I shipped an iOS app three weeks ago. It has 1 review.
Not "1 star" — one single review, from one person. Downloads are somewhere between zero and a rounding error. The app works fine. People who use it like it. Nobody finds it.
Instead of guessing, I pulled data on the entire category and looked for the pattern. Here's what the numbers said, including the part I didn't want to hear.
The setup
The app is a screen time blocker. The pitch: it's for adults who want to block themselves — no account, no cloud, no monitoring dashboard, everything on-device via Apple's Screen Time API.
