When I'm not playing games, watching a movie, taking photos or traveling, I'm usually programming. Not for work, just because I like it. Most of my free time ends up going into some site or app that nobody asked for.
That's where almost everything on this site comes from. The websites, the apps, the posts about how I built them. None of it started with a plan to launch. It started with me wanting to build something, or wanting to learn how something works.
Apps that were just for me
This year I built a few apps with no intention of putting them on the App Store. I made them because I enjoy it and because each one taught me something new. They lived on my phone, I used them, I kept improving them, and that was it.
Now, with the year almost over, a question keeps bothering me: why are these only on my phone, if other people might want to use them too?
I don't have a good answer. So I've started shipping them.
Ritus started as a place to save my coffee recipes. Then I wanted to learn how to implement RAG, so I built a local AI chat inside it that answers from the app's own content (I wrote about how that works). Then I wanted a brew timer, and instead of using someone else's, I built my own. By the time I looked up, I had a pretty good coffee app that only I was using.
Be Gentle is an idea I'd kept for years. I've always wanted to make apps that help people be a little better, and this is the first one. It started as an app to get you out of your comfort zone. Somewhere during development it changed into an app about being kinder, which, it turns out, often gets you out of your comfort zone anyway. Ninety days, one small act of kindness each morning.
Cutti doesn't have a deep story. I just wanted to learn 2D animation. I started with Rive, and right when I was finally making something that looked good, I saw an indie dev who had done their animations in Swift, and I decided to try that instead. Cutti is what came out of it: a tiny cat that lives on your iPhone, like a tamagotchi, and grows up a little every day. It was just me wanting to learn animation.
The drawer of doubt
Those three made it out. Others didn't, at least not yet.
I have a few more apps that are basically ready. They left the drawer of "personal projects I'll never launch" and moved into a different one: the drawer of "I'm not sure if it's worth launching."
That second drawer is worse. When something is just for you, there's no pressure. Once you start thinking about launching it, you start asking if it's good enough, if anyone needs it, if it's too simple, if there are already a hundred apps like it. And while you go back and forth, the app just sits there, finished and unused.
What DateWay taught me
DateWay was also a personal project. It's an app for date ideas: you spin a wheel, find a place nearby, and do something different together. I built it for myself, and for a long time that's all it was.
Today it has more than 300 downloads. I never promoted it. In fact, I've never promoted any of my apps anywhere, except here on this site.
300 isn't a big number. But it's 300 people who found something I almost kept on my own phone, and that changed how I think about the drawer.
Launching is usually the right call
I don't have a rule for this, only my own experience. And even counting the ones that didn't work out, launching has felt like the right choice.
The worst case of shipping an app is that nobody downloads it. That's almost the same result as not shipping it, except you get to find out.
I know that worst case well. Muda, a plant care app, was one I launched super excited about, and it ended up with 8 downloads. It also cost me money every month, for the server and the AI tokens, so in the end I took it off the App Store. And then there's FastHand, a poker game against bots. It's finished and I think it's great, but recent App Store guidelines mean I can't publish it.
So launching doesn't always work out. But not launching never does. The best case is that someone you'll never meet finds what you made useful, like those 300 people with DateWay.
I wrote before about why side projects matter and about not needing to reinvent the wheel. This is the part that comes after: once you've built the thing, let other people see it.
I'm going to keep opening the drawer. If you want to see what comes out of it next, it'll show up on my now page.