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How Stu Maschwitz Vibe Coded His Way Into an App Rejection and What It Means for the Future of Apps→

This week on AppStories, Federico and I talked about the personal productivity tools we’ve built for ourselves using Claude. They’re hyper-specific scripts and plugins that aren’t likely to be useful to anyone but us, which is fine because that’s all they’re intended to be.

Stu Maschwitz took a different approach. He’s had a complex shortcut called Drinking Buddy for years that tracks alcohol consumption and calculates your Blood Alcohol Level using an established formula. But because he was butting up against the limits of what Shortcuts can do, he vibe coded an iOS version of Drinking Buddy.

Two things struck me about Maschwitz’s experience. First, the app he used to create Drinking Buddy for iOS was Bitrig, which Federico and I mentioned briefly on AppStories. His experience struck a chord with me:

It’s a bit like building an app by talking to a polite and well-meaning tech support agent on the phone — only their computer is down and they can’t test the app themselves.

But power through it, and you have an app.

That’s exactly how scripting with Claude feels. It compliments you on how smart you are, gets you 90% of the way to the finish line quickly, and then tortures you with the last 10%. That, in a nutshell, is coding with AI, at least for anyone with limited development skills, like myself.

But the second and more interesting lesson from Maschwitz’s post is what it portends for apps in general. App Review rejected Drinking Buddy’s Blood Alcohol Level calculation on the basis of Section 1.4, the Physical Harm rule.

Maschwitz appealed and was rejected, even though other Blood Alcohol Level apps are available on the App Store. However, instead of pushing the rejection with App Review further, Maschwitz turned to Lovable, another AI app creation tool, which generates web apps. With screenshots from his rejected iOS app and a detailed spec in hand, Maschwitz turned Drinking Buddy into a progressive web app.

Maschwitz’s experience is a great example of what we covered on AppStories. App creation tools, whether they generate native apps or web apps, are evolving rapidly. And, while they can be frustrating to use at times, are limited in what they can produce, and don’t solve a myriad of problems like customer support that we detail on AppStories, they’re getting better at code quickly. Whether you’re building for yourself, like we are at MacStories, or to share your ideas with others, like Stu Maschwitz, change is coming to apps. Some AI-generated apps will be offered in galleries inside the tools that created them, others will be designed for the web to avoid App Review, and some will likely live as perpetual TestFlight betas or scripts sitting on just one person’s computer, but regardless of the medium, bringing your ideas to life with code has never been more possible.

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iPhone vs $2000 Pro Camera — How Close Are They Really?→

I constantly see articles or videos proclaiming that iPhones are better than traditional cameras or that traditional cameras will always be superior to the iPhone’s camera system. So it’s great to see a measured opinion – with plenty of comparisons – from someone who clearly loves shooting with both pieces of hardware.

That’s exactly what designer and creator Oliur has done with his latest video and blog post.

I took the new iPhone 17 Pro and the Fujifilm X100VI out with me, shot the same scenes, edited everything the same way I normally do, and then mixed them up to see whether anyone could guess which was which.

Some of the results genuinely surprised me.

I originally posted the challenge on X to see who could figure out which camera was which, and out of all the comments, only one person got them all right.

What’s striking is how, despite the Fuji camera’s evident technical prowess, it’s not so simple:

Technically, the Fuji should win. But in real-world photos — especially the kind most people share online — the gap isn’t as big anymore.

While the blog version is good, I’d recommend Oliur’s YouTube version for more in-depth breakdowns and an interesting conclusion.

The iPhone’s convenience and computational power make it competitive in almost every normal scenario. If someone told me they rely solely on their phone for photography today, I wouldn’t argue with them.

As someone who loves photography but doesn’t want to commit to a dedicated camera, it’s good to know that after some adjustments, the iPhone’s input can now result in an output that is competitive with a traditional camera – at least for my use cases.

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Apple Music’s Replay 2025 Is Live→

Apple Music has released its annual Apple Music Replay overview of subscribers’ listening statistics for 2025 along with top charts for 2025. The recap can be accessed on https://replay.music.apple.com, where you’ll find details about the music you listened to throughout the year, including your top albums, songs, artists, playlists, and genres.

Replay includes statistics about your listening habits.

Replay includes statistics about your listening habits.

As with past years, Replay ‘25 begins with an animated highlights reel of your year in music set to the songs you enjoyed throughout the year. Replay also spotlights listening milestones like the total number of minutes listened and the number of artists and songs played. Subscribers can browse through their statistics by month, too. Your Replay ‘25 playlist, which includes your 100 most listened-to songs is available from the Replay website and Apple’s Music app. In addition to Replay ‘25 Apple Music released top charts for countries around the world and genres.

Apple Music's top charts.

Apple Music’s top charts.

The timing of Replay ‘25 is opportune for me, since Federico and I are beginning to assemble our lists of favorite music of 2025 for an upcoming episode of MacStories Unwind. Most of all though, I just enjoy using Replay ‘25 as a way to revisit my favorite music of the year.

To view your own Replay 2025 statistics, visit music.apple.com/replay.

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Why is ChatGPT for Mac So Good?→

Great post by Allen Pike on the importance of a great app experience for modern LLMs, which I recently wrote about. He opens with this line, which is a new axiom I’m going to reuse extensively:

A model is only as useful as its applications.

And on ChatGPT for Mac specifically:

The app does a good job of following the platform conventions on Mac. That means buttons, text fields, and menus behave as they do in other Mac apps. While ChatGPT is imperfect on both Mac and web, both platforms have the finish you would expect from a daily-use tool.

[…]

It’s easier to get a polished app with native APIs, but at a certain scale separate apps make it hard to rapidly iterate a complex enterprise product while keeping it in sync on each platform, while also meeting your service and customer obligations. So for a consumer-facing app like ChatGPT or the no-modifier Copilot, it’s easier to go native. For companies that are, at their core, selling to enterprises, you get Electron apps.

I don’t hate Electron as much as others in our community, but I can’t deny that ChatGPT is one of the nicest AI apps for Mac I’ve used. The other is the recently updated BoltAI. And they’re both native Mac apps.

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“The iPad’s Software Problem Is Permanent”→

I love my iPad Pro, but, as you know, lately I’ve been wondering about what comes after iPadOS 26. We have much better multitasking now, and key workflow limitations such as file management, audio recording, and long-running background tasks have been addressed by Apple this year. But now that the user-facing system’s foundation has been “fixed”, what about the app ecosystem?

Over at Snazzy Labs, Quinn Nelson has been wondering the same, and I highly recommend watching his video:

Quinn makes a series of strong, cogent arguments with factual evidence that show how, despite multitasking and other iPadOS 26 improvements, using apps on an iPad Pro often falls short of what can be achieved with the same apps on a Mac. There is so much I could quote from this video, but I think his final thought sums it up best:

There are still days that I reach for my $750 MacBook Air because my $2,000 iPad Pro can’t do what I need it to. Seldom is the reverse true.

I’m so happy that Apple seems to be taking iPadOS more seriously than ever this year. But now I can’t help but wonder if the iPad’s problems run deeper than windowing when it comes to getting serious work done on it.

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MacStories Setups Update: An Apple Gear Refresh, Dual-Screen Gaming, and HomeKit→

Our desk setups. Federico (left) and John (right).

Our desk setups. Federico (left) and John (right).

As we head into the final weeks of 2025, Federico and I figured it would be a good time to update the MacStories Setups page. There’s an ebb and flow to the gear and apps we test each year, and as the fall OS update season fades into the past, it’s not unusual for one or both of us to take stock of our setup and make changes. That’s been very true for both of us this year, but in different ways.

Federico has been focused on simplifying his hardware setup and testing a long list of apps and services. In contrast, I’ve made fewer gear cuts, focusing more on strategic changes to the gadgets I use and settling on a core set of work apps.

The result is that Federico’s hardware setup changes have primarily been updates to his Apple and portable gaming gear. He made the transition from the iPhone 16 Pro Max to the iPhone Air, and couldn’t be happier with the result. He also replaced the M4 iPad Pro with the latest M5 model and moved from the AirPods 4 to the AirPods Pro 3.

Both of us ditched our previous Apple Vision Pro head strap solutions for the Apple Dual Knit Band, which has been a big upgrade. It’s comfortable, and having one dial to adjust both bands is both clever and far simpler than other solutions I’ve tried.

Ayn Thor.

Ayn Thor.

Federico also added the Ayn Thor to his handheld gaming lineup. The Thor, which I also bought this fall, is a dual-screen OLED gaming handheld that runs Android. It’s perfect for emulating dual-screen systems like the Nintendo DS and 3DS, but it has also been excellent for game streaming and testing the emerging world of emulating SteamOS on Android. If game tinkering is your thing and this sounds intriguing, we have two episodes of NPC: Next Portable Console that go in-depth on the Ayn Thor.

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iPadOS 26.2 Beta Restores Drag and Drop Gestures for Split View and Slide Over→

Following the comeback of Slide Over in iPadOS 26.1, Apple is continuing to iterate on iPadOS 26 multitasking by restoring functionalities that had been removed from the launch version of iPadOS 26.0 in September. Yesterday, in the third developer beta of iPadOS 26.2, the company brought back drag and drop gestures to put app windows directly in Split View and Slide Over without having to interact with additional menus. To understand how these old gestures work in the context of iPadOS 26, I recommend watching this video by Chris Lawley:

As you can see, the gestures are pretty much the same ones as iPadOS 18, but the interaction is slightly different insofar as the “pull indicator” for Slide Over (re-introduced in iPadOS 26.1) now serves two purposes. That indicator now acts both as a signal that you can drop a window to instantly tile it as one half of a Split View, and it’s also a drop target to enter Slide Over right away. The design is clever, if maybe a little too hard to discover…but that’s always been the case with multitasking gestures that aren’t exposed by a menu – which is exactly why Apple is now offering plenty of options in iPadOS 26 to discover different multitasking features in different menus.

I’m glad to see Apple quickly iterate on iPadOS 26 by finding ways to blend the old multitasking system with the platform’s new windowing engine. Based on the comments I received after publishing my iPadOS 26 review, enough people were missing the simplicity of Split View and Slide Over that I think Apple’s doing the right thing in making all these multitasking systems coexist with one another.

As I argued on last week’s episode of Connected, and as Myke and Jason also elaborated on this week’s episode of Upgrade, the problem with the iPad Pro now is that we have a great foundation with iPadOS 26 and very few third-party apps that take advantage of it beyond the usual names. I suspected as much months ago, when I explained why, in a world dominated by web apps, the iPad’s next problem was going to be its app ecosystem. The web services I use on a daily basis (Slack, Notion, Claude, Superhuman, Todoist – the list goes on) simply don’t make iPad apps of the same caliber as their desktop/web counterparts. So I find myself using Safari on the iPad to get my work done these days, but, for a variety of reasons and dozens of small papercuts, Safari for iPad simply isn’t as good as Safari on the Mac.

Given how the third-party app ecosystem story for iPad is outside of Apple’s control and how most companies aren’t incentivized to make excellent native iPad apps anymore, now that multitasking has been largely “fixed” in iPadOS 26.2, I hope Apple turns its attention to something they can control: making Safari for iPad truly desktop-class and not a baby version of Safari for Mac.

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Apple Beefed Up Its Rule Against Copycat Apps→

Last week, I wrote about Apple’s new policies surrounding mini apps. However, that wasn’t the only change made to the App Review Guidelines last week. Apple also added a new subsection “c” to its rule against Copycat apps:

4.1(c) You cannot use another developer’s icon, brand, or product name in your app’s icon or name, without approval from the developer.

As I wrote earlier this year, this isn’t a new problem, especially for developers of popular games on other platforms. Copycat versions of Blue Prince, Palworld, Wordle, Cuphead, Balatro (before it was released on the App Store), and Unpacking have all appeared on the App Store in recent years.

The update to App Guideline 4.1 shows that Apple is aware of the problem, which is a step in the right direction. Hopefully, the awareness will lead to better enforcement, too.

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Google and Epic Games’ Settlement Is Far from a Done Deal→

Last week, Epic and Google made a big show of settling their antitrust dispute. The only trouble is that they didn’t do so until after the judge in the case had entered a permanent injunction requiring Google to make changes to how it operates its Play Store, which were upheld on appeal. That makes it harder to settle, as the mobilegamer.biz reports today:

The agreement was framed by Epic and Google as a conclusion to the court battle between the two that has been rumbling on since 2020. But a report from Law360 quotes the Judge overseeing the case as saying the proposals do not go far enough to rectify Google’s behaviour. Judge Donato also wants another hearing in December or January to straighten it all out.

“My concern here is that these proposed modifications … [are] not providing an adequate remedy for Google’s wrongdoing,” said Judge Donato, according to Law360.

This sort of thing isn’t unheard of, especially when the dispute is over a legal issue that takes into account the effect on consumers along with the parties involved. The judge in the case has scheduled hearings for December and January to consider the proposed settlement, but it looks like this case could end up in the U.S. Supreme Court after all.

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