Indie Frame #8 — David Neumann, YouTube Creator

This week we head to Germany to meet David Neumann, a content creator who has been framing the screenshots for his Apple tutorials on YouTube with Shareshot for quite some time.

So David, tell us who you are, what you do, and how you ended up doing it!

My name is David Neumann. Since 2019 I’ve worked as a content creator and online-marketing freelancer, and for the last five years I’ve focused almost entirely on tutorials for Apple products, iPhones above all.

Before that I spent 15 years at Electronic Arts (the video game company). When my team there was disbanded, I took it as the moment to strike out on my own, and so far that’s worked out well.

You’ve certainly been busy since! It looks like you’ve published over 550 videos on YouTube to date. Do you run to a strict content schedule, and what apps do you use to manage your pipeline and ideas?

550-plus is right, though a good chunk of those are Shorts. My aim is one long video a week for my viewers, in some weeks that works out better than in others. The Shorts are mostly there to nudge people toward the long videos.

For managing the pipeline I keep it simple. I collect content ideas in Apple Reminders and jot things down in Apple Notes, and beyond that plain Apple setup I don’t really use dedicated planning apps.

I love that it’s all just Reminders and Notes — so often you hear podcasters saying they’ve come back to them.

Now, Germany is consistently in the top 3 or 4 countries for downloads of Shareshot, even though it isn’t translated into German. Presumably plenty of German people at least read English well — but with your background in tech media, do you think translating apps into German would still make a difference or be appreciated by German users? And are apps usually translated well into German, or do you see a lot of weird/bad translations, especially now that developers are leaning on AI for it?

It depends entirely on the audience. For a B2B app I don’t think translation is essential. Shareshot is a good example: for a German user base I’d say translating it really isn’t necessary. Plenty of German users read English well enough for a tool like that.

On bad translations, yes, you still run into odd ones, but I’m not sure AI is the culprit. My experience has actually been the opposite: Since the generative AI tools arrived, translations have got noticeably better than whatever was used before. That said, you do still see clumsy work, even on big platforms. The ones that make me smile are the word-for-word translations that land on the wrong meaning.

Classic example: in English “Save” covers both “sparen” (save money) and “speichern” (store a file). So a German discount banner sometimes ends up reading “speichere jetzt” (store now) when it should say “spare jetzt” (save now).

LOL I do love translation mishaps. That is interesting to hear though, I do wonder if it would help with getting App Store ratings — and we are adding more consumer features so maybe it will be worth it.

So where does Shareshot actually fit into your content production pipeline? Do you use our Shortcuts actions for producing content?

Shareshot is a regular part of how I produce my companion material. For paying members I publish a companion PDF for each YouTube video, often 30 to 50 pages, fully illustrated with screenshots. Shareshot is what lets me turn out good-looking screenshots fast, and with a shortcut I can even run them as a batch. That batch step is the thing that makes the whole format workable for me. Without it I’d spend the entire day building screenshots one at a time.

AI does a lot of the heavy lifting when I build these companion documents, but on the final text I always have the last word.

I imagine I can probably tell when you run your shortcut from our analytic stats, you must be one of the heaviest users of the app!

So, what did you think of the WWDC26 announcements and the new OS features? And does the German audience like hearing about Beta features, or do you tend to them to talk about the new features when the OS actually ships in September?

For a German audience the WWDC26 announcements were a little underwhelming, mainly because the headline feature, the new Siri, isn’t coming to Germany at launch. The only way to use it here is to change the iPhone settings to a non-EU country, and the moment you do that, other things stop working, especially apps you’ve already bought, so beyond a quick test it isn’t really usable.

Apart from Siri there honestly isn’t a huge amount of new features. A lot of it is refinement of iOS 26, which I don’t think is a bad thing in itself. For a channel like mine that lives off covering what’s new, this isn’t great news, but I suspect it suits actual users fine. I’m not convinced the average iPhone owner needs a pile of new features every single year. What most people want is for everything to run smoothly and for the battery to last, and from what I can see so far, iOS 27 delivers on both.

Regarding your beta-versus-September question: Aside from a few die-hard Apple fans, most regular users don’t care about the new features until they arrive as part of the official version on their devices in September.

It’s annoying about the EU thing, though I support the privacy/independence angle they have generally. Right now getting Siri AI is about the only “Brexit bonus” we have I suppose — I’d happily give it up to be 🇪🇺!

One last one thing then: do you think the foldable iPhone will be popular in Germany?!

Not at all. But I also don’t think it’s being built with the German market in mind. Germans tend to reach for affordable products. Something like the MacBook Neo is a great fit for the German buyer. And if what you want is a big screen, a cheap iPad is far more likely to be the answer for them.

I think very few people here actually want a combined device, something they can fold up and carry that still gives them a large display. Apple presumably has other regions in mind for it.

Yes, I personally think this will live firmly in the “business traveller phone” realm. I don’t want one at all, but testing might require it — will it take 2 screenshots every time you take one?! Thanks so much for taking the time, David!

Our thanks to David for sharing! You can find his Apple tutorials on YouTube, and members get the companion PDFs (made with Shareshot!) over on his Patreon.

If you are an indie who enjoys using Shareshot and fancy being featured in a future instalment of “Indie Frame”, please contact me. We love to share the love!