Enigma is in review — with an oracle that runs on the phone

Enigma went to App Review today. The feature I ended up leading with wasn't in the original plan at all.

The oracle learned to talk

The first version answered by tap or shake and pulled from a written set of readings. That works, and it's honest, but every divination app on the store does exactly that — and users suspect as much. So the Oracle now takes a typed question and answers it in a line or two of its own, generated by Apple's FoundationModels on the device itself.

No server, no account, no request leaving the phone. For an app people ask personal questions of, that isn't a technical footnote — it's the whole proposition. I'd rather ship a smaller model that never sees the network than a better one that does.

Where it doesn't work, and saying so

Apple Intelligence doesn't speak every language yet — Ukrainian and Russian among them — and it needs eligible hardware with the feature switched on. My first implementation quietly fell back to the written readings and put a badge on the answer claiming the model wrote it. That badge was a lie, and it took me embarrassingly long to notice.

Now the app checks supportsLocale against the language it's about to answer in, not the language the interface happens to be set to. When the model can't help, the app says so plainly and offers to answer in English instead. The App Store description carries the same caveat. Promising AI in the app name and then delivering a canned reading is how you earn one-star reviews.

What review taught me before review

Two mistakes worth writing down.

The developer panel that unlocks Premium was gated to DEBUG || TestFlight. But App Review installs the build with the same sandbox receipt TestFlight uses — there is no way to tell them apart from inside one binary. A reviewer would have found a button granting free Premium, which is an undocumented feature under guideline 2.3.1 and an invitation to skip testing the purchase entirely. It's DEBUG-only now.

And the 3D book is a Sketchfab model under CC BY 4.0. Commercial use is fine; attribution is required. I had removed what turned out to be the attribution watermark and shipped nothing in its place. There's a credits section now, with the author named and the licence linked.

Shipped in 1.0

• AI Oracle answering free-form questions on-device
• Three decks: metaphorical association cards, the 22 Major Arcana, classic 52-card cartomancy
• Past — Present — Future spreads, with love, career and advice for every card
• Numerology chart from birth name, date and place
• Daily forecast from the real synodic moon phase and a personal day number
• A SceneKit Book of Wisdom, 33 hand-drawn gold icons, 16 languages including right-to-left

Now the part I have no control over.