Show HN: PhotoCraft – an AI photo editor I built and shipped as my first iOS app
2 points - today at 9:54 AM
Hi HN,
I’m an indie developer and I recently shipped my first iOS app, PhotoCraft. It’s an AI-powered photo editor focused on enhancement, avatars, and creative edits.
This project started mainly as a way for me to learn how to take an idea all the way from development to passing App Store review and shipping something real. The hardest parts for me weren’t the models or the UI, but scope control, onboarding decisions, and dealing with review feedback.
A few things I learned along the way:
“Good enough to ship” is harder to define than expected
App Store rejections are more about clarity and UX than code
Cutting features early saved me a lot of time later
I’m sharing this mostly to get feedback from people who’ve built and shipped products before. I’d especially appreciate thoughts on:
First-time user experience
Whether the feature set feels focused or bloated
Monetization flow (what feels fair vs frustrating)
Happy to answer any questions about the build, tooling, or App Store review process.
Thanks for taking a look.
— Deva
jprezant
today at 10:09 AM
Hi. What makes PhotoCraft different from the dozens of other AI photo editing apps on the App Store? There is also already another AI photo app of the same name: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/photocraft-art-from-any-image/....
devavinoth12
today at 2:36 PM
That’s a fair question. The short answer is focus and simplicity.
I didn’t try to cover every possible AI photo use case. I intentionally limited the feature set to a few workflows (enhancement, avatars, creative edits) and tried to make them fast and easy to understand for first-time users.
This is also my first iOS app, so a big goal was learning how to ship something usable end-to-end rather than building a very broad tool that never quite feels finished.
I’m actively learning from early feedback and trying to improve clarity and results quality over time.
Guestmodinfo
today at 10:03 AM
Hi, can you please tell me:
1. What are the upfront cost that you need to pay the apple store for them to host your app?
2. Do you need to host your app on some server and connect it to app store. What are the cost of that?
devavinoth12
today at 2:44 PM
Sure, happy to share.
The Apple Developer Program costs $99/year.
On the backend side, the app does use servers for AI processing, so there are ongoing costs depending on usage (compute + storage). I’ve kept the initial setup fairly lean while validating usage and trying to understand real demand before scaling anything aggressively.
One of my main goals with this project is to learn how to balance infrastructure costs with a consumer subscription model in a sustainable way.