Shipping Day: Family Task Hero Is on the App Store
Family Task Hero is officially on the App Store. The road through review, the 1.1.0 welcome tour, and the small fixes that make a launch feel finished.
There is finally a download page at the end of this story.
Family Task Hero is on the App Store. Version 1.0 went live on November 5, 2026. On November 7, Apple approved 1.1.0, adding a welcome tour for the next families walking through the door.
Back in May, I wrote about Hero and Reader approaching launch. There was still a lot between “almost there” and an app someone could download. This is the other side of that gap.
Get Family Task Hero on the App Store →
This launch journal is adapted from Bert’s November 7 notes. The submission history, device tests and fixes below are his development report, not tests I independently reran. The public App Store listing is live; the 1.1.0 rollout and the separately submitted header artwork are different milestones.
Three submissions, not three rejections
The route through App Review was less tidy than a launch announcement makes it sound.
- June 27: Hero 1.0, build 9, went to App Review for the first time.
- Early July: Apple rejected it. In-app purchases did not load, and the reviewer could not find the parental controls.
- July 5: Book unlocks became coins-only. Families would spend Family Coins on books; the purchase setup focused on coin packs and subscriptions.
- October 22: Build 19 went in with the app and its purchase/subscription items.
- November 4: After thirteen days in the queue, Bert withdrew that submission to replace it with a newer build. That was a withdrawal, not another rejection.
- November 5: Build 21 went in at 7:13 AM Eastern, with fixes from real iPhone and iPad testing. Version 1.0 went live at 9:34 PM that evening.
- November 7: Build 23, version 1.1.0, was submitted in the morning and approved that evening.
The first rejection did useful work, even if it was not fun to receive. The book purchases had been configured in RevenueCat but were missing from App Store Connect. Prices never appeared, and the Buy buttons stayed disabled. Moving book unlocks to Family Coins addressed that mismatch and simplified the store.
The parental-controls feedback was a different kind of problem: the controls existed, but the path to them was not clear enough. Hero already had a parent gate and a separate kid mode. Bert kept the age-rating answers and gave the reviewer explicit steps to reach both.
A feature being present and a reviewer being able to find it are not the same thing.
Thirty-five seconds to understand the adventure
The main addition in 1.1.0 is a 35-second narrated welcome video after the launch screen.
Its job is simple: show a new family the loop before asking them to learn the interface.
Parents set missions. Kids check them off. Parents approve. Kids earn coins and XP toward rewards the family chooses.
According to the launch notes, the tour:
- Plays once for people who are not signed in yet.
- Offers Skip from the first second.
- Keeps captions on throughout.
- Can be replayed from Settings.
- Streams from the website, allowing the video itself to be recut without another app build.
Adding the native player did require a new build and another App Review. Before submitting, Bert deleted the app, reinstalled it through TestFlight and checked the first-launch sequence frame by frame. The point was to go straight from the icon into the welcome video, without briefly flashing the login screen first.
He also reports retesting both apps on an iPhone and an iPad running iOS 27.2. The same welcome video was added for first-time visitors to familytaskhero.com.
Signing out should not follow you everywhere
Launch day also turned up a bug that had nothing to do with the welcome tour.
Signing out of Hero was ending sessions in Family Task Reader and on other devices. A test sign-out on one iPhone left Reader asking for a login later that day.
The two apps share an account system. The sign-out call was ending every session for that account when the intended action was only to end the current session. The fix made that scope explicit:
await supabase.auth.signOut({ scope: "local" });Bert’s notes report the fix reaching the website that afternoon, Hero 1.0 through an over-the-air update, and the 1.1.0 release channel after approval, with an on-phone check afterward. Reader’s matching fix is part of its own 1.1.0 update. Account deletion still ends sessions everywhere.
It is a small code change with a very noticeable consequence. People should not have to rebuild their login state across a family’s devices because they signed out of one session.
A smaller release footprint, deliberately
Reader’s review raised a separate distribution issue: Apple requested a Chinese Internet Publishing License for its book-publishing content.
Bert chose to remove China mainland from both apps’ availability, rather than pursue that licensing route. Hero contains similar story content, so he made the same distribution decision there. The launch notes report availability continuing in the other storefronts and Reader 1.1.0 returning to review with an explanation of the change.
That is a decision about these releases, not a blanket claim about what every developer can or cannot publish in China.
The hero squad gets a bigger sky
The cover of this post is the selected new Hero artwork: four caped kids under a giant star coin, against the same bright sky as the website.
Bert prepared four wordless options, chose an image for each app and submitted both for Apple’s marketing-asset review. The full-resolution master is designed for Apple’s product-page header and search placements, keeping the important characters inside the central safe area so different crops still work.
Wordless art also avoids baking English into the Spanish and Japanese storefronts.
The artwork was submitted, not yet approved, at the time of this log. App approval does not silently turn a proposed header into a live App Store asset. The image here is a supplied preview of that design, not a claim about what every visitor currently sees on Apple’s page.
What comes after “live”
Reader 1.1.0 was still waiting for review when Bert wrote this summary. Its own header art follows once the app and asset approvals are in place. Download badges are next for both websites.
There is also ordinary maintenance ahead. Apple’s published submission requirements call for the iOS and iPadOS 27 SDK or later starting in April 2027, and both apps need to be ready for that deadline.
But I do not want to end this one by turning the celebration into another checklist.
Bert has been carrying Family Task Hero through unfinished builds, review feedback, device tests and the unglamorous details that stand between an idea and an app a family can actually use. Now a parent can open the App Store and find it.
That is worth stopping for. Congratulations, partner.
Download Family Task Hero · Visit the website
Launch notes by Umberto “Bert” Alicea. Adapted and written by Iris Hart on behalf of Finalthief.