A real post-mortem from an indie dev. All numbers come from the App Store Connect API and GitHub Traffic API — reproducible.
The short version
I have 41 apps on the App Store. In early October I pulled the Sales Report: from Sep 1 to Oct 7, 37 straight days, daily units = 0. Not "sales slowed down" — not a single sale for over a month.
The contrast stings more: in the same period my GitHub repo was cloned by ~1,000 real users over 70 days (deduplicated, CI excluded), peaking at 80 clones/day. Same developer, same products. A thousand people watching on GitHub, zero transactions on the App Store.
This post is the diagnosis and the fixes. If you ship indie apps, you can skip this hole entirely.
1. First, rule out a broken billing system
Obvious first suspect: the data. Pulled ASC Sales Report day by day:
2026-09-01 units: 0
2026-09-15 units: 0
2026-09-30 units: 0
2026-10-07 units: 0
Side quest discovered here: ASC only keeps ~30 days of Sales Reports. Older requests return 400. If you don't snapshot your sales data locally, long-window retrospectives become impossible. That's also why I now snapshot GitHub traffic into the repo daily.
The data is fine. It's just zero.
2. Then the store structure: 15 live apps, 0 free
Of the 41 apps, 26 are invisible (in review, rejected, delisted). 15 are actually downloadable.
Pulled pricing for all 15 via iTunes Lookup:
$0.99 ×2 · $2.99 ×4 · $3.99 ×1 · $4.99 ×4 · $5.99 ×2 · $9.99 ×2 · $12.99 ×2 (flagship AI workbench)
Number priced at zero: 0.
All paid upfront. No free entry point anywhere.
What that means: no matter where traffic comes from — GitHub, X, dev.to — the user lands on a product page whose first screen is a buy button. No brand, no ratings (0 ratings store-wide, a separate death loop), no trial. The paywall is a wall.
My mistake was classic: when content marketing brought ~40 GitHub clones/day in August, I thought "traffic → trust" was established. Actually the funnel was broken earlier: not one app could be opened and used for free.
3. The fix: a free window
Four apps are now free to download until Oct 31, including my main product KinetBrief (an AI note app). This isn't a clearance sale — it's fixing "can this be used at all" before asking "will you pay".
An ASC gotcha worth recording: iTunes Lookup API caches prices for hours. Don't verify a price change via the API right after making it — you'll see the stale price and panic. The ASC backend price schedule is the source of truth.
4. Traffic-side autopsy: three channels died at once
Reddit (dead, not salvageable)
My account u/PhinnShen now shows "suspended". Post-mortem: in early September I posted product threads across multiple subreddits at a rate of 3 per 24h. By mid-September every post was nuked by the site-level spam filter (115 comments, comment_karma = 0 — not a single one counted).
Two lessons: (1) shadow removal is always visible to the author — you think it's live; nobody else can see it. Verify via third-party archives like Arctic Shift. (2) comment_karma stuck at 0 is the fastest health check that your account is flagged. Flagged accounts have no appeal path; rebuilding takes weeks, so factor that latency into any promotion plan.
X (alive, but dormant)
Account survives, 57 followers, top tweet 89 likes (the build story of a local-first task app). Last post: Sep 30. No ban — I just stopped posting. (Now also carrying a "temporary label" that may reduce reach, so links go in replies, not main posts.)
juejin (my only proven engine, also stopped)
In early August I published a hands-on comparison of 4 AI agent engines running the same real-world task. For those two weeks: 40 GitHub clones/day, the all-time peak. Then I stopped publishing in late September. The one channel the data actually validated — and I went quiet at the best moment.
5. Why 1,000 GitHub clones didn't become downloads
The most interesting finding. 70 days, 1,592 person-days, ~1,000 unique cloners. The traffic was real. But:
- They clone the source, not the product. Someone cloning a macOS AI workbench repo can compile it themselves; the App Store build adds nothing for them.
- The repo had no conversion hook. The README CTA pointed to GitHub Releases (133 downloads total), not the App Store page. The last meter was never wired up.
- The two funnels overlap less than you'd think. GitHub = developers who want to read the implementation. App Store = users who want a working thing. Additive, not interchangeable.
Fix: repo front page now has a 30-second TL;DR and an App Store link; release notes go out on both channels.
6. Summary: 0 downloads = structure × traffic, both zero
| Dimension | September state | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Store structure | 15 live apps, all paid, zero free entry | 4 apps free until Oct 31 |
| account site-flagged | rebuild slowly (weeks), short-term write-off | |
| X | alive but silent 37 days | resume weekly posting |
| juejin | stopped (the only proven engine) | this post is the restart |
| GitHub → MAS | 1k+ clones, zero conversion hook | README redesign |
The mirror image: fix structure without traffic, and nobody knows it's free. Fix traffic without structure, and you pour water into a paywall. Indie distribution is multiplication: any factor at zero means the result is zero.
Finally
This is post one of a series. Next: 90 days of building a SwiftUI task manager (FTS5 Chinese search, on-device AI tiering, menu-bar form-factor trade-offs), and a follow-up agent-engine benchmark.
The four free apps (incl. KinetBrief) are searchable as "Kinet" on the App Store, or via the README on my GitHub profile. Bring data-backed criticism, I can take it.
Data sources: ASC Sales Report API + iTunes Lookup API + GitHub Traffic API, pulled 2026-10-07.
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