I’m Steffen (ex-iOS tech lead at TIDAL, now indie dev). I got tired of squinting at git logs and that blank App Store text-area every release, so I built Release The Notes! – a macOS app that turns the diffs between any two refs into copy-ready release notes.
What it does
- Pick a repo & refs – any local Git repo; tags, branches or SHAs.
- Noise filter – resources / test snapshots / config churn are ignored.
- AI summary – OpenAI chews on the remaining diffs and returns two drafts:
- End-user friendly (“What’s New”)
- Stakeholder / technical (“Internal changelog”) with contributor info
- One-click variations – concise, humorous, extra-technical, marketing-ish.
- Copy to clipboard – paste straight into App Store Connect, GitHub Releases, email, etc.
Under the hood
SwiftUI + The Composable Architecture, macOS 14+. Apple Silicon-native (Intel still works).
Only the diffs/metadata you choose are sent to OpenAI over HTTPS; nothing is stored server-side. Analysis of ~50 commits ≈ 30 s; thousand-commit ranges take a couple of minutes. Caches the analysis locally, so generating extra tones is instant.
Pricing
Free download → $4.99 / month or $19.99 / year (3-day trial on yearly). Rationale: cheaper than the hour I used to burn writing notes by hand.
Links
App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/release-the-notes/id6743372709 Website (screens, video): https://releasethenotes.com/
Why I’m posting
I’d love feedback on:
- Accuracy/trustworthiness of the AI summaries
- UX (especially first-run flow)
- Fairness of the price point
- Edge-cases you hit (huge repos, mono-repos, unconventional commit styles, etc.)
Roadmap
- Markdown / HTML / JSON export templates
- Jira links
- Self-hosted-LLM options
- Localization (is non-english release notes a thing?)
Happy to answer anything. Tear it apart!
Steffen