FiTRaT

I built a fitness app when everybody told me not to. Even every ASO tool I checked was practically screaming at me not to do it.

Ironically, I knew from the beginning that the most likely outcome of this endeavor was failure.

But I have been a weightlifting enthusiast all my life, and a back injury has prevented me from going back to the gym. So my logic was simple: this was a great opportunity to improve my Swift skills while reconnecting with something I had always loved.

That was three months ago.

When I first submitted the app, it received a 4.3 spam rejection. My honor had been questioned by Apple. They asserted that I had used a template, which I hadn’t.

So I did something I had never done before.

I used every AI tool at my disposal to push beyond an MVP and build a fully scoped app designed to guide users through the process of reshaping their bodies. Nutrition, exercise, routines, body measurements—everything tracked, everything measured, all working together to forecast future body composition without relying on blind guesses.

Then I changed the name so far away from the original intention of the app that it no longer fit the audience it had been built for.

And that was okay.

At the time, I just needed to make sure the app got approved.

And it did.

But I didn’t know it had come out tainted.

Now, every new submission seems to take close to a month. In three months, I have only been able to make three meaningful changes to the App Store listing—an impossible timeline when you are trying to iterate quickly, test positioning, and run ASO experiments.

And so, the app has failed.

At least so far.

But I am not giving up. I am going to make it work.

And maybe—just maybe—that is exactly the kind of delusional thinking that carries you through failure after failure until, one day, you stumble into a prosperous business model.