DEV Community: Rafi Bagaskara Halilintar

Submitting to App Store and Play Store as a solo developer - what actually happened

Rafi Bagaskara Halilintar — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 11:14:04 +0000

I submitted Termique to the App Store and Play Store three days ago. It's live now. Here's what the process actually looked like, because most guides make it sound cleaner than it is.

The part nobody talks about - the assets

Before you even think about submitting, you need screenshots. Not just any screenshots, specific sizes for specific devices. App Store wants iPhone screenshots, iPad screenshots, and if you support Mac, Mac screenshots too.

The iPad one caught me off guard. Termique is an iPhone app. I don't have an iPad. But Apple requires iPad screenshots anyway. So I ran the simulator, took the screenshots, and moved on. It's annoying but it takes maybe 30 minutes once you know it's coming.

For the actual design I used Figma templates from the community, there are free ones that handle all the sizing automatically. That part wasn't bad. The bad part was not knowing I needed it until I was already mid-submission.

The rejection

I got rejected. It happens. The reasons were straightforward, a missing screenshot size and something about content rights information that I hadn't filled in. Both fixable in under an hour.

The thing about App Store rejection is it's not as dramatic as it sounds. They tell you exactly what's wrong. You fix it. You resubmit. That's it.

Three days from submission to live

I submitted on day one. Got feedback the same day. Fixed everything, resubmitted on day two. Approved and live on day three.

I was expecting weeks. I got three days. That was the biggest surprise of the whole process.

Play Store was similar, faster review, slightly different requirements, but nothing that required starting over.

What I'd tell myself before starting

Make sure your legal pages are ready before you submit. Privacy policy, terms of use, all of it. Both stores will ask for links during submission and you can't just skip them. Having those ready saved me a round trip.

The other thing, your app doesn't have to be perfect. It has to work. There's a difference. Some things weren't fully polished when I submitted Termique. But nothing was broken in a way users would notice. That's the bar. Don't wait for perfect, you'll never ship.

The actual hard part

Honestly the submission process itself wasn't the hard part. The hard part was building something worth submitting in the first place.

Termique is available on the App Store and Play Store now. If you manage servers and want an SSH manager that actually syncs across all your devices, give it a try.

termique.app

Why I chose Tauri over Electron for my SSH manager

Rafi Bagaskara Halilintar — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 11:33:54 +0000

When I started building Termique, I knew one thing for sure: it had to feel fast.

An SSH manager is a tool you open constantly. You switch between servers, you check logs, you run commands. The last thing you want is to wait for your app to load. So when I started evaluating my options for building a cross-platform desktop app, Electron was the obvious first choice, but it didn't take long for me to realize it wasn't the right one.

The Electron problem

Electron is everywhere. VS Code, Slack, Discord, all built on Electron. And for good reason: it's mature, well-documented, and lets you build desktop apps with web technologies.

But the tradeoff is real. Electron ships with its own copy of Chromium and Node.js. Every Electron app is essentially a browser running your app inside it. The result? My early build was hitting around 100MB just for the installer. For an SSH manager, that felt absurd.

And it wasn't just the bundle size. The app felt heavy. Not broken, not unusable, just heavy. That sluggish feeling every time you open it, that half-second delay before things respond. For a tool you open dozens of times a day, that adds up fast.

Discovering Tauri

Tauri takes a different approach entirely. Instead of bundling its own browser engine, it uses the OS's native webview, WebKit on macOS, WebView2 on Windows, WebKitGTK on Linux. The result is dramatically smaller bundle sizes and native performance.

When I switched Termique to Tauri, the Windows installer went from ~100MB down to 12MB. That's not a small improvement, that's a completely different category of app.

But what surprised me more was the performance difference. Tauri just feels fast in a way that's hard to explain. Snappier startup, smoother interactions. I'm not sure exactly what's happening under the hood, but the difference is noticeable immediately.

It wasn't all smooth sailing

I'll be honest, Tauri has its quirks. The one that frustrated me the most early on was something embarrassingly simple: the close button didn't work.

When I first got the app running, clicking the X to close the window did absolutely nothing. I had to force quit every single time. It took me a while to figure out the fix, but that kind of thing is part of working with a newer framework, the documentation isn't always as comprehensive as Electron's, and some things you just have to figure out yourself.

Was it worth it?

Yes, without question.

For Termique specifically, the lightweight nature of Tauri isn't just a nice-to-have, it's part of the product's identity. An SSH manager should feel like a native tool, not a browser tab pretending to be one. 12MB installer, fast startup, no bloat. That's exactly what I wanted.

If you're building a developer tool where performance and trust matter, I'd seriously consider Tauri. It's not as plug-and-play as Electron yet, but the tradeoffs are absolutely worth it.

Termique is available at termique.app, free to try, and built entirely with Tauri.

I got locked out of my own servers. So I built my own SSH manager.

Rafi Bagaskara Halilintar — Thu, 28 May 2026 18:12:58 +0000

A while back, I switched devices.

Simple enough, right? Except I was on Termius Free and apparently
host sync is a Pro feature. So everything I had set up, hosts, SSH
keys, credentials, none of it carried over. I had to start from scratch.

That was the moment I thought: why am I paying for something that
holds my own data hostage behind a paywall?

So I built Termique.

One month. One developer. Zero co-founders.

I started in early May. Today, Termique is a fully working SSH manager
for macOS, Windows, and Linux, built with Tauri, React, Hono,
PostgreSQL, Firebase, and Cloudflare Workers.

The hardest part wasn't the code. I built most of it with AI assistance.
The real challenge was figuring out what to build, which features
actually matter, how sync should work securely, and what should never
leave your device.

The second hardest part? Security auditing. Making sure nothing leaks
that shouldn't. Credentials stay encrypted on your device. The server
never sees plaintext. No telemetry on your sessions.

What it does today

Add a host on your laptop. Open your desktop. It's already there, IP,
port, SSH key and all. No re-setup. No copy-pasting credentials between
machines.

That's the thing I'm most proud of. It sounds simple, but that's
exactly the point.

Where we are

12 users, still very early. Launching on Product Hunt on June 15th.
Free plan available, Pro is $5/month, half of what frustrated me in
the first place.

If you've ever been annoyed by Termius pricing or just want an SSH
manager that doesn't feel bloated, I'd love for you to try it and
tell me what you think.

termique.app