Why I built Asomium

I’m Mario, founder of Native First. We ship indie iOS and Mac apps — some you might have seen, ThinkBud, RoleBud, a handful of others in the pipeline. None of them have made us rich. All of them have, at some point, made me hate the App Store release workflow.

This is the post about why.

What a release actually looks like

Here’s the literal sequence I used to do for every release, on every app:

1. Open App Store Connect in Chrome.
2. Click into the new version. Wait for the page to load.
3. Click the locale picker. Pick en-US. Edit the description. Save.
4. Click the locale picker. Pick de-DE. Edit the description. Save.
5. Repeat steps 3-4 for every locale I’d previously bothered to add.
6. Switch to Figma. Open my screenshot board. Export to PNG for iPhone.
7. Switch to a folder. Drag PNGs into the screenshot uploader. Wait for ASC to chew on them.
8. Switch to Xcode. Bump build number. Archive. Upload via Organizer.
9. Switch back to ASC. Wait 15-30 minutes for the build to index. Refresh.
10. Attach the indexed build. Click submit. Fill in the export compliance dropdown for the 47th time. Submit.

Step 5 alone could eat an afternoon. Step 9 ate context — by the time the build indexed, I’d context-switched to something else and the release got forgotten until evening.

And this was the optimized version. The first few releases were worse.

What existed already

The tools I checked, in order:

• App Store Connect website. The reference implementation of “every feature you need, none of them where you want them.”
• fastlane. Excellent for CI/CD pipelines. Less excellent for the parts that aren’t pipelines — copywriting, screenshot design, ASO. It assumes you’ve already decided what to ship.
• Astro / Rankd / AppFigures. Beautiful ASO dashboards. Great keyword data. Don’t write metadata for you, don’t help with screenshots, don’t ship the build.
• One-off Mac apps. Half-built tools that did 30% of the workflow. Worth less than the sum of their parts because I still had to glue them together.

What I wanted was the whole workflow, in one window, on the Mac.

What I built

Asomium is the workspace I wished existed. The first version did exactly four things:

1. Fetch every locale’s metadata for a selected app and show it in a single grid.
2. Translate any field across N locales via Claude, in one click.
3. Render screenshots from canvas templates with device frames.
4. xcodebuild archive → upload → wait for index → attach → submit, from one button.

That covered 80% of my pain. Then I added ASO tracking because I was tired of paying for two separate subscriptions to track keywords I cared about for two apps. Then I added competitor metadata pulling because I kept manually opening competitor pages and squinting at their screenshots. Then I added the one-click en-US → en-AU/CA/GB/IN/SG expand because I was leaving five English storefronts unfilled on every launch.

The product grew the way indie tools should grow: from real friction, toward real workflow.

What I learned

Three things, repeatable:

1. Tools that fix a workflow beat tools that fix a feature

There were already great Mac apps for “App Store screenshot design”. The problem was that any of them required exporting PNGs and uploading them elsewhere. The exporting and uploading was the part I hated. Solving the design problem without solving the export problem barely moved the needle.

2. The most loved features are the ones that save five clicks

The single best-received feature in the beta isn’t the AI translation or the ASO tracking. It’s the en-US → all English locales expand. Five clicks instead of fifty, on every release. Tiny in scope, enormous in feel.

3. Indie tools should be honestly priced

Asomium costs $14/month or $299 once. Most ASO tools alone cost more than that for a single app. I’m not trying to be cheap — I’m trying to be priced like indie devs price their own software. The lifetime deal is there because the indie dev who buys Asomium is the kind of person I’d want as a long-term user, not a churn-risk metric.

What’s next

The MCP server is the obvious next thing — I want to drive Asomium from inside Claude Code, where I already spend most of my coding time. Past that: better screenshot intelligence (auto-cropping competitor screens into your template), App Intents-aware metadata suggestions, a “release checklist” that catches the small things I’ve been bitten by (export compliance dropdown, build indexing latency, missing localizations).

If you ship indie apps and recognize the workflow above, I’d love your feedback. The Mac app has a free 14-day trial and a working Pro tier for $14/month. Try it and tell me what’s missing.

— Mario