — a collection of pet health tracker apps, one for each animal type:

Bunny Tracker — Rabbits
Hamster Care — Hamsters
Guinea Pig Care — Guinea pigs
Ferret Care — Ferrets
Chinchilla Care — Chinchillas
Bird Tracker — Birds
Reptile Care — Reptiles
Dog Tracker — Dogs
Cat Tracker — Cats

Yes, I made nine separate apps. Yes, I maintain all of them by myself. Yes, I question my life choices regularly.

They all do weight tracking with charts, photo diaries, and — this is the part I actually want to talk about — a shared photo album where users across all 9 apps can post photos of their pets and see each other's.

A hamster owner can scroll through and see someone's chinchilla on the other side of the world. A cat person might stumble upon the most adorable ferret they've ever seen. It's like a tiny, quiet social network where the only content allowed is pet photos.

People are actually using it. Like, real people. Posting real photos of their real pets.

I cannot tell you how happy this makes me.

So why did I redo all the screenshots?

Because the old ones were embarrassing.

OK, "embarrassing" is strong. They were... functional. I took simulator screenshots and uploaded them directly to the App Store. No mockups, no captions, no design whatsoever. Just raw screen captures that said "here is an app that exists."

Every time I browsed the App Store and saw my listings next to other apps, it was like showing up to a job interview in pajamas. The app itself is fine! But the first impression was terrible.

After my last post, some of you gave me advice about presentation and ASO. One comment that stuck with me was something like: "People decide whether to download in about 3 seconds based on screenshots alone."

Three seconds. My old screenshots couldn't even tell you what the app does in thirty.

So I decided to redo everything. Properly this time. With device mockups, captions explaining each feature, and actual effort put into making them look professional.

How hard could it be, right?

The math that almost killed me

Let me walk you through the scope of what I signed up for.

Each app needs screenshots showing different features — the main screen, weight charts, the photo album, settings. Let's say about 5 screenshots per app.

That's already 45 screenshots just in English.

But I support 10 languages: English, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian.

So each screenshot needs the caption text swapped out for each language.

45 screenshots x 10 languages = 450 images.

Oh, and each one needs both an iPhone version and an iPad version.

450 x 2 = 900 images.

For each one, I had to:

Take the simulator screenshot
Place it into a mockup template
Add the caption text
Export as PNG
Resize to App Store specifications (which are different for iPhone and iPad, because of course they are)

There was a Wednesday night — I think it was Wednesday, the days blurred together — where I finished the 4th app and realized I was not even halfway done. I closed my laptop, made instant ramen, and sat on the floor eating it while my guinea pigs stared at me with what I can only describe as concern.

Was it worth it?

Yes. Absolutely yes.

The difference is dramatic. The old screenshots said "I made an app." The new ones say "here's an app, here's what it does, here's why your pet would benefit from it."

The photo album screenshots turned out especially nice. There's something about seeing a grid of real pet photos with little reaction buttons that immediately communicates what the feature is about — better than any description I could write.

About that photo album

Since I have your attention, let me tell you about the feature I'm most proud of.

All 9 apps share the same cloud database. When someone posts a photo in Bunny Tracker, it shows up in Cat Tracker too. And Dog Tracker. And all the others.

You can react to photos with three emojis:

Love
Paw print (universal pet approval)
Amazing

There's a species filter, so you can browse just hamsters, just birds, or everything at once.

And every uploaded photo goes through AI moderation before it appears in the gallery. No inappropriate content, no spam, no random selfies. Just pets being cute.

I check the database sometimes just to look at what people have posted. Last week someone uploaded a photo of their chinchilla mid-yawn and it got a bunch of reactions and I swear I spent five minutes just smiling at my screen.

This is why I keep doing this. Not for downloads or revenue. For moments like that.

What I learned

Screenshots matter way more than I thought. I spent months adding features and polishing code, but the thing that probably makes the biggest difference for a new visitor is... five images with some text on them. It feels absurd, but that's how the App Store works.

Localization multiplies everything. Supporting 10 languages means 10x the work for screenshots, descriptions, and keywords. But it also means someone in Brazil or Korea might find my app. I've actually seen downloads from countries I've never been to, which is a surreal feeling.

There's no shortcut for grunt work. I'm one person. There's no design team, no marketing department, no intern I can hand this off to. It was just me, my laptop, and 900 images that needed to exist. Sometimes building apps is glamorous problem-solving. Sometimes it's resizing PNGs at midnight.

Please look at my apps

I'm not good at self-promotion. My last post was literally titled "nobody uses my apps" and that somehow worked better than anything else I've tried. So in the spirit of honest self-deprecation:

I have 9 pet apps. They're all free. They have beautiful new screenshots now. Please download one.

If you have a pet — any pet — there's probably a version for your animal. Track their weight, take photos, send a paw reaction to someone else's hamster across the globe.

You can find all 9 apps here:
https://keik.co.jp/animal-scale/index-en.html

What's next

Honestly? I need to sleep for about three days.

After that, I'll probably go back to working on features, fixing bugs, and trying to figure out how marketing works. Someone in the comments of my last post suggested I try TikTok. Me? TikTok? I'll think about it.

But right now, I'm just going to sit here, open the photo album, and look at strangers' pets for a while.

If you downloaded one of my apps from the last post — thank you. If you're about to try one now — thank you in advance. And if you post a photo of your pet in the album, I will absolutely see it and I will absolutely send a paw reaction.

— Kei