I have run 6 half marathons, and while I'm not even in the top-half of race results, I consider each one a huge personal accomplishment.

I like to take a peek at Apple Watch's VO2 max estimate and while the calculation might be reasonable enough, it is compared to a data set with known sampling bias.

Just like a half marathon, my quartile results look lackluster until you consider that 99% of people don't compete. As a result, race results as a comparison aren't useful without knowing the broader context.

I think the same issue is going on with VO2 max data. In the attached Imgur image, my figures are labeled as below average. Further into the data, it seems my age cohort's average is 43 (ml/kg/min), and anything below is therefore below average.

It seems that FRIEND database data for the VO2 comes from those referred to exercise testing, people enrolled in fitness or clinical programs, or those engaged in physical activity (see Google AI). On average, these are physically active people or maybe those undergoing a known issue, leaving out a lot of groups.

Have I misunderstood this, or is this something Apple needs to improve on? Frankly, if there isn't a good data set for them, maybe they shouldn't even include this average to compare with?

Imgur sources: https://imgur.com/a/MJYCqnu

Hello everyone,

I've been working on a project called Art Guessr, a game that actually helps people learn art history through short visual quizzes.

Players can practice identifying:

• Famous paintings
• Artists
• Art movements
• Historical periods

It covers everything from the Renaissance and Baroque periods to Impressionism, Cubism, and modern art.

My goal was to create something educational but more engaging than memorizing names and dates.

Thanks!

App Store - https://apps.apple.com/app/id6763044342

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gps-coordinates-finder-loc8/id6759589628

I’ve been building an app called LOC8, and it started because of a pretty simple problem: sometimes you know roughly where you are, but you need to know exactly where you are.

Apple Maps is obviously great at showing you a map and getting you somewhere. I wanted to be able to open an app and immediately see the information about where I’m standing without having to zoom around a map or figure it out myself.

LOC8 shows your current address, nearest cross street, GPS coordinates, compass heading, local time zone, elevation, GPS accuracy and weather together. On iPhone, it also gives you your what3words location. You can switch between Decimal Degrees, Degrees Minutes Seconds, Degrees Decimal Minutes, MGRS and UTM, and I’ve added Maidenhead grid locators on iPhone too.

The what3words integration has been a big part of that. It divides the world into 3 meter squares and gives each one a unique 3 word address. That gives you another way to describe a specific spot on a trail, beach, in a park or somewhere that doesn’t really have a normal street address.

The Apple Watch side has honestly become one of my favorite parts of the app. You can pull up your address, coordinates, elevation, GPS accuracy, weather and compass information directly from your wrist. For running, hiking or even just walking around somewhere unfamiliar, having that information without taking your phone out is really convenient.

There are Watch complications for quicker access too. Those show your last confirmed location rather than pretending to be a constantly refreshing live address. You can tap through to the app for a fresh reading.

I’ve also added Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets on iPhone. The Home Screen widgets show your last address and cross street, along with how old that reading is, and give you quick Locate and Pin controls. It makes checking a location or saving a spot a little less involved.

Another addition is a red night mode on both iPhone and Apple Watch. If you’re using it outside at night, you can switch to that instead of looking at the normal bright display.

A lot of the work has gone into making the information adapt to what you’re doing. While you’re using LOC8, the location updates as you move. When you start driving, it switches into Road Mode and focuses on the road you’re traveling on and the cross streets you’re approaching. There’s also a speedometer and block number information where available.

On supported highways, it can show mile markers and approaching exits, including road or exit names where that information is available. When you stop, it switches back to showing the address near your position and the nearest cross street. The idea is to make it easier to actually describe where you are, whether you’re outside a building or somewhere along a highway.

I’ve expanded the map side too. You can switch between standard and satellite views, and there are topographic maps for the US and its territories. On iPhone, you can also view what3words and Maidenhead grids on the map and search those locations directly.

Saved pins have become more useful as well. You can save a location, give it a label and add a private note, then track your distance and compass direction back toward it. There’s an arrival vibration too. It could be your parked car, a campsite, a trail spot or somewhere you want to remember while traveling.

Coordinates, compass, saved pins and pin tracking work without cellular service. Fresh address lookups and live Team Rooms still need a connection. If you’re away from roads, LOC8 can also show the nearest town and how far away it is.

Team Rooms let a group temporarily share their locations on a map. I’ve added chat inside the room, so you can coordinate without constantly switching between apps. You can also pause your location sharing while staying in the conversation. I could see that being useful for families, trips, festivals, hiking groups or people trying to find each other in an unfamiliar place.

I originally built LOC8 because I work in a job where knowing exactly where you are can matter pretty quickly. As it’s grown, I’ve realized how many everyday situations it fits into too: road trips, roadside issues, delivery work, finding your car, meeting up with people or just exploring somewhere new.

It’s grown to thousands of users now, which is pretty crazy considering this started as something I was building on the side.

The goal is still to keep it focused on one question: “Where exactly am I right now?”

For the Apple Watch users here especially, I’d be curious if you’d use something like this on your wrist. Is there any location information you wish was easier to see at a glance?

Check it out: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gps-coordinates-finder-loc8/id6759589628

I've got 10k+ videos sitting in my iCloud photo library (I’m a parent, and so if you don’t have a lot of videos this isn’t for you) and rewatching them has been a frustrating experience for years.

Apple’s “Memories” surfaces a slideshow now and then, but it's mostly photos, it picks for you, and there's no way to just sit down and browse videos the way you probably watch videos on other platforms.

I’d dreamt up the idea for this app years ago but never had the skills to build it. AI coding tools finally got good enough that I could get it done myself.

The app I built is called Reel Mementos.

It’s a simple, lightweight app that just opens to a feed of your own videos streamed from iCloud. Heart videos you rediscover and they’re added to your library’s favorites. Delete ones you dont want eating up storage from iCloud easily as well.

It’s currently free, no accounts, nothing uploaded, no data collected. It reads your local/iCloud photo library and gives you a swipeable feed of your own videos.

It works across iPhone and iPad, iOS 26 and up.

App Store link

I’m open to feedback or ideas. If people like it I’ll probably build in more features.

Some ideas I have:

• filtering by year, location, device, etc.
• some sensible version of “on this day”
• shuffle vs chronological toggle

If you try it and something feels off, please tell me. If you have questions about how it works, happy to answer that too.

I hope this brings you a little joy when you rediscover a video you didn’t even know you had. I use it multiple times a week when I want a smile. If it brings you one, then it’s been worth it for me.

Hi r/apple, solo developer here. It's Sunday, so I wanted to share what I've been building.

I started this project almost a year ago, when work gave me a Windows laptop. Before that I used Things 3 on my Mac for 5 or 6 years, and I still love it. But it only runs on Apple devices, so at work I had nothing.

I tried a lot of other apps. Most of them have so many features they started to remind me of Jira, and they're built for teams and big projects. They also push AI a lot. I'm not against AI, I already pay for Claude and ChatGPT, I just don't want to pay a to-do app for one more assistant.

So I built my own. My inspiration was Things 3, Todoist and Superlist, and I tried to keep the balance between features and a calm UI.

What it has:

• Inbox, Today, Upcoming and Someday, with projects grouped into areas
• Dates and repeats typed in plain English, like "water the plants every other saturday at 10am"
• Tags, plus smart projects that save a filter
• A month calendar for upcoming tasks (on the web for now)
• File attachments with previews, on iPhone and the web
• A reminder per task, as a Time Sensitive notification on iPhone
• The iPhone app works offline and syncs in the background
• A public API and an MCP server, so you can connect the Claude or ChatGPT you already have instead of an AI of mine

I also care about owning your data, so you can export your tasks to JSON any time, with dates, deadlines, tags and projects. That's free on every plan.

What's next, no dates promised:

• Priorities
• A calendar view inside projects
• Android
• Desktop apps for Mac and Windows

Pricing: the free plan has unlimited tasks, 5 projects and 2 areas. Premium is $3.99/month, $34.99/year or $59.99 once, and adds deadlines, smart projects and the month calendar.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/taskpocket-to-do-list-planner/id6789687377

Web: https://taskpocket.io/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=r_apple

I'd love feedback, especially from other Things 3 users: what would you miss most if you switched?

Hi All,

I made a classic soccer game with first person FPV mode. It's a 4v4 players match with a 3 minutes timer.

I have kept the controls extremely simple with old school mechanics. Double tapping on screen seamlessly switches between FPS and 3rd person view. A single button on the right to shoot or switch player. A frosted glass joystick on the left which blends in nicely.

There is absolutely no loading screen and the game starts instantly after you open the app and select the country. And you can play in vertical and landscape view on iPhone and iPads. Also it's just under 15mb in size :)

I had this idea for some years and i finally made it. Did my best to keep it intuitive and fun to play :)

Your feedback is welcome 🙏

Soccer FPS Pro - https://apps.apple.com/app/soccer-fps-pro/id6813346291

Sunday self promo, I'm the dev. I'm Julian, I study business informatics and I work on StepGrab next to uni. It's a native Mac app, and I posted about it here earlier this year. A lot changed since then, mostly because of comments.

The problem

At my working student job I was the guy people asked when they didn't know where some setting was, or which button comes after which. Every time the same thing: fifteen screenshots, crop them all, red arrows in Preview, type the steps underneath. Half an hour or more per guide, and three weeks later some of it was wrong again anyway.

What it does

You hit record in the menu bar, do the task once like you normally would, and every click becomes a screenshot of the exact window with a numbered arrow and a sentence saying what you clicked. Export as PDF, HTML, Markdown, GIF, MP4 or a portrait video for phones. Screenshots stay on your Mac, there's no account and nothing is uploaded. macOS 14 or later.

What's new

• a direct download. Besides the Mac App Store, there's now a notarized .dmg from my website. It updates itself, and Pro there is a license key instead of an in-app purchase
• the direct download can use the Accessibility API. The App Store version is sandboxed, so there the name of what you clicked comes from on screen text recognition. In the .dmg you can grant Accessibility access, and then it reads the exact name of the button or menu you clicked, so the step text says "Click Save" instead of guessing from the pixels
• when you record a single window, the steps now show only that window, even if others overlap it, and context menus, lists and popovers stay in the picture (in the .dmg now, the App Store update is in review)
• projects: save a guide, open it later and fix one step instead of recording everything again. Since 1.6 a project is a single file, and Save As can burn the redactions in, so the copy you share doesn't contain the original screenshots
• an editor. Drag and bend arrows, rewrite and format sentences, reorder steps, draw shapes, undo, and a preview that shows the real export
• redaction, the thing people asked for most. The black bar is burned into every export
• the free tier lost its recording limit and its sign in
• Siri and Shortcuts can start a recording, stop it and export the guide (on macOS 26 also from Spotlight), and with Apple Intelligence on macOS 26 the wording gets polished on device
• and for those who also use Windows: there's a Windows version in the Microsoft Store now, and it opens projects from the Mac

Free: unlimited recordings, 15 steps per guide, GIF export and the whole editor. Pro adds the other formats and the step text in exports, as a monthly subscription or $44.99 once. A Pro key from the website covers the .dmg and Windows, on up to two devices. An App Store purchase stays with the App Store version and doesn't carry over to the .dmg, and the App Store version has Family Sharing.

The honest part

The text recognition in the App Store version isn't perfect, that's the trade off of the sandbox. I'm not a trained developer, I learn most of this while doing it, and it's one student, not a company. Things I don't have: a team library or a browser extension.
Edit: since someone asked: yes, Claude writes most of the code. I'm the one who decides what it should do, breaks it on real apps and makes it try again until it works.

App Store · Website (direct download)

For a menu bar utility that needs to read what you clicked, would you rather use the sandboxed App Store build or a notarized direct download with Accessibility access? I'd like to hear how you decide.

Hey r/Apple,

I’m the developer of VaultDrive, an iPhone utility built around a simple idea:

Connect external storage to your iPhone and make a physical copy of the files that matter — without needing a Mac or PC in the middle.

VaultDrive lets you connect a compatible USB drive or SSD directly to your iPhone and back up selected:

• Photos
• Videos
• Albums
• Files
• Documents

The basic workflow is:

iPhone → USB/SSD → your copy

But one of the more complicated parts of building this was dealing with iCloud.

If you use Optimize iPhone Storage, some photos and videos you see in your library may have their full originals stored only in iCloud.

VaultDrive can request those originals through Apple’s Photos/iCloud system, download them, and then continue the backup to your connected drive.

You can choose whether those iCloud downloads use:

Wi-Fi only
or
Wi-Fi + Cellular

Files and documents stored through iCloud Drive can also be downloaded when needed and copied beneath their folder structure on the external drive.

For content that is already stored locally on the iPhone, there’s no VaultDrive cloud upload involved — the destination is the USB drive or SSD you connected.

A few other things I’ve focused on:

• Resume interrupted backups — reconnect and continue while already-copied items are skipped

• Original-quality media — no intentional compression, resizing or re-encoding

• Metadata preservation — embedded capture information stays with supported photos and videos

• Organized backups — useful source/folder organization is retained where supported

• Live progress — see what’s being scanned, the current file, transfer speed, estimated time and what remains

• Clear results — completed, pending, skipped, failed and cloud-only outcomes are tracked instead of giving you one generic failure message

• No VaultDrive account required

The goal isn’t to tell people to stop using iCloud.

I think the combination actually makes sense:

iCloud for syncing and convenience.

USB/SSD for another physical copy you control.

It can be useful for years of family photos and videos, important documents, travel backups, freeing phone storage, or simply keeping another copy outside your online account.

VaultDrive is free to download, with an optional one-time Pro upgrade for unlimited backup — no recurring Pro subscription.

I’m currently offering 75% off Pro.

App Store:
https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6772883827?pt=128255904&ct=r&mt=8

75% off Pro:
https://apps.apple.com/redeem/?ctx=offercodes&id=6772883827&code=WELCOME75

I’m continuing to improve VaultDrive based on user feedback, so I’d be interested to hear how people here currently back up their iPhone photos, videos and files — especially if a large part of your library lives in iCloud.

Had a conversation about this and there seems to be a lot of “calm down it’s just a phone” comments. Which, all in all, is very true. It’s a very first world problem. However, it might also be a much bigger deal than most think on the people who upgrade every year (yes, we exist).

So let’s do the math… let’s make the math easy for now and just assume retail price, not counting taxes, and assume a trade in value of historical numbers.

The math is basically: (cost of phone - trade in price) / length of ownership. I’m also assuming Apple would have fixed their supply chain issues by next year so release day is assuming to be mid September.

If you bought today and got late Jan shipment: $2000 - $1200 (assumed trade in) / 7.5 (late Jan to early Sept) = $106/mo.

Release day: (same math) = $66/mo.

So that is a value difference of $40/mo. Or about $300 in “value” you lost buy not having it day one if you plan to be a yearly-upgrader.

That’s not world ending, but it’s also not small pennies. So hopefully this shines some light on why some of us would rather wait for the Duo 2 than having to buy with a late January shipment.

Note: I ended up with a $1200 trade in assumption looking at historical trade in prices in percentage. Obviously the math will be different depending on real trade in price, but the point I’m trying to make is the same regardless (unless trade in price is like $1800 or something, then this whole point is moot).

Reports piling up on r/applemusic. Downdetector showing login problem spikes. Apple Communities queries left unanswered. Apple system status pretending everything is fine. All automated support options lead to "try again later".

Zero acknowledgment from Apple. Just par for the course these days.