App Approval, App Outages, and Idea Guys

The Weekly Variable

Author

Jay Peters
June 13, 2025

The Weekly Variable

So close.

I don’t have an app link for Wave yet, but I could if I wanted too…

Plus a big outage and a big release.

Topics for this week:

App Store Approved!

After a only a few days of back and forth with the App Store approval team, Wave is ready to release!

I can see how the approval process can slowly drag out into the horror story of months on end if you’re not careful enough.

The process was fairly painless for me thankfully, probably due to the help of AI.

On more than one occasion, I dumped nearly all the code for the app into Gemini Pro to make sure I had everything that Apple would want for approval, and still managed to miss one of the requirements.

After the first submission on Sunday, the review team came back wanting more screenshots (which was fair, I only provided one screenshot of the app to see what I could get away with) and they also wanted a working test user which is also fair, they were going to need a way to sign into the app to test it…

Easy fixes on Monday for the first review.

The second review was a little more in-depth.

Apple came back requiring a way for users to block each other, which I did remember Gemini mentioning in the list…

Adding a blocking system was more work than expected, taking a few hours to vibe throughout the app but by Tuesday night I had another version resubmitted for approval.

And by Wednesday the last request was much simpler.

I had an extra confirmation button before asking for permission to access images on the device, so I removed that and did one more check with Gemini if there was anything else Apple might find.

Gemini suggested I finish implementing a reporting system so users can flag inappropriate content.

I had a button for it, but the button didn’t actually do anything yet so I finished adding that functionality as well.

Later Wednesday afternoon I submitted the app again for approval, not sure what they would find next.

But when I checked late Thursday morning, the app had been approved for the App Store!

With that, we decided to do one more test round now that we know that future versions should be approved, and with this last round of testing, will probably go live with the app next week!

Hopefully will have a link in the next week or two… finally.

Downstream Outages

The vibe coding process was going well this week while I was quickly adding a system for users to block each other, which was quite helpful because giving users a way to block one another was way more code than I expected.

After that, there was one minor issue I knew was still outstanding that I wanted to fix after the app got approved on Thursday, but the vibe coding ground to a halt.

It started with seeing an error I’d never seen before when coming back to the app after letting it sit overnight.

I thought I had gotten myself into a weird edge case when I tried logging out of Wave, but it turned out that Supabase itself was having stability issues.

Then I was trying to make changes to the code without the database, but was hitting context length issues with Gemini Pro, when earlier in the week I had been shoving in more than 300k tokens at a time as I pasted almost the entire Wave code base in the chat.

Suddenly I couldn’t send in more than 2 files of content.

So I was blocked on both fronts, no app changes, no db access.

I could have done some coding myself but who does that these days?

X confirmed I was not the only one having issues, seeing the Supabase, Cloudflare, GCP, and OpenAI were all confirming outages so it was time to wait for things to stabilize.

Supabase ended up blaming Cloudflare for their issues, and Cloudflare said they were having issues with “downstream providers”.

Coincidentally Google Cloud Platform (GCP) was also having issues during that time.

After about an hour, everything seemed to go back to normal and I was able to wrap up my changes with all the proper tools again.

It is a little scary sometimes how all these systems are tied together.

When one goes down, the rest are stuck as well.

Not sure what to do about that besides try to spread dependencies between different systems like GCP and AWS and may be something else, but you never know where there’s a connection downstream.

Luckily the outage was pretty brief, but I guess that’s why you can only expect 99.9% uptime.

o3-pro

OpenAI released o3-pro this week and so far the reviews have been positive.

I haven’t had much time to play with it, but some early testers have sounded really impressed.

According to this post, https://www.latent.space/p/o3-pro, it’s more than just a model, but more of a system that has access to a number of tools to help it process whatever the request or task may be, and it’s way beyond a chatbot.

Sam Altman found a pretty great quote from that same article:

I am very excited to leverage something like that.

Fill in all my plans and details and let it get to work for 20 minutes to solve everything.

Fully willing to let AI take the wheel on my business ventures.

Idea Guys

Sam Altman published a new blog post this week titled “The Gentle Singularity”, talking about the current state of AI and where things could be headed.

For the most part I have to agree.

We’re sitting on this thing that’s smarter than humans, but it will take a little time until it can fully impact the earth.

AI is limited to digital space so that’s where it has the largest impact, but once it’s able to walk around in a robotic body, the pace of change will probably be faster than we can imagine.

Of course that still requires dependable autonomous robots and a reliable source of portable power to keep them moving so that could take some time.

In the meantime, Altman mentions that now may be the time for “the idea guys” to shine.

No longer blocked by needing a team to get things done, AI can be that team to make any idea a reality in no time.

Basically he’s telling me this is my time.

Vibe Businesses

Speaking of idea guys, Greg Isenberg showed off his new website for idea guys, ideabrowser, on an episode of the My First Million podcast this week.

The website itself looks great, a really powerful tool for finding and vetting ideas for new SaaS products.

But what really impressed me was watching Greg walk Sam Parr through the process of building the initial business from the idea, using a number of AI tools to bring it to life.

“Use more AI” runs through my head all the time and this walkthrough pretty much summed up how and why.

Here is a massive list of tools that could be used in the process:

I consume a lot of AI content and I still don’t recognize all of these tools, which some of these are sales pitches for sure, and also the AI landscape is expanding to all aspects of life, way past “AI” tools.

Soon, being an expert in “AI” will mean about as much as being an expert in “internet”.

But it was really pretty amazing to see Greg weave a bunch of these tools together using IdeaBrowser to find a pre-vetted idea, TLDraw to map out an initial idea to give to Manus to fully flesh out the app and prompt which could then be fed into Bolt to create the first working version of the app.

He then mentions using Supabase as the backend to store data from the app, and using something like Lindy or n8n to automate or “vibe market” the hardest part - finding users for the app.

Lots of value to unpack and I’m sure there will be pieces I’ll be borrowing for my own projects, particularly the marketing ideas.

The full process is in the video below, but like Sam Altman said, this truly is the age of the idea guy:

And that’s it for this week! App approval, outages and the age of the idea guy.

Those are the links that stuck with me throughout the week and a glimpse into what I personally worked on.

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