After 10 days on the Mac App Store: 67 impressions, zero purchases.

I spent nights wrestling with Apple’s sandbox, endured three App Store rejections and a flagged GitHub account, and shipped something that works. Quay is a menu bar app that syncs a local folder with GitHub — one click to commit, push, and pull. I built it for myself to maintain static sites.

The build went well. Everything after – not quite.

A sandboxed app walks into /usr/bin/git

I started programming in 1984 on a Commodore 64. Forty years later, I’m describing features to Claude Code and watching it implement them across multiple files in one pass. AI compressed the distance between having an idea and holding a finished app enormously.

But it doesn’t skip the pain.

Quay is a sandboxed Mac app that shells out to git. Sounds easy, but isn’t, as /usr/bin/git doesn’t actually exist on modern macOS. It’s an xcrun shim — and the sandbox blocks xcrun. So you’re a Git client that can’t call git. Until you detect the real Command Line Tools path.

Rules you learn by breaking them

Then came App Store review. Apple rejected Quay three times.

The core issue was almost comical. I created a GitHub account for the review. But of course, authentication failed for the reviewer because GitHub’s OAuth Device Flow triggered two-factor authentication on their end. Real users accessing their own repos would never hit this. The fix was to use a pre-generated token just for the review.

Meanwhile, GitHub flagged my account with no reason given and no reply from support.

None of this was about code quality. It was about navigating a system whose rules aren’t obvious.

Nobody knows…

So the app is live. It handles diverged repos, credential expiry, SSH-to-HTTPS conversion, sandbox file bookmarks. Edge cases that took weeks to get right.

And nobody knows it exists.

I picked reasonable keywords, wrote a clear description, and tried to choose the right categories. It doesn’t matter. A niche developer tool is a needle in a haystack that just got 84% bigger.

Anyone can vibe-code a Git wrapper in a weekend. But shipping a sandboxed Mac app that reliably authenticates with GitHub, survives App Store review, and works on someone else’s machine — that’s not a weekend. The moat for indie tools in 2026 isn’t code. It’s everything around the code: the environment it runs in, the gatekeepers it must pass, and the people it needs to reach.

AI helped me build Quay faster than I could have alone. It can’t help anyone find it, can it?