Something not shipping?
Dev Idle is an idle game about being an iOS developer, made by one. If something is broken, missing, or behaving in a way the game clearly didn’t intend — write. Replies are slower than a chatbot and come from actual hands on a keyboard.
The three questions that arrive most
How do I restore my purchases?
Open the Shop tab and scroll to the bottom — Restore purchases is there, and it works without buying anything first. It brings back permanent unlocks and an active Pro subscription on any device signed in to the same Apple Account. Conference Tickets are consumable: once spent in the game they are gone, and they cannot be restored.
I lost my save.
Your progress lives on your device, inside the app’s own container. Deleting Dev Idle deletes it. If iCloud sync is available in your build and you are signed in to iCloud, a copy also lives in your own iCloud account and will come back when you reinstall and sign in with the same Apple ID. I do not hold a copy of anyone’s save — there is no server — so if the local and iCloud copies are both gone, I genuinely cannot restore it. I am sorry; it is the same trade that keeps the save yours alone.
How do I cancel Dev Idle Pro?
On your iPhone: Settings › Apple Account › Subscriptions › Dev Idle › Cancel Subscription. Cancelling stops the next renewal; Pro stays active until the period you have already paid for ends, and nothing you earned while subscribed is taken away. Refunds go through Apple, not through me — use reportaproblem.apple.com. If you think a charge is the app’s fault rather than a change of mind, write to me too and I’ll look at it.
Before you write — quick checks
The shop won't load.
The shop says which failure it is rather than spinning forever. “Reaching the App Store…” means it is still trying. Anything else shows a short reason and a Try again. If it keeps failing on a good connection, your App Store country may not have the products yet — write and I’ll check.
My App Review countdown seems stuck.
The review timer is real wall-clock time and keeps running while the app is closed — that is the joke, and it is also how it is implemented. If the Live Activity on your Lock Screen disappeared, the timer underneath it is unaffected; reopen the app to see the true remaining time. You can shorten a review with Conference Tickets, which is the only way to shorten one.
I came back after a day and got less than I expected.
Offline earnings are capped, deliberately, so that closing the app is a pause rather than a strategy. The cap is 8 hours by default; Overtime raises it to 24, and Pro doubles it. The “while you were away” sheet shows the rate it used and the window it covered, so the arithmetic is checkable rather than mysterious.
An update changed my numbers.
Balance changes happen, and every one of them is simulated across thousands of prestige cycles before it ships. Permanent upgrades bought with Commits, Shares and Pull Requests are never revoked by a balance change. A seasonal Sprint Pass track does reset each season, by design — the rewards you already claimed are yours to keep.
Reporting a bug usefully
Dev Idle reports crashes to Firebase Crashlytics, so I usually know that a crash happened — but a crash report is a stack trace, not a story. It cannot tell me what you were trying to do, and it says nothing at all about the bugs that break something without crashing anything. That is what your email is for. If you can, include:
your iPhone model and iOS version, the app version from Settings → About, what you were doing when it happened, and a screenshot. If it is an economy question, the numbers on screen are usually enough for me to reproduce it, because the engine is deterministic.
Privacy and terms
What the app does and does not collect is set out on the privacy policy page — the summary is that the game reports how far you got and what crashed, to Firebase, with no account and nothing tied to you as a person. The licence you play under, including the subscription terms, is on the terms page.