martinpuli/createanapp/apple-product-spec

Apple Product Spec

Turn the market thesis into a testable product contract. Every public promise must map to a real release behavior and test.

Establish the product contract

Define:

• target user, buyer, job, context, and moment of use;
• one-sentence value proposition without “AI” unless AI itself is user value;
• core loop and time-to-first-value;
• free, paid, and unavailable capabilities;
• supported device families, orientations, minimum OS, offline behavior, and accessibility target;
• explicit v1 non-goals;
• measurable success, stop, and rollback conditions.

Specify complete journeys

For each journey, include entry, prerequisites, happy path, cancellation, empty/loading/error/offline states, persistence, destructive confirmation, accessibility, analytics event if any, and acceptance tests.

Cover onboarding, core job, save/relaunch, import/export/share, settings/support/legal, permissions, paywall, purchase, restore, entitlement changes, and account/data deletion if applicable.

Define monetization as behavior

For every product or subscription, specify immutable product ID convention, entitlement, duration/type, price hypothesis, ongoing value, free limits, upgrade/downgrade relationship, restore, grace/billing retry, expiration/refund/revocation, family sharing decision, server dependency, offline cache, and customer-visible copy.

Do not sell a subscription without credible continuing value. Do not promise a trial or price until App Store Connect is configured identically.

Build the data and risk maps

For each data type, record source, purpose, device storage, transmission, processor, retention, deletion, backup, encryption, permissions, privacy-label category, and policy text. Include SDK and website data.

Identify safety, privacy, security, IP, claims, child/health/financial, user-content, moderation, AI, and platform risks. Convert each into prevention, detection, response, owner, and stop-ship rule.

Choose architecture from constraints

Prefer the smallest architecture that satisfies the contract. Decide local versus cloud, sync/conflict strategy, migrations, observability, feature flags, dependency policy, accessibility identifiers, deterministic StoreKit configuration, test seams, export/import validation, and failure recovery.

Avoid a backend when it adds no user value. Do not avoid one when accounts, cross-device sync, public content, server secrets, or verified server state require it.

Write acceptance criteria

Use observable Given/When/Then criteria. Include:

• functionality and data integrity;
• performance/resource bounds;
• supported-device layout;
• VoiceOver, Dynamic Type, contrast, motion, and input methods;
• permissions and privacy behavior;
• purchase/restore/revocation;
• clean-install and upgrade migrations;
• review-mode access;
• exact release evidence required.

Deliverables

Produce the PRD, journey map, device matrix, entitlement table, data map, risk register, architecture decision record, acceptance-test matrix, App Review demo script, milestone plan, and human handoffs. Read references/spec-template.md for the minimum structure.