RevenueCat Shipaton 2026 · a field report

57 days.
3,914 apps.
One developer.

peter@meetup: ~

$ whoami

Peter Dongo

$ cat about.txt

by day: Senior DevOps Architect / AI Architect @ Alerant

by night: solo developer. 6 apps shipped. 0 co-founders.

$

peterdongo.dev

ls ~/shipped

Six apps. One developer.

Fingertips

Everything you reuse, one keystroke away

macOS · iPadOS · iOS

FrostCam

Pause your webcam without the black screen

macOS

Névtárs

Choose a baby name as a couple

iOS · Android

MeterTab

Know how much AI you have left

macOS · iOS · watchOS

DropRoost

Track the price you actually pay

iOS · iPadOS · macOS

WarmCam

Look your best on every video call

macOS

?

[REDACTED]

A mystery app, written in Kotlin Multiplatform.

// shipping in 2 months

This talk is about the first one, and the hackathon it was built for.

open Fingertips.app

The paragraph you keep retyping, five letters away.

The email reply, the IBAN, the Wi-Fi card, the contract PDF. One library on iPhone, iPad and Mac.

4.6 ms

to search 5,000 snippets

0

servers of mine

cat SHIPATON.md

A hackathon where the deliverable
is a shipped, paid app.

$740k

in prizes

26,449

developers registered

57

days left when I decided to enter

[x] a new app, first released inside the window

[x] live on a real app store // not a demo, not a repo

[x] takes payment through the sponsor's SDK

[x] a written entry and a demo video

the award I built for

Influencer Award: Productivity

Named judge: Christopher Lawley. $20k / $10k / $5k.
One award, one judge, one app.

grep -ri "lawley" ~/internet | wc -l

I researched the judge like a customer.

The brief, verbatim

"one fast, focused place to save and retrieve reusable text snippets, documents, files, and images"

The suspect

230K YouTube subscribers. iPad-first. And he ships his own apps.

His three use cases

Canned email replies. Documents you show clients. Details you type into forms.

// his audience, by age (%)

61.5% are 25 to 44: people with clients, invoices and forms.

70% live outside the US, so the app ships in 12 languages.

stage: build · day 3

Day 3:
the thesis dies.

The plan: a custom keyboard, so your snippets live exactly where you type.
The target user: an iPad in a keyboard case.

Attach a hardware keyboard and iPadOS hides every on-screen keyboard. Including mine.

The one user I built it for was the one user who could not reach it.

wc -l WRONG.md

39

things I wrote down as facts that testing proved false.

#7 · build settings

The config key that vanished

A build setting silently dropped my payments API key. The app ran with purchases disabled and looked perfectly healthy.

#35 · the expensive one

The 14-day trial that never ended

Offline, the entitlement check failed open and never looked at the local trial. One launch on airport wifi turned 14 days into forever.

#14 · the polite one

Siri said "copied". It copied nothing.

A background process cannot write the clipboard. No error, no log, a cheerful success message.

None of them was ever an open question. The flat, confident voice in a plan is the tell.

stage: review · a mandatory code review by a stranger, with no SLA

Imagine your CI takes 24 days.

waiting in the queuetalking to a humanblocked: its purchase item was locked in the other queue

7 days

first commit to "submitted"

24 days

"submitted" to live in the store

1 day

the second Mac review, after I gave in

review: FAILED · 3 findings · 20 Aug

2.3.7

A price in a screenshot

Mine. Deleted the screenshot.

2.1(b)

The purchase item was missing

It was in the other queue. I had submitted it 28 seconds earlier.

2.4.5

Auto-paste needs an Accessibility permission

Argued it for two pages. Appealed. The answer: no.

So I deleted the feature.

Mac/Paster.swift | 190 lines → 40

++++++++------------------------------

$ nm -u Fingertips | grep -Ei 'AX|CGEvent'

(no output)

A review note cannot win an argument. It can make a removal checkable.

409

STATE_ERROR.NON_ACTIVE_APP "Offers can only be created for active apps."
Launch-day bonus: approved is not active. The judges' free code could not exist until I pressed Release.

stage: submit · the part no build tool helps with

Then you have to explain it.

the text

Rule: short, and not AI-generated.

So I wrote it by hand. Like an animal.

the video

Four claims died on camera.

"The app never appears on screen." It does, for 1.2 seconds.
"Search finds it first." Below my web history, actually.

0:44 of the first master. Every still I checked looked perfect, because ffmpeg auto-rotates when it decodes. A human found it in one viewing.

stage: judge · the field

Four in ten entries arrived
in the last 36 hours.

// my category, after the close

3,914

entries

~20

eligible, in or near my category

6

real contenders

3

prizes

cat how-we-judge.md

How 3,914 entries actually get judged.

01 · a tool

Intake filter

Store link, video, assets. Your category comes from your own form answers.

02 · two screeners

Pre-screen

Watch the first 2 minutes. Score 1 to 5.

03 · 30 judges

Scoring

Read the description, watch 2 minutes, score 1 to 5, nominate.

04 · the sponsor

Final pick

1st to 3rd are chosen. One developer advocate installs the app first.

Until step 4, nobody has to install the thing you spent 57 days on.

Influencer Award: Productivity

the judge I built the whole app for: Christopher Lawley

not on the panel

yt-analytics --by source --after close

Nobody watches your video.

13 views in total, about 3 of them mine.
One came from the judging side, and it watched all of it.

cat NEXT-TIME.md

The first 2 minutes of the video are the video.That is all a judge is asked to watch. Anything after it may never be seen.
Publish late: 12 to 24 hours before the close.My page was public for 8 days. Some late entries started to sound familiar. I can't prove a thing.
Run every platform claim on real hardware on day one.39 times, the docs, the simulator or I were wrong.
Budget two review rounds and a queue you cannot hurry.Build time was a week. Calendar time was a month.

cat ~/Mail/Inbox/shipaton.eml

One more thing.

From: RevenueCat

Subject: Your Shipaton result is

Body: Congratulations, or maybe not, who can tell

No email yet.

Winners are announced on 21 Oct. Ask me then, I will either be unbearable or very quiet.

1^st

2^nd

3^rd

brew install --free fingertips

A gift, for sitting through this.

1. Get the appApp Store · iPhone, iPad, Mac

in the room
only

2. Unlock it, freethe code was for the room on 13 Oct

Normally $9.99, once. Tonight: on the house.

exit 0

Thank you.

Ask me about the review queue, how the judging really works, or any of the 35 wrong facts I skipped.

peterdongo.dev

usefingertips.com

the write-ups: hackernoon.com/u/peterdongo