what worked on my apps' TikTok accounts: a concrete scene plus a fix: 2,125 views taking a side against chatgpt: 908 a character joke with no payoff: 150 the internet wants a point.

which part of your app business do you wish you'd automated first?

my config server answered "not modified" without checking the app version. so people on the new version would never get the new setting. old code showed the prompt on 2 of 2 launches, the fix on 0 of 6. caught in review, before release.

xcode 26.5 won't pass a StoreKit test file to the simulator from the command line. only the Run button does. my whole setup is agents running commands. meet the one feature that wants a human finger.

my config server rejected a clock tolerance of 0. nothing crashed. ordering in the app just turned off, silently. if a setting can be zero, test zero.

398 of 398 tests green on a new weekly reminder. on iOS, a tap never reached the app. and the admin panel sent the days as text, so the server rejected every change. 2 blocking bugs. zero red tests.

first time i used my own screenshot tool through an AI chat instead of the editor. the batch render failed for every language. the project id never reached the step that needed it. found by the one customer who can't leave: me.

what's one metric you stopped trusting, and what made you stop?

fixed the bug where buying messages in my AI chat app unlocked nothing. shipped it. still unlocked nothing. the new function was never called. the real fix came one version later, with a test that proves the caller exists.

my post scheduler says my last 25 tweets got 97 views. X says 413. two dashboards, 4x apart. very on brand for me.

my config server silently dropped any field that wasn't in its type. the dashboard said "verified". the app used its built-in value. two days of that. "verified" meant "i sent it".

81% of new users met my party app's paywall before a single card. median time on it: 3 seconds. i had a remote switch to turn it off. it did nothing on first launch, which runs on the bundled default. a remote switch can't reach a fresh install.

337 TikTok posts across my apps. one breakout: a 10 second video, 26,342 views. so i made six near copies. 184 to 957 views. the algorithm can tell.

solo devs: what's the first thing you check every morning?

theory: people leave my AI chat app because the character never says hi first. shipped the greeting. people who got one messaged far more, 82% vs 23%. they came back at the same rate. 8.3% vs 7.7%. right fix, wrong problem.

asked an AI to draft my app's store description. it promised "unlimited plants" in 10 languages. it didn't make that up. it found an old unused string in my own codebase. my claim checker: 15 of 15 clean.

a daily backfill pulled 16 markets. one dropped connection and 5 of them were gone. the helper retried 429s and 5xx errors. it never retried a connection that died halfway. retry the failure you actually get.

"has this user paid?" my invoice app answered that in five places, with three different rules. features stayed locked while the paywall closed itself. restore said success and unlocked nothing. now there's one answer, and a test that fails if code asks around it.

moved my TikTok posting to a scheduler to save time. audience before, by my own read: mostly US. audience after: 89.2% Turkey, 1.3% US. i live in Turkey. TikTok noticed.

what's the bug that taught you the most, and how long did it take you to find it?